Walter Pincus annotates Trump’s erratic and dangerous conversation with Elon Musk. Thank goodness thoughtful and knowledgeable reporters still work to set the record straight. This is an excellent example. T

The Cipher Brief

Donald Trump and Elon Musk – the Annotated Version 

Posted: August 20th, 2024

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

OPINION — “One of the things we’re going to do is we’re going to build an Iron Dome over us. Israel has it. We’re going to have the best Iron Dome in the world. We need it and we’re going to make it all in the United States, but we’re going to have protection because it just takes one maniac to start something. We’re going to have protection and we’re going to have…Why shouldn’t we have an Iron Dome? Israel has one. Some other places have one that nobody even knows about frankly. Israel has it. We’re going to have an Iron Dome.” 

That was former President Donald Trump speaking on August 12, during his live-streamed, two-hour discussion with Elon Musk on the latter’s X platform. 

It was one of Trump’s many references to national-security matters during his exchanges with Musk that showed how limited his knowledge is of military subjects, despite his earlier four years as U.S. Commander-in-Chief – and how often he claims wrong information as facts to present his view of things. 

Much of what Trump says on defense matters remains unchallenged, so I want to deal with a few statements he made during his Musk conversation, not least because its 1.1-million-person audience may actually believe what he said.  

The facts about “Iron Dome” 

For example, Iron Dome is recognized as a short-range defense system, useful perhaps in the U.S. for border protection, but not to provide what Trump seems to imply – protection for the entire U.S. from nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). 

Iron Dome is an Israeli-developed system, designed originally to defend Israeli cities from enemy artillery and short-range rockets fired from up to 40 miles away. Its range has since been increased to up to 150 miles. A typical Iron Dome battery has three or four launchers (20 missiles per launcher) and each battery can defend up to 60 square miles, so they are strategically placed around cities. They can operate day and night, under adverse weather conditions, and can respond to multiple threats simultaneously. 

The U.S. has for more than a decade contributed more than $2 billion to Iron Dome’s development, and a Raytheon/Israeli joint venture in the U.S. produces an interceptor missile used by the Iron Dome system. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps have purchased Iron Dome batteries for tactical defense purposes. 

Perhaps Trump had in mind two other Israeli missile defense systems that the U.S. has helped in funding – “David’s Sling,” designed to intercept enemy planes, drones, tactical ballistic missiles, long-range rockets, or cruise missiles; or “Arrow 3,” which intercepts ICBMs during space flight. 

It’s also possible that Trump was just using Iron Dome as a stand-in for his desire for a nationwide U.S. missile defense system that does not exist; and maybe he wants to build one because Iron Dome seems to have protected Israeli cities.  

However, 35 minutes later, in the same conversation with Musk, Trump referred to the current fear of a mass Iranian attack on Israel “from hundreds and maybe thousands of rockets.” In that situation, Trump said, “You know, their Iron Dome, as they call it, as we all call it, but their shield that they built, that can be swamped. We’ll use the term that’s appropriate, swamped. But they swamp it by shooting enough missiles. You [referring to Musk] know this better than anybody. By shooting enough missiles, they can’t defend themselves. You know, they [Iran] just obliterate the whole place [Israeli cities]. And that’s what some people think they’re looking to do.” 

So suddenly Iron Dome, which Trump earlier saw as protecting Israel, and by analogy the U.S., can be overcome – “can be swamped” – by “enough” of Iran’s missiles. Trump’s shifting faith in Iron Dome can be explained, not by the actual capabilities of the weapon system, but what Trump wants to appear saying at any given moment. 

In this case, when Trump first brought up Iron Dome it was after Musk had said, “People have become complacent about, but they actually have forgotten that there are currently a lot of nuclear missiles that have targeting parameters for the United States and other countries.” 

Trump initially wanted to show what he would do in response, and somehow Iron Dome, which has recently been much publicized in helping to safeguard Israel, was in his mind.  

When he returned to the subject some 35 minutes later, the context was different – Trump then wanted to criticize the Biden-Harris administration for not supporting a possibly “swamped” Israel and so, as he put it, “if you vote for her, you ought to have your head examined.” 

The case of Nord Stream 2 

Trump also used national security situations, and inaccurate information, to promote himself. 

“I shut down Nord Stream 2.” Trump said early in the Musk conversation, adding, “That was the big oil pipeline, the biggest, I think the biggest pipeline in the world going all over Europe. I shut it down. Biden came, and then they say, I loved Russia. I was a friend of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and I loved Russia. No, he [Putin] actually said to me one time, ‘If you are my friend, I’d hate to see you as an enemy.’ I shut down his pipeline.” 

The first thing to note is that Nord Stream 2 is a natural gas pipeline, not used to carry oil. More important, Trump did not shut it down. Instead, Congress imposed sanctions on international companies building the pipeline as an amendment to the fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Bill. Ultimately, however, although the legislation held up Nord Stream 2’s construction for almost a year, it began again in 2020 during the Trump administration, with Russian companies doing the work, unaffected by U.S. sanctions.

Putin announced completion of the pipeline in September 2021, and the Biden administration reached agreement with Germany – which had regulatory authority over Nord Stream 2 – that the U.S. would apply new sanctions if Russia used Nord Stream 2 as a “political weapon.”  

After Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Germany suspended certification of Nord Stream 2, and the U.S. applied sanctions to Swiss-based Nord Stream 2 AG, a subsidiary of Russia’s Gazprom, that was to operate the pipeline. It never went into operation and in September 2022, undersea explosions damaged both Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2.  

In short, Trump had nothing to do with shutting down Nord Stream 2. 

Trump’s “axis of evil” 

Perhaps the most confused part of the foreign policy Trump shared during his conversation with Musk conversation came when he tried to articulate what he actually thinks about Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. 

At one point Trump described them as a “modern day axis of evil,” and said, “These are powerful countries, very heavy nuclear, which is the biggest threat,” apparently a reference to nuclear weapons. To date, Iran has not acquired nuclear weapons, though Tehran is much closer to having them than it was in 2017, when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the international agreement that limited Iran’s nuclear activities. 

During the Musk conversation, Trump never referred to Iran’s nuclear program. Instead, he said, “Iran would not be attacking [Israel], believe me. You know, when I was there [as President], and I say it with respect, because I think we would have been good with Iran. I don’t wanna do anything bad to Iran, but they knew not to mess around.” 

Trump went on to claim that as a result of sanctions his administration imposed in 2018, “Iran was broke…It’s all about the oil. That’s where the money is. But if you buy oil from Iran, you’re not gonna do any business with the United States. And I meant it…And they [Iran] were at a point where they were, they had no money for Hamas. They had no money for Hezbollah.” 

That wasn’t true either. As Trump’s own Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it during a May 2020 interview, when Trump was still in office, Iran’s leaders “are using the resources that they have to continue funding Hezbollah in Lebanon and threatening the state of Israel, funding Iraqi terrorist Shia groups, all the things that they have done historically – continuing to build out their capabilities even while the people inside of their own country are suffering.” 

As for Russia, and as mentioned above, Trump has spoken repeatedly of his friendship with Putin. During the Musk conversation, Trump also reiterated, in an odd form, his oft-stated view that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine had he been President in February 2022. 

Trump claimed to have had the following exchange with the Russian President: “I said to Vladimir Putin, I said, ‘Don’t do it. You can’t do it, Vladimir. You do it, it’s gonna be a bad day. You cannot do it.’ And I told him things that what I’d do. And he said, ‘no way.’ And I said, ‘way.’ And it’s the last time we ever had the conversation. He would never have done it.” 

Of course, Trump never said when that alleged conversation took place, how it came up, or what it was that he would have had the U.S. do if the invasion had taken place on his watch. 

Perhaps some reporter at some future Trump press conference will ask about that. 

Trump went on to say of Putin, “I got along well with him. I hope to get along well with him again. Getting along well with them [leaders of the modern-day axis of evil] is a good thing, not a bad thing.” 

“I got along well with Kim Jong Un,” Trump told Musk, and he then went on to describe their meetings and exchanges while Trump was in the White House. In the end, Trump said, “I got along with him great. We were in no danger. But President Obama thought we were gonna end up in a war, a nuclear war with him. And let me tell you, he’s got a lot of nuclear stuff, too. He’s got plenty of nuclear. He can do plenty of damage.” 

Unmentioned was that back in 2017, then-President Trump vowed to “confront very strongly” North Korea’s “very, very bad behavior” in test-launching ICBMs and other missiles.Back then, Trump also said that North Korea would be “met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before” for its nuclear threats. 

But despite Trump’s tough words, Kim went ahead with North Korea’s nuclear program, and now Trump appears to accept Kim’s having nuclear weapons – even admiring him for it. 

Do you want a president as Commander-in-Chief who changes his-or-her mind on a weapons system to suit his-or-her current mood; a president who claims credit for events they did not affect; or who said they had told a foreign leader something, but may not have done so?  

In short, do you want a leader whose word cannot be trusted? 

I don’t. 

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/donald-trump-and-elon-musk-the-annotated-version