U.S. President Donald Trump lamented the amount of money that the United States, China and Russia spend on weapons production, and suggested that such money could be better spent elsewhere.
At the meeting with Chinese Vice Prime Minister Liu He in the Oval Office, Trump floated the idea of following up on a potential trade deal with China with a second phase deal that addressed the issue of military spending and arms production.
“As you know China is spending a lot of money on military, so are we, so is Russia and those three countries I think can come together and stop the spending and spend on things that maybe are more productive toward long-term peace,” Reuters cited the U.S. President as saying.
“It think it’s much better if we all got together and we didn’t make these weapons,” he added.
Asked by Trump to weigh in on the suggestion, China's vice PM said he thought it would be a good idea.
A military observer of the TASS news agency, retired Colonel Viktor Litovkin, speaking to Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that Trump's proposal doesn't sound serious: the state, whose military budget could reach $750 billion by 2020, offers the states with a smaller military budget to reduce their defense spending.
"It looks ridiculous in the eyes of the world community and, especially, specialists. Russia's military spending is about $50 billion, China's military spending exceeded $180 billion. How can we compare these budgets? Donald Trump should illustrate an example by reducing his military spending by half. Then we will think about it and, maybe, also reduce our expenses by 1-2%," he said.
The expert clarified that Trump’s statement was directed primarily to an external audience. “The internal audience, of course, will not tolerate it, because the U.S. budget forms military orders for Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other companies that will not forgive him military spending cuts. They need it, because it is their earnings,” Viktor Litovkin concluded.
Director of the Institute of Political Studies Sergei Markov also drew attention to the discrepancy of Trump's statement to U.S. common military policy. "The United States strives for complete military domination, their strategy includes dominating on land, water, the air, space and cyberspace - as well as in all geostrategic directions - the Pacific Ocean, Europe, America, Africa, the Middle East. They use a very serious advantage in the field of military technology compared with China and a serious money and science advantage compared to Russia. The Americans have only 5-10 years to prevent China and Russia from catching up with them, because in 10 years China will reduce its backlog in defense industry. That is why Washington's task is breaking the political will of Moscow and Beijing, and nothing shows that they are giving up this task," he said.
The political analyst expressed confidence that the statement was made for the internal audience. “Trump is an impulsive person. He knows that, on the one hand, he is working to achieve U.S. world domination, but, on the other hand, he has to act as a 'dove of peace' sometimes and make such statements," Sergey Markov concluded.
