President Donald Trump, by naming his initial national security adviser Michael Waltz as his pick for ambassador to the United Nations, reflects the need to "have a team he's comfortable with," Robert Wilkie, a former undersecretary for the Department of Defense, told Newsmax on Friday.
"I think this is another iteration of that," Wilkie told Newsmax's "Wake Up America," while refusing to speculate who Trump will pick to replace Waltz. "The most important thing is not the staff at the White House; it's the direction that the president has set."
The news about Waltz, meanwhile, is overshadowing the win Trump has pulled off in Ukraine with the agreement on rare earth mining, Wilkie said.
"The president, with the help of your friend and my friend Gen. Keith Kellogg, has really pulled off an incredible feat of diplomacy," Wilkie said. "It is now [Russian President] Vladimir Putin who is in dire trouble. This agreement, which blames Russia for the start of the war, it gets America invested in Ukraine's development, a $1 trillion minerals deal."
The price of crude oil has also plummeted since Trump came into office, said Wilkie, noting that under former President Joe Biden, oil was $100 a barrel but is now down to $56 a barrel under Trump.
"[This will] further cripple Putin's economy and also require the Chinese to question whether this partnership made of steel is worth it," said Wilkie. "It further cements President Trump's place as a thinker when it comes to and a doer when it comes to international relations."
Wilkie also discussed Trump's call to increase defense spending, which he said would not have happened if former Vice President Kamala Harris had been elected president.
"We would have been on a trajectory to hit 2% [GDP] on defense spending, which is something we hadn't achieved since 1924," he said. "That's how low we were going. We were not respected, we were not feared. And I think this is a message to the rest of the world, particularly the Chinese, that the United States is back and that there's no one, there's no country, or combination of the country of countries that could match the military might of the United States."
Trump reportedly plans to call for a 13% increase in the defense budget in his budget proposal for next year, bringing the defense budget to $1 trillion, and Wilkie said he thinks Congress might take Trump's plan and allocate even more.
"I think there is an understanding that the last four years have been a catastrophe," he said. "What we need now are ships and shipyards. We need planes coming off the assembly lines."
Ukraine, he added, "has given us a way forward."
"They've shown that the use of undersea drones and aerial drones, that kind of technology can cripple a massive military machine like Russia's," said Wilkie. "The Ukrainians, without a navy, have blown the Russian Navy right off the Black Sea. And that's the kind of thing we need. That's the kind of thing that the Taiwanese, for instance, would need to deter a potential Chinese move across the straits."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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