Every American president’s time-honored primary responsibility is to protect our country from foreign and domestic enemies. Some presidents have accomplished this better than others, but no president has been perceived as being so weak as Joe Biden.
America is rudderless and our uncoordinated, deadly and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and our insistence on negotiating a new nuclear deal with Iran, has only strengthened the perception from our enemies like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Kim Jong-un and Nicholas Maduro to name just a few, that America is not truly prepared to honor our international commitments.
Putin’s statements and subsequent moves clearly indicate that he wants to rebuild a ring of puppet-buffer states on his western boundary to provide him with breathing room if there was ever an attack from the west. Of course, this is pure folly because in the last 200 years only Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler have ever tried to invade Russia and both of them utterly failed.
The only weapons on the fringe of Russia are those of peaceful nations who want to be able to defend themselves from actions just like what Putin has undertaken in Ukraine. But ruthless dictators like Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Kim II-sung are paranoid by nature because they became their country’s leaders through intimidation, terror, creating a police state and murdering their opponents, both real and imagined.
It should come as no surprise that Putin would invade a non-threatening country on its border because he shares a vision with dictators throughout history: gobbling land and peoples whether they want to be part of his nation or not.
The real question is whether Western leaders are up to this moral and legal challenge of international law. The best way to fight Putin is to deny him the funds that he will need in order to underwrite this military campaign. To date, Biden’s responses have been weak and tentative. Biden has led from behind rather than use America’s prestige and power to make us the tip of the spear.
I’m not suggesting American troops should be involved in fighting the Russians, but we should have certainly been willing to transfer military equipment, supplies and offensive and defensive weapons back in November when President Volodymyr Zelenskyy first requested them. Had we done so, we could have articulated a proxy war against Russia just like we did in Afghanistan when the Russians invaded back in 1979.
America’s military-industrial machinery is primed to supply the latest weapons technology but this sector has not been called upon to ramp up production and to replace what we will be sending to Ukraine and our other friends in Eastern Europe. America must step up immediately because anything less causes our NATO and European Union friends to think twice about our true commitment to honor the principles we enunciated since the end of World War II and during the Cold War.
Energy keeps Russia fat with monetary profits while simultaneously challenging the precepts that America’s military strategists have always believed: that our country must return to energy independence. Under former President Donald Trump, America was, for the first time, an exporter of oil and natural gas. As soon as Biden took office, he cut America’s throat by stopping the future flow of oil from Canada. He doubled down by listening to the Far-Left Socialist Democrats by trying to ban oil in the near future. California has already done that which goes to prove that its leaders are so stupid that they will cut off their nose to spite their face.
Now, unbelievably, the Biden administration is seeking to get oil from Venezuela which has been an international pariah for the last three decades. To buy oil from Venezuela would only help to prop up a murderous regime in our own hemisphere.
Next, the Biden administration will want to turn to Iran which is also our enemy. We should commit now that we will never allow oil from Russia, Iran or Venezuela to be brought into our country. To do otherwise would only weaken America’s resolve to not be beholden to any dictatorship. For that matter, the fact that we are importing about 600,000 barrels of oil every day from Russia is a traitorous act that undercuts America’s national security and allows Western European nations to take a similar position which is self-defeating for all of us.
Green energy will not make America independent and strong for at least a generation to come. Fossil fuel is the only currency that we have that can be used to fortify America and prepare us for the dark days ahead, as Putin isn’t finished once he occupies Ukraine.
We already know that Germany sold their national security for easy and relatively cheap oil and natural gas from Russia while refusing while Trump was president to increase their military spending to 2 percent of GNP. Last week, the German chancellor finally woke up and committed to the 2 percent threshold and we can only hope that it is not too late. France is also militarily weak like Germany. Both of those nations agree with Biden in believing that diplomacy will rule the day. But it hasn’t and won’t work when dealing with despots.
Only the United Kingdom has been a staunch and dependable ally. We should look at the UK’s resolve and take similar actions. For example, it was the British prime minister that first suggested taking the oligarchs’ penthouses, yachts and bank accounts to deny these corrupt financiers the fruits of their bounty. The UK has gone further and is unwilling to allow any Russian ships to dock at any English port. The U.S. should take the same exact position.
America must deny the SWIFT system to every bank and financial institution in Russia and any country–any country–which attempts to help Russia overcome the international banking system is our enemy. That should serve as a warning signal to China.
Anything Russian-made should be forbidden in this country. In his State of the Union speech, Biden called for a resurgence of American manufacturing. Joe needs to put some money where his mouth is. No country in the world can mobilize like we can when our security is threatened. America needs to move across the board to a war footing because our future is in dire straits. Oil and natural gas development and drilling have been turned off by Biden and his cronies. Congress needs to wake up and lead our country if our president is too dumb or incompetent to do so himself. With the November elections around the corner, I believe, that Americans will send a cogent signal on which party we need to lead our country.
A Rasmussen Report poll released this week indicates that 70 percent of likely American voters “believe the U. S. government should encourage increased oil and gas production to reduce America’s dependence on foreign sources of oil and gas.” A Quinnipiac University poll released this week shows that 75 percent of Americans are willing to ban Russian oil even if it means a concomitant increase in the price of gasoline.
Sleepy Joe, get out of the basement and lead this country. If you’re unwilling to go where the American people are willing to go, which is to pull up our big boy pants, take our licks on increased economic costs as we show solidarity with Ukraine, NATO and the European Union, then we need someone who will lead us.
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