Arkansas senator Tom Cotton blasted Barack Obama for his accommodation of Russian aggression over the past eight years and argued that Russia has committed “crimes and transgressions against the United States and our interests” while the administration “looked the other way.” Speaking to Tucker Carlson on Fox News Tuesday, Cotton laid out a case for why Vladimir Putin and Russia deserve tough consequences for their actions, citing the harassment of American diplomats in Russia and successful hack of the Democratic National Committee.
Carlson pushed back, asking why Russia deserves to be singled out when American allies spy on the United States all the time. “Russia is on our side, fundamentally, in the struggle that most of us recognize is the main one, which is against Islamic extremism. We share common interests,” Carlson said, likening those shared interests to those of Western nations like the United Kingdom. “Why wouldn’t Russia fall into that category?”
“Well, all those other countries don’t do things like beat our diplomats in Moscow when they’re walking in the front door of our embassy,” Cotton replied. “They don’t harrass our diplomats throughout Russia and throughout the Middle East. They don’t invade sovereign countries in Europe like Russia did in Ukraine and like they did in Georgia. They don’t supply missiles to rebels that use those missiles to shoot civilian aircraft out of the skies. They don’t run illegal spy rings in our countries for decades who are then exposed. These are just all examples of things that Russia has done over the last eight years in no small measure because Barack Obama, again, has not just appeased Russia and been weak on Russia, he’s actively undermined efforts by people in Congress like me to take a firmer line.”
Carlson tried again, asking Cotton if it isn’t true that the United States isn’t “basically on the same side as the Russians on the question of Islamic terror.”
“It doesn’t mean ignoring or excusing their awful behavior, but doesn’t that outweigh that behavior?” Carlson pressed.
“Well, Tucker, I wish it were so, but if you look at what Russia has done in Syria, they’ve taken the fight hardly at all to the Islamic State,” Cotton said. “They’ve fought almost entirely the Syrian opposition that was fighting againsnt Bashar al-Assad. They haven’t been bombing Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State. They’ve been bombing Aleppo, which was the main opposition holdout until it fell last month.”
