Shannon Bream Presses Vivek Ramaswamy On Blocking Ukraine From Joining NATO: ‘Why Reward The Murderous Behavior Of Vladimir Putin?’

Fox News host Shannon Bream confronted Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy over his policy proposal to end the war in Ukraine by blocking Russia’s eastern neighbor from joining NATO.

Bream started her foreign policy question to Ramaswamy by outlining his policy stance, noting that Russia would have to end its military alliance with China, withdraw nuclear weapons from surrounding Eastern Bloc countries, but would grant them control of the Donbas region and prevent Ukraine from joining the NATO alliance.

“Why we reward this murderous behavior of Vladimir Putin by giving him what he wants on a couple of fronts, that land that’s not rightfully his and keeping him out of keeping Ukraine out of NATO,” Bream asked the GOP candidate. “Which is one of the things he was most objecting to and said that was one of the reasons behind this completely illegitimate land grab.”

Ramaswamy defended policies, claiming it would prioritize the interest of America and deter China from going after Taiwan.

Shannon, with due respect, NATO was created to deter the USSR. The USSR does not exist anymore, yet NATO has expanded more after the fall of the USSR than it ever did during the USSR existence. So I think we have to ask the question of what advances American interests. And to me, the top American interest is pulling apart the Russia-China alliance. That ends the Ukraine war, that stops us from having to fund another hundreds of billions of dollars to protect somebody else’s border that we could be using to protect our own border. And more importantly, this is also how we deter Xi Jinping from going after Taiwan. Xi Jinping’s bet is that the US will not want to go to war with two allied nuclear superpowers, Russia and China, at the same time. But if Russia’s no longer in Xi Jinping’s camp, then China will have to think twice before going after Taiwan. That is how we deter the invasion of Taiwan while avoiding going to war.

Bream followed up by noting, “If President Xi sees that Putin went and took land and that the West agreed to give him chunks of land that are not his. How does that deter Xi from then not going after Taiwan?”

Vivek concluded:

 Xi Jinping does not reason based on an analogy. He reasons based on hard power. Right now, Russia has the largest nuclear stockpile in the world. I worry that we’re going closer to nuclear war with Russia. They also have hypersonic missile capabilities ahead of that of the US. Combine that with China’s naval capacity, more naval ships than the US. In addition to our economic independence on China, that puts China in a strong position. However, if Russia is no longer allied with China, that actually weakens Xi Jinping’s position. That is how we both end the Ukraine war and address the Taiwan situation while avoiding war in one fell swoop.

Watch the full clip above via Fox News.

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