Page 864 - Leverage News Today

Of the bush administration. >> we have few consequences. right? he moved on ukraine during the obama years. vo few consequences. he moved on syria in the obama years. sanctions didnt work. so, what is he seeing now? only under the trump administration where he had real pain for his bad behavior but thats changed now. we are back to the old ways. diplomacy without leverage, diplomacy without deterrence is bound to fail and thats why were in such a dangerous situation with these two nations. >> ta...

Countries invests so little in their own military? the eus economy is multiples began russias, germanys alone is more than twice as big as why isnt germany funneling troops eastward with the answer is they dont care about ukraine. if russia is such a minimus why did biden approve nordstrom 2? why did biden with our own oil and gas industry and drive up the cost of fuel? if you are really worried about russia, he would want to keep our energy prices low here at home. the truth is biden gave lette...

Goes around ukraine to germany. mrs. merkel begged biden to not support it. there are a couple of sanctions bills in congress now against russia for the pipeline. so russia has their own financial leverage. they can you know, withdraw oil and heating from europe this winter. theres a lot of stuff that they can do and our again, our hand is kind of limited. >> rick, is there a sort of contraction of the options available? is there a cumulative em boldening of putin from the last four years? is an...

Minister. the big thing for vladimir putin is, if he invades, there will be russian soldiers coming home in body bags, and that cant be popular with the russian government. >> one would imagine. if you look at all of this, heading into this call, how much leverage does president biden have right now? >> well, i think he does have some leverage, and they did prepare yesterday. it was important he talked to the british, french, german, italian leaders, so hes thinking not just for the united state...

The past 30 years. >> are they accusing president biden truly such the fact that sanctions were eads on nord stream 2 and the withdrawal from afghanistan, which was widely criticized. how do you respond to that criticism that president biden is being too weak to mr. putin? smr i think three points. the first is that vladimir putin standing behind then president mcdebta in 2008 invaded georgia when we had 150,000 troops deployed in iraq and afghanistan. the question between our foreign wars and c...

Doing to their own people, uyghur minorities is, you know, barbaric. what theyre doing to hong kong, again, you know, really clamping down on freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of speech those are not american values and we should not reward the chinese by having our athletes go there this whole thing of a diplomat being boycott is nonsense. they are still going to have the olympics and meet and generate money. thats not what we should be doing. we should be boycotting the entire thing. our...

And the way they depend on putin is for the billions of dollars that putin sends their way. if the u.s. disconnects them from the financial system, theyre going to be hurt and putins power will be shaken. thats most leverage we have. we dont have any military levage at all. when you look at sanctions policy and politics, they only work if the global community sanctions russia, right? if they can go and replace our business with iranian business deals, theyre toothless. do we have the whole world...

To work with vladimir putin. the actions we are going to see are what we are going to do right now sanctions in place right now. military equipment moving to help our ukrainian allies. >> bret: so now is the stick-up. your reaction to that? >> well, i think the president has been clear that sanctions would be automatically triggered. he will trigger sanctions if putin takes this action. look, sanctions are most effective, in my view, when you let the other party, in this case putin, know in adva...

How much leverage did that give him? >> enormous leverage. it makes so sense to discourage domestic production and encourage russia production. thats what the biden administration did. we need to have a branching conversation with european allies. they need to wean themselves off that dependence. we need to do everything to arm ukraine to the teeth. we know that the biden administration delayed on some of the requests for lethal assistance. this white house is not acting with a sense of urge ear...

Worlds lone super power. >> sandra: senator ted cruz bluntly said that putin is laughing at biden. >> totally. >> that biden surrendered to putoin the pipeline. there is a bloomberg report this morning, senator, that the u.s. wants nord stream 2 halted if putin invades ukraine and the goal in todays call was for the u.s. to push germany to agree to stop that pipeline if putin invades ukraine. thats not confirmed. thats still being reported by bloomberg and people familiar with the plan. what wou...