Late President Ronald Reagan wouldn’t have ordered the Russian planes that brought down a U.S. drone this week to be shot down, as he won the Cold War by bankrupting the Soviet Union, not through military action, K.T. McFarland, who served in his administration, told Newsmax.
“You don’t go to war,” McFarland, also a former deputy national security adviser under President Donald Trump, said on Newsmax’s “John Bachman Now,” while disagreeing with contentions made by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. “You don’t have to go to war because you have an economic weapon.”
McFarland’s comments come after Graham maintained Wednesday that if Reagan were still alive, he would have started shooting down Russian planes if they were threatening U.S. assets, including the incident in which two Russian Su-27 aircraft flew in front of an unmanned U.S. MQ-9 drone above the Black Sea and dumped fuel on it. One of the Russian jets hit the drone, causing it to crash.
“China is very quickly becoming the dominant global power, right under our noses,” said McFarland. “What happened in the Middle East? There’s now a new Saudi Arabia-Iran agreement. Now the Chinese president is going to go to Russia to have a Russia-China alliance, and then he’s maybe even going to go to Ukraine and try to play the peace broker there again. We’re always reacting.”
The U.S. has the ability and the tools to become the dominant world power again, but the Biden administration “refuses to use them,” said McFarland.