ORLANDO, Fla. – Former Trump Deputy National Security Adviser KT McFarland said President Biden should be focusing on the United States becoming the world’s “energy superpower” as a response to Russia launching its multi-front war on Ukraine.
In an interview with Fox News on the sidelines of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), McFarland reacted to the president’s speech Thursday morning.
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The president announced additional sanctions on Russia, and the deployment of an additional 7,000 U.S. troops to Germany—while maintaining that U.S. forces will not fight in Ukraine.
“Great words. No big deeds,” McFarland said of Biden’s speech. “The only thing that really matters—the only thing that would affect Russian behavior—is to kick them out of the international banking system, and he wouldn’t do it. Why? Because the Germans and the French and the Italians—nobody wants to go along with it. Why? Because they all rely on Russian energy, Russian oil and natural gas.”
An oil pump jack in a field with wind turbines in Corpus Christi, Texas, U.S., Friday, Feb. 19, 2021. Photographer: Eddie Seal/Bloomberg via Getty Images
“So, if you kick Russia out of the international banking system, no big deal for Americans, huge deal for the Europeans,” she said. “They can’t afford to give that up.”
McFarland, though, laid out a “plan” for America to regain its energy independence.
“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.”
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“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.”
As for troops on the ground, McFarland said the Ukrainians “don’t want U.S. troops.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures while speaking to the media during a joint news conference with Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban following their talks in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2022.
(Yuri Kochetkov/Pool Photo via AP)
“We don’t belong. We shouldn’t put U.S. troops in Ukraine,” she said. “If the Ukrainians want to fight on their own, you know, by themselves, for themselves, good, give them whatever they need to fight. But that’s not our fight.”
“What is our fight, though, is NATO,” she continued. “And the big question is, if Putin is emboldened by Ukraine, and we’ll know in the next 48 hours whether he gets a pro-Russian puppet government in Ukraine, will he want to go further or will he decide that maybe he’s got a taste for going after small NATO countries?”
“We don’t know,” she said.
Meanwhile, McFarland said that Biden is “reinforcing American forces in NATO countries” in order to “evacuate Americans” and because of the “humanitarian crisis which is coming, because you know, a couple of million Ukrainians are going to run across the border into Poland and in other countries.”
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But McFarland questioned whether NATO allies will “stay” with the United States “if it gets tough.”
“I don’t know. There are so many unknowns,” McFarland said.
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