Flournoy Says Biden Will Threaten Putin with the ‘Nuclear’ Financial Sanctions

Dec. 6, 2021 (EIRNS)—Michèle Flournoy, the co-founder of the legacy neo-con think-tank the Center for New American Security gave an interview to “Fox News Sunday” Dec. 5 from the Reagan Center in California, where neo-cons and conservative Republicans were having an annual meeting. Flournoy herself has a Democratic profile and was ambitious to become Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary, after heading up the West Exec consulting firm in Washington where leading Obamacons nested during the Trump Administration.

Flournoy was flanked by Iowa Senator and combat veteran Joni Ernst, who told anchor Chris Wallace that President Joe Biden would hold the cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s head at their Dec. 7 meeting, as a threat against any Russian move regarding Ukraine. Flournoy dismissed that strategy as alienating European allies who are in economic pain; she counseled instead (or, rather, appeared to be predicting or informing) that Biden would make a “much more powerful” threat. That is, that the United States would coordinate with NATO allies to sanction all trans-Atlantic banks from owning Russia’s debt or buying it on the secondary market—aiming to collapse Russian debt (and thus the ruble) in value—and to cut Russia’s financial system off from the SWIFT messaging system for financial transfers among the global banks.

These actions have been referred to in the past as the “nuclear option” of financial sanctions against Russia; and Flournoy repeatedly pointed out to Wallace and Ernst that Biden had said he was going to threaten sanctions on a different scale than any that had been imposed before.

If such sanctions were attempted, Russia would require extraordinary and sustained financial support from major nations—particularly China, but also India or Japan—for Moscow’s banks to survive.