Russian President Vladimir Putin will never be a friend of the United States and he will never change his behavior because he "wants to drag us down and pit us against each other," former White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster said Tuesday.
"What he's conducting is a sustained campaign of political subversion against the United States, against Europe, and our other allies," the retired general said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," while discussing his new book "Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World." "The sooner we recognize that, the more effective we're going to be."
On Monday, President Donald Trump wouldn't answer a White House reporter's question on the poisoning of Putin critic Alexei Navalny, and McMaster said he could not explain why that happened.
"I can't think of any other plausible alternative to the Kremlin poisoning Navalny like they attempted to do with Sergei [Skripal] and his daughter in April of 2018," he said.
The United States must, in response, impose costs on Russia beyond those that Putin factors in when he makes such decisions, said McMaster.
"Russia is not strong," he added. "Putin has a lot of problems these days, right? He's coping with COVID-19 and what was an ineffective response to it, the collapse of oil prices, he has a weak economy. The economy is about the size of Texas or Italy. So, Putin knows he can't compete with us on our own terms except maybe with nuclear weapons, which is a scary prospect, but what he's trying to do is drag us down."
McMaster also warned that China is also no partner of the United States, and the biggest shift the Trump administration made was to treat the country as a rival.
"That competition doesn't need to lead to confrontation," he said. "They're motivated mainly by fear of losing control, and their aspiration to achieve national rejuvenation. And that fear, that fear of losing the Chinese Communist Party's exclusive grip on power, is driving this establishment of an Orwellian, technologically established police state where they're extinguishing human freedom across the mainland and now trying to do it in Hong Kong and they're becoming more and more aggressive internationally as well."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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