CNN host Fareed Zakaria slammed the Biden administration for its “toothless” economic war against Russia that is making its oligarchs rich while the West becomes poorer and more dependent on Russian energy.
“It is now clear that the economic war against Russia is not working nearly as well as people thought it would” and is “in danger of failing,” Zakaria warned on the July 10 edition of his show, Fareed Zakaria GPS.
Key to the West’s failure to defeat Russia are its counterproductive energy policies, the CNN host said. He also criticized President Joe Biden for not taking the energy crisis seriously enough: “The Biden administration is still making it harder to finance long-term investments in natural gas and oil.” [Emphasis added].
Despite the growing energy crisis, “Western countries are still not treating this challenge as a paramount priority,” Zakaria said.
His advice? “Western leaders should recognize that economic sanctions simply will not work in a time frame that makes any sense. They should try to increase as much of the supply of energy worldwide as they can, but also dial back those sanctions that are clearly causing more pain to the West than to Russia.”
Zakaria explained that a large part of America’s strategy to defeat Putin was “to impose massive sanctions” on Russia, including on energy exports like oil, gas and even coal.
But it is actually Americans who suffer most from Biden’s sanctions, not the Russian government, Zakaria said. In fact, he noted that the Russian state actually benefits from American sanctions:
"Vladimir Putin cares less about what these sanctions do to the Russian people than he does about what they do to the Russian state. And thanks to rising energy prices, Bloomberg projects the Russian government will make considerably more revenue from oil and gas than it did before the war: around 285 billion in 2022, compared to 236 billion in 2021."
“Meanwhile, Europe is facing its worst energy crisis in fifty years,” Zakaria added. To put that crisis in perspective, natural gas prices in Europe are now “700 percent higher than they were at the beginning of last year,” he said. [Emphasis added].
The potential drawbacks of continued dependence on Russian energy could be catastrophic, Zakaria said. "Having developed a dangerous dependence on Russian energy over the last two decades, Europe cannot quickly change that without plunging into a deep and protracted recession.”
The solution, Zakaria concluded, “would not be for the West to stop buying Russian energy altogether, because with less supply on the world’s market, it would only drive prices even higher.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact ABC News at 818-460-7477, CBS News at 212-975-3247 and NBC News at 212-664-6192 and demand they hold Biden to account for America’s energy crisis.
