America in ‘Cold War 2.0’ With Russia, KT McFarland Says
Virginia Allen /
ORLANDO, Florida—America is in a new Cold War with Russia, KT McFarland says.
In Russian President Vladimir Putin’s opinion, America may have won the Cold War of the post-World War II period, or think it won, but “that was only Cold War 1.0,” McFarland, the former deputy national security advisor under former President Donald Trump, told “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
Putin is “in Cold War 2.0 and he plans to win that one, and he is going to [do] it with his energy resources and his vicious, brutal invasion of Ukraine.”
Already over 130 Ukrainian civilians and military personnel have been killed in the Russian invasion.
“Ultimately, sadly, I think Russia wins,” McFarland said, “but God bless the people of Ukraine.”
If Russia does succeed in taking Ukraine, McFarland says, Putin will seek to conquer other nations in the region.
“I do not think he stops with Ukraine,” she said of Putin. “I think he digests it and then I think he’s going to start looking to the Baltics—those three little countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.”
“His ultimate goal is to break the back of NATO and to separate the United States from our European allies,” McFarland said. “And to not only restore Russia to greatness in his mind, but to really just … undo the Cold War victory.”
McFarland spoke with The Daily Signal Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. She criticized America’s lack of preparation ahead of the Ukraine-Russian conflict:
There’s more that the U.S. should have done. It’s too late at this point. I mean, we could have given them [Ukraine] more lethal weapons in the last year.
President [Joe] Biden and then President [Barack] Obama before him, did not give Ukraine what we call lethal weapons. They would give them soft powers, blankets, food stuffs. Trump actually reversed that and gave significant lethal weapons, offensive and defensive weapons, to the Ukrainians. There’s not much more we can do at this point.
In the weeks leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin amassed more than 150,000 troops on Ukraine’s border and launched cyberattacks against the sovereign nation.
When asked if she believes America is prepared for Russian cyberattacks, the former deputy national security advisor said the U.S. is “not nearly well prepared enough.”
[In] Russia, China, everything is under the control of the government, right? Even if it pretends to be an independent company, it’s not. It’s under the control of the government and the government’s cyber offenses and defenses.
In the U.S., we have that separation between government and private sector. So if you’re a bank, let’s say you’re a small bank somewhere in the Midwest and you have a cyberattack, who’s defending you, right? Nobody. Maybe you tell your customers, “Well, change your password,” but nobody’s really defending you.
So, the difficulty the United States has, it’s our strength but it’s our great weakness, is that we do not have a national policy of how to defend against cyberattack.
To keep Russia from growing in power and attacking other nations, America needs to become energy independent, McFarland said, and encourage all of Europe to break its energy dependence upon Russia.
Biden should tell the American people, “I’m reversing course,” McFarland said, “I’m going to reopen the Keystone pipeline. I’m going to reopen American energy.”
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