Russia’s President Vladimir thinks the “time is right” for an invasion of Ukraine — but it’s a decision for which President Joe Biden “bears a lot of the blame,” Sen, Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Sunday.
In an interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” Cotton charged that Biden has been “appeasing” Putin for a year.
“I think President Biden bears a lot of the blame,” Cotton declared, arguing “he gave him a very one-sided nuclear arms control treaty the very first month of his presidency” and removed sanctions from the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.
“And then in August, Vladimir Putin let the rest of the world see Joe Biden's debacle in Afghanistan,” he said. “That's why Vladimir Putin thinks the timing is right here and why this matters to the American people.”
According to Cotton, “it's very dangerous when you allow our adversaries like Russia, China and Iran to try to upend the status quo and all we do is have strongly worded speeches or some mealy-mouthed sanction.”
“If Vladimir Putin can get away with this in Ukraine, what does that say to Xi Jinping about what he can do in Taiwan or to threaten our military positions in the western Pacific,” he said.
Cotton also blasted Germany for making bad decisions about energy that have also helped fuel the crisis in Ukraine.
“Germany made extremely poor policy choices about energy over the last decade — shutting down all of its nuclear power plants for instance — making them more dependent than they already were on Russian gas,” Cotton said.
“And now with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline going through the Baltic Sea you are in a situation where Germany has secured its energy supply” without considering the consequences it will have on both Ukraine and NATO Allies like Poland.
“Russia will now be able to turn off the gas to those countries in the winter with no consequences for Germany — meaning the German government will be much less likely to take a firm stance against Russia,” Cotton said. “This is just another example of these long lines of bad decisions and appeasing decisions that the German government across two different administrations has made towards Russia.”
Cotton added that Germany’s history for the last 10 years is a cautionary tale for the United States if its implements something like the Green New Deal.
“We have already reduced our energy independence and therefore we have not been able to export energy,” he asserted. “What we should have been doing is producing even more oil and gas and turning some of the gas into liquefied natural gas which we could then export to Germany so Germany would have a reliable energy source from the United States as opposed to depending on Russia.”
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Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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