Issa: ‘We Are in a Second Cold War,’ Which Putin’s Winning

On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Evening Edit,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) stated that we are in a second cold war that Putin is winning and “it’s likely that we’re going to give away the rest of” Ukraine.

Issa said, “Well, we are in a second cold war, there’s no question at all, and he’s winning this cold war.”

Issa continued, “When he takes the rest of Ukraine, he’ll stop. He’ll stop because he doesn’t want to trigger Article 5 of NATO. So, he won’t invade the countries [that] we’re sitting there bolstering. That’s the good news. The bad news is, he will be right on the border of each of those countries. And we will have lost a non-nuclear ally, a country who aspired to be a NATO member, who created a relatively functional democracy. You know, one of the challenges for many of the former Soviet Bloc countries was making that conversion away from dictatorship, away from the kind of economy that they had had. And Ukraine did better than most. It’s the breadbasket of people in the Middle East. It’s an exporter. It’s an agricultural country, but one that works very hard and now is about to be taken over.”

He concluded, “I don’t have any question that Putin is only making a step, and then he’ll look for another guise to go into a country that has no U.S. military. and by the way, no U.S. embassy. Because we have basically evacuated the embassy and Americans have been told to flee. Not since Chamberlain said he had a diplomatic solution have we had a diplomatic solution that gave away a whole country. We gave away Crimea. We’ve given away eastern Ukraine now. And it’s likely that we’re going to give away the rest of the country, including Kyiv.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett