KT McFarland, who once served as part of the administration of the late President Ronald Reagan, said the Gipper would not have ordered that the Russian planes that caused a U.S. drone to crash this week be shot down, stating that he managed to win the Cold War through bankrupting the Soviet Union, not through military action.
McFarland, who also served as a former deputy national security adviser under the leadership of former President Donald Trump, went on to say, “You don’t go to war,” during an interview with John Bachman on Newsmax. “You don’t have to go to war because you have an economic weapon.”
Here’s more from Newsmax:
McFarland’s comments come after Graham maintained Wednesday that if Reagan were still alive, he would have started shooting down Russian planes if they were threatening U.S. assets, including the incident in which two Russian Su-27 aircraft flew in front of an unmanned U.S. MQ-9 drone above the Black Sea and dumped fuel on it. One of the Russian jets hit the drone, causing it to crash.
“If the administration or any of these people who seem to want to beat the war drums, if they were really serious about defeating Russia, they would do one thing and they would do it quite quickly: Stop President [Joe] Biden’s war on American fossil fuels,” McFarland commented. “Let the United States energy industry once again become not just energy independent for America, but energy dominant now.”
The U.S. has enough energy to supply the rest of the world’s needs, she added, and “we can do it at a much cheaper price than Russia or Iran or any of these countries,” she added.
Russia needs energy prices to remain high as “that’s how they’re paying for this war,” McFarland said. “If we wanted to stop Russia dead in its tracks, instead of shooting them out of the air, just bankrupt them. Russia would not be able to afford to keep this war going for even another six months if we use that economic weapon.”
McFarland stated that with Reagan, there were only a total of two military engagements during his entire 8 years in office. One was in Grenada and finished with an incident involving vessels in the Persian Gulf.
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“Other than that, Ronald Reagan did not go to war,” McFarland explained. “Ronald Reagan used the economic weapons to defeat our adversaries and we have that weapon today, and we should use it.”
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there isn’t going to be a whole lot left of the drone to recover, which McFarland criticized as an example of the government “making excuses after the fact.” She then said this will lead to countries like China and Russia committing similar acts in the future because there will be no consequences for their actions.
“China is very quickly becoming the dominant global power, right under our noses,” said the former Reagan administration official. “What happened in the Middle East? There’s now a new Saudi Arabia-Iran agreement. Now the Chinese president is going to go to Russia to have a Russia-China alliance, and then he’s maybe even going to go to Ukraine and try to play the peace broker there again. We’re always reacting.”
