Pompeo: Joe talk ‘reckless’

Cites ‘A’geddon’

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday that President Biden’s “Armageddon” comments about Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats are “reckless,” but a White House rep insisted they simply reflect the “high stakes” in Ukraine.

Pompeo (inset), who served as CIA director and secretary of state in the Trump administration, said Biden’s remarks indicate how the president is struggling with Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“First off, those comments were reckless, and I think they . . . demonstrate maybe one of the greatest foreign-policy failures of the last decades, which was failure to deter Vladimir Putin in the same way the Trump administration did for four years,” Pompeo said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“When you hear a president talking about Armageddon as a random thought just musing at a fundraiser, that is a terrible risk to the American people. If he truly believes that, he ought to be talking to us in a serious way. More importantly, he should be doing all the things that are necessary to deter Vladimir Putin.”

White House national security spokesman John Kirby told ABC News’ “This Week” that the president “was reflecting the very high stakes that are in play right now when you have a modern nuclear power and the leader of that modern nuclear power willing to use irresponsible rhetoric the way that Mr. Putin has several times in just the last week or two, as well as the high tensions in Ukraine over just the course of the last few days.

“So the president, I think, was accurately reflecting the fact that the stakes are very high right now.”

Kirby said the president’s remarks are not an indication that Putin’s finger is on the nuclear trigger as his military faces setbacks against Ukrainian troops.

“These comments were not based on new or fresh intelligence or new indications that Mr. Putin has made a decision to use nuclear weapons and, quite frankly, we don’t have any indication that he has made that kind of decision,” Kirby, the former spokesman for the Pentagon, said.

“Nor have we seen anything that would give us pause to reconsider our own strategic nuclear posture in our efforts to defend our own national security interests and those of our allies and partners,” Kirby said.