Former Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell told Newsmax Friday that the administration of President Joe Biden and the national media are "marching us into war" in Ukraine.
"I'm a diplomat. I'm just sitting here watching in total frustration that we don't have any ambassadors. We don't have people trying to solve this problem diplomatically," Grenell, the former Acting Director of the United States National Intelligence, said during "Stinchfield" Friday. "Why is official Washington, all of Washington, just marching right into war, putting American men and women in Europe in harm's way?"
Grenell said that the United States should be pressuring Germany, which has the largest European economy, a budget surplus, and has not paid its annual dues to NATO, to use its influence to pressure Russia into standing down against Ukraine.
"Why is it that we have to send in the military when we have so many other diplomatic options that we have not used," he said. "Joe Biden said that there is a war coming for sure, a bloody war, he said. If you believed that a bloody war was around the corner, wouldn't you put sanctions on the pipeline that's funding this war?"
He said the U.S. should place sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is ready to open and bring natural gas from Russia to Germany and Europe, before a "bloody war" starts with Russia and Ukraine.
"The Russians have a pipeline. Their economy is not in great shape," he said. "They need that pipeline from the Germans. I would think that you would want to sanction something and try to cut off some of this money and send a strong message before a bloody war."
He said the U.S. could also push to preemptively take Russia off the international banking system as a diplomatic means of getting it to stand down.
"Those are diplomatic actions. Peaceful diplomatic actions," he said. "Yes, it's tough diplomacy, but why don't we have any of the Biden administration ambassadors speaking out, talking about solving this problem peacefully."
Grenell said that the administration and the newsrooms in Washington, D.C., seem more interested in seeing a conflict rather than a diplomatic solution to the crisis.
"They're marching into war," he said. "When Donald Trump was president, we didn't have a march towards war. We didn't start any new wars. We brought our troops home.
"I don't understand why official Washington and all the newsrooms in Washington are marching us right into war and ignoring the options that would cause us to, at least, triangulate the Russians and possibly avoid war."
Biden said Friday that he is convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin is planning to use the more than 150,000 troops surrounding Ukraine to invade "in the coming days."
Putin has consistently denied a plan to invade Ukraine.
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