Gov. Ron DeSantis isn’t holding back when it comes to Russian warships miles from the Sunshine State for military exercises with Cuba, even though the Pentagon says they’re “no threat.”
Florida’s Governor told an audience in South Florida that Moscow’s aggression is a direct result of the weakness of the Joe Biden administration and that if he were “Commander in Chief” rather than just the Governor, such a provocation wouldn’t be “something that we would allow to be happening.”
“It starts at the top with the President of the United States,” DeSantis said Friday at Hollywood Fire Rescue Station 5.
“I think it’s really concerning, I think that under this administration, they’ve put out a posture that has invited more aggressive actions from our adversaries,” he added before outlining Russia’s improved strategic position in the Western Hemisphere in recent years (despite not even being able to win a war against Ukraine on its border).
“Now, Russia, this isn’t their first foray into the Western Hemisphere, obviously, if you look through history,” DeSantis said, referencing the Cold War.
“But I think the amount of activity among hostile nations in our own hemisphere is probably at a level that we have not seen in many, many years. And if you look at how the governments of this hemisphere are constituted, now, most of them are more aligned with the Russians and the Chinas, unfortunately than with the United States and the free world.”
“And so I think it is problematic. I think that history has shown that these bad actors, they respond to strength and they’re deterred by strength. They are not going to be deterred by weakness. They’re not going to be deterred by confusion; they’re not going to be deterred by a president wandering around aimlessly at the G7,” DeSantis said, referring to a moment when Biden seemed to wander away from the other world leaders before being corralled by Italian PM Giorgia Meloni.
“They’re going to be deterred because they know that that’s not somebody that you want to mess with. So we’re failing as a country with the deterrent capability. And I think it starts at the top with the President of the United States.”
DeSantis has offered variant comments about Russian leader Vladimir Putin in the past, memorably calling the autocratic ruler “an authoritarian gas station attendant with some legacy nuclear weapons from the old Soviet Union.”
The Governor has also suggested that if foreign nations threatened the U.S., he would obliterate the aggressor.
“If people were firing rockets from the Bahamas into, like, Fort Lauderdale, we would never allow that. I mean, we would flatten them. Within like five minutes, we would flatten them,” he said in Eldridge, Iowa, in early December, during the last weeks of his failed Presidential campaign.
However, there will be no moves to “flatten” the Russian fleet, which is much more imminent than the wild hypothetical of a Bahamian attack on South Florida.
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