Top Trump Adviser Has Shifting Views on Russia, Eurasia

December 1, 2016, by Joshua Kucera

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/81511

President-elect Donald Trump's top national security adviser has expressed a variety of contradictory opinions about affairs in the former Soviet Union, making it difficult to assess what policies the next White House administration may pursue in the region.
Trump has appointed Michael Flynn, a retired three-star general and former top intelligence official, as his national security adviser. Flynn has been Trump's closest foreign policy adviser since early in the presidential campaign. Other key posts like the heads of the Pentagon and State Department have yet to be named, but Flynn seems to enjoy a high level of Trump's trust and appears likely to be the most influential White House voice on foreign policy.
Flynn, as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012-4, was obliged to give an annual tour d'horizon of the perceived military threats to the U.S., but these tended to reflect Washington conventional wisdom. After being fired from that job, an unleashed Flynn became significantly more extreme -- and erratic -- in his views.