Former President Donald Trump tried to warn Germany about depending too much on Russia as its energy source, and now the United States may be doing the same thing by losing its energy independence under the Biden administration, former Deputy Drector of National Intelligence Ric Grenell said on Newsmax Tuesday.
"I hope people start to understand that the opposite of America First is consensus with the Europeans," Grenell, now the senior national security analyst for Newsmax, said on "John Bachman Now." "The Europeans don't share the same threat assessment.
"They don't fear Iran. They don't fear Russia in the same way that Americans do."
The Trump administration tried to share several factors with the United States' European partners, including information regarding the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, he added.
"There's another element of this, in that Senate Democrats and the Biden administration are not seeing the lessons of the past," said Grenell. "They're not paying attention to the successes of Donald Trump, because the reality is the Senate Democrats and Joe Biden's administration came together to drop sanctions on this Nord Stream 2 pipeline and now what we're seeing is the leverage from Russia coming home to push the Europeans in ways that they're very uncomfortable."
And now, with the pressure coming from Russia, the EU manufacturing base will see "skyrocketing prices" on top of the inflation woes the countries already have.
"This is a disaster that is not going to be fixed in the short term until Germany, the largest economy, and other economies throughout Europe, decide to diversify their energy sources," he said. "You can't just do wind; you can't just do, you know, solar.
"You've got to do all of the above and that includes using technologies so that you can do coal and bring back nuclear energy to Europe."
The EU also lost the United Kingdom through Brexit and is becoming less powerful because of lax immigration policies, said Grenell.
"Look we all want to welcome individuals who need help in a humanitarian moment or a crisis, but we have lines for immigration because we must be able to have rules to not have this enclave of individuals breaking the law and rushing in," said Grenell.
He added that he hates the whole idea of sanctuary cities, which he considers a "nice label on a terrible precedent, which is ignoring federal law and doing what you want. It's the Wild West. We have to have rules."
Meanwhile, Trump will be speaking at the America First Agenda Summit in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, but Grenell said that he is a big advocate for getting the former president out into the country and away from the think tanks.
"We just heard him in Arizona, where he laid out the vision for what America First is, and he critiqued Joe Biden's tanking this country in every possible way on every possible issue, so I think you're going to see him articulate that to those insiders in Washington," said Grenell. "Maybe some of them will hear it for the first time because as you and I both know it's a very insular place there. They only listen to themselves."
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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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