President Joe Biden is to blame for Russia's power play because he reversed Donald Trump's energy policies, says former Trump National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland.
Russian President Vladimir Putin "can do whatever he wants" with oil at $100 a barrel, McFarland said Thursday during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, according to the Daily Mail.
"If oil is at $40 a barrel, which it was when President Trump left office, the Russians are broke," she said.
"They can't afford to go to war. War is expensive."
Former President Trump's energy independence policy, she said, kept Putin in check.
Biden, she said, "immediately shut down the American energy industry oil and natural gas. The energy that we were exporting to other countries — that stopped as well — and what happened? The price of oil went sky high."
"Vladimir Putin is rich, and he gets to choose when to invade."
In an interview with Fox News, McFarland said Biden should be focusing on the U.S. becoming the world's "energy superpower" in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
"Biden should have said to the American people, 'I'm reversing course, and I'm going to re-open American energy production, oil, natural gas, the Keystone Pipeline, liquified natural gas terminals,'" she said, adding that he should have told the Europeans: "I got your back, I will give you energy security. Don't rely on that unreliable Russian stuff. We will sell you at a good price."
"Cheap, reliable, clean, American natural gas," she said. "And then he should have turned to the Russians and said, 'I am going to pump a lot of oil from American companies. I'm going to get the Saudis and our Arab allies to pump a lot of oil and natural gas. We are going to drive that price right down and you're going to be bankrupt.'"
"Here's the thing," she said. "We have it. Donald Trump got us there, and American ingenuity and technical people and engineers, and they figured out a way to get oil and natural gas out of rocks, and it turns out we are sitting on the biggest reservoir of oil and natural gas of anywhere in the world."
She added: "But Americans just do their job. Get out of the way, let that energy industry work, and then we become the energy superpower, not just for North America, but for the world."
Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address early Friday that 137 people, both service members and civilians, have been killed and hundreds more wounded.
via newsmax