CNN’s Fareed Zakaria: Biden admin ‘making it harder’ to invest in natural gas and oil, to Putin’s advantage

CNN host Fareed Zakaria on Sunday criticized the Biden administration and European countries for allowing themselves to depend on Russia for gas and oil. His remarks came during his opening monologue on his eponymous weekly show, Fareed Zakaria GPS.

“It is now clear that the economic war against Russia is not working as well as people thought,” Zakaria said.

“Vladimir Putin cares less about what these sanctions do to the Russian people than what they do to the Russian state. oil and gas than before the war, about 285 billion in 2022 compared to 236 billion in 2021,” he continued.

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Zakaria called the West’s economic war against Russian President Vladimir Putin « toothless » and said the United States and Europe were too dependent on Russia for energy.

“The fundamental problem with the economic war against Russia, as I have said before, is that it is toothless because it cannot sanction all Russian energy. The Russian economy is fundamentally an energy economy” , did he declare.

“Oil and gas revenues alone account for almost half of the government budget. And unfortunately the solution would not be for the West to completely stop buying Russian energy, because with less supply on the world market, it would only drive prices even higher. » Zakaria continued.

« Having developed a dangerous dependence on Russian energy over the past two decades, Europe cannot change this quickly without plunging into a deep and prolonged recession, » he said.

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(Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Zakaria also expressed similar concerns about Germany’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia, as President Donald Trump did at a NATO summit in 2018. During the summit, Trump told Secretary NATO General Jens Stoltenberg that the pipeline makes Germany ‘totally controlled’ and ‘captive of Russia’.

« On July 11, the pipeline through which Germany gets most of its Russian gas is due to close for maintenance. It’s possible that Putin will decide to punish the West and Germany by not letting it reopen, » he said. Zakaria about the same gas pipeline. . « If so, Germany, Europe’s largest economy Laura, will almost certainly slip into recession. »

« Putin’s strategy seems to be to impose costs on the West and then buy time by assuming that the cracks in the coalition against him will grow as the economic pain in those countries grows, » Zakaria said.

« Western countries are still not treating this challenge as a top priority. The Netherlands has a huge gas field, but they are actually slowing down production. Germany is still not going back on its nuclear phase-out , the Biden administration is always making it harder to finance long-term investments in natural gas and oil,” he continued, while criticizing the administration for not being able to restore the agreement on Iran’s nuclear, which he said would « bring a huge influx of new oil supplies to the world market. »

« The priority must be to defeat Vladimir Putin, » he concluded.

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Joe Biden has been criticized for its oil policyincluding by United Refining Chairman and CEO John Catsimatidis, who said there was a « Washington war on North American oil ».