Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said during a Monday Fox News appearance that President Joe Biden’s foreign policy positions emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin to escalate the conflict in Ukraine.
“We’ve been too slow. When we said we would provide HIMARS, we provided 4 instead of 40. We didn’t provide enough ammunition,” Pompeo told Fox News host Martha MacCallum. “Every day that we give Vladimir Putin some idea that we are not prepared to do the things that will deter him — deterrence, Martha, it’s the simple idea in his head, the cost of continuing this conflict has to be too high for him.”
“It’s what we did for four years, and I walked about 2014,” Pompeo continued. “He didn’t invade Europe on our watch during the Trump Administration. You can say that was just pure luck. I think it was because Vladimir Putin thinks that the calculus changed when President Biden came in and he saw what happened in Afghanistan.”
Some experts believe that the withdrawal from Afghanistan ordered by Biden led Putin to feel comfortably launching the invasion of Ukraine Feb. 24, starting a war now in its eighth month. Other experts pointed to Biden’s energy policies, claiming they helped Putin fund the war by increasing energy prices.
“We have to restore deterrence,” Pompeo said. “And there’s only one way to do that. That is with firm resolve, commitment from our partners and friends, and a seriousness of mission, including providing them targeting intelligence, precision targeting intelligence that we have the capacity to do and we have not yet done.”
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