This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 10th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

The White House is moving to renew and establish nuclear weapons agreements with Russia and China, what might that

broad agreement look like and how would it address nuclear danger?

Cato's Eric Gomez comments on the new Star Treaty and's necessarily tight deadline.

The President is well known for pretty bellicose rhetoric.

It wasn't that long ago, although it seems an eternity ago, that he was having this public argument with Kim Jong-un and both sides seem

to be issuing some pretty substantial and worrisome threats.

And now we see a push for arms control with large adversaries, China and Russia.

What explains this either change of heart or public shift?

I think it can sort of be tied down to just Trump's kind of varying nature, right?

He has talked before about obviously his whole,

you know, art of the deal, great negotiator type

mindset that he has of himself and he's also talked about

wanting to have arms control before is like this kind of you know big

negotiation that he could sort of successfully do so I think there's some aspect of

ego stroking going on for sure it also tracks with his sort of idea of doing away with a lot of Obama stuff.

So when he came in, he really set his sights on getting out of the Iran deal and saying that he could get something better and now we're

sort of testing that out now with the US out of the deal and trying to pressure Iran via sanctions

to come back to the negotiating table and Iran isn't having it.

There's an aspect here of Trump wanting to do away with things that were

accomplishments of the Obama administration, most notably that we've accomplishments of the Obama administration.

Most notably that we've seen so far is the JCPOA

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