Wippl Interviewed on Trump’s Military Strategy
Joseph Wippl, Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed about President-Elect Donald Trump’s expected military strategy in the face of mounting global crises.
Wippl was interviewed for a January 15, 2017 article in The San Antonio Express News entitled “Trump Meets World.”
From the text of the article:
For those reasons, Joseph Wippl, a professor of international relations at Boston University and a former longtime CIA officer, expects little change in U.S. strategy under Trump.
“He’s coming in at a time when things have been going pretty well against ISIS,” Wippl said. “So I don’t think he’s going to send U.S. divisions over there to deal with them.”
Trump nominated retired Gen. James Mattis to serve as his defense secretary and appointed retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as his national security adviser.
Between the two, Flynn holds the more apocalyptic view of Islamic extremism, describing the U.S. as locked in a “world war” against Islamist militants, a sentiment that aligns with Trump’s campaign rhetoric.
But Wippl and other military observers predict that Trump will place greater weight on the more measured perspective of Mattis, who co-authored the Army’s counterinsurgency manual with retired Gen. David Petraeus.
“Gen. Mattis will dominate military policy,” Wippl said. “If there’s one person that’s not going to last long in the administration, it’s Gen. Flynn.”
You can read the entire article here.
Wippl is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. He spent a 30 year career as an operations officer in the National Clandestine Service (NCS). Wippl has served overseas as an operations officer and operations manager in Bonn, West Germany; Guatemala City; Luxembourg; Madrid, Spain; Mexico City; Vienna, Austria; and Berlin, Germany. Learn more about him here.