“Donald Trump is really the first president since Ronald Reagan who has a grand strategy, a larger view of our competition with our chief rival. For Reagan, it was the Soviet Union. For Donald Trump, it’s China,” author and investigative journalist Peter Schweizer told NewsNation’s Batya Ungar-Sargon.
In Trump’s case, it relates to the cost and availability of energy. Ungar-Sargon invited Schweizer onto her program to comment on statements by Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin, whose efforts at EPA have tried to balance environmental protection with America’s need to produce more of its own energy domestically.
Schweizer, whose most recent #1 bestselling book, The Invisible Coup, exposes Chinese interference in American politics and life, addressed those sentiments.
“If you look at a lot of the actions that [Trump] is taking, whether it’s tariff policy, Venezuela, or Iran, there’s a common thread,” Schweizer said. All of those lead to China in some way… Energy dominance is certainly a component of that. China is reeling, and I think it’s going to be a big factor when the president goes to China in just a couple of weeks,” Schweizer said.
Ungar-Sargon switched to the news that United Arab Emirates will pull out of OPEC. “Can you explain to our audience why that is so significant?”
“This is vital. The UAE is doing this primarily for their own national interests. They were having to curtail their oil production to conform to OPEC quotas, and it just didn’t make sense. What this has done is create the first major rupture in OPEC in a very long time. It’s going to be good for the global energy markets,” Schweizer said.
“If you match the UAE’s action with a rising domestic production in the United States, you have an energy market that is now dominated by the United States and its allies, or at least its friends, again to the detriment of China and to our competitors,” he said. “Even Russia is caught in this now because Russia would try to negotiate agreements with OPEC on energy production. That will no longer be the case now that the UAE has been able to back out.”
Ungar-Sargon pointed out that Americans “are somehow not buying it. The war in Iran is unbelievably unpopular. The president’s approval ratings are very low. Why is this so hard for people to understand that this is a very America-First agenda?” she asked.
Well, we live in a news cycle where we want to know immediately what’s going on. If there’s an uptick in prices, that is bad. The bottom line is this the consensus of all the experts, people like David Albright, who’s been covering Iran nuclear program for very long time, is that Iran was 3 to 6 months away from acquiring a nuclear weapon,” Schweizer responded. “We are a superpower. Can we not deal with the consequence for a few months of disruptions and energy price increases to accomplish a vitally important national security goal – to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons?”
“If we can’t do that, I would say we might as well fold up our tents and go home,” Schweizer said.
“Medium- and long-term, I do think that the American people will appreciate it. It was the same thing during the Cold War. They didn’t like a lot of things that Reagan did, but they loved it when the final results came and they championed him because of that. And I think we’re going to see the same when it comes to Donald Trump,” Schweizer said.
