that means 40% of his military budget. how long are we going to go on funding both sides in these oil wars? whether it s in the middle east or russia or anywhere else. that is flat out stupid. and it s time we finally had a plan, a strateging plan, to get off ooil. we cannot do it overnight, but we can do it a lot faster than we have been doing it. and remember, anderson, what brought down the soviet union? it was the collapse of oil prices between 1998 and 2002, brought on strategically by saudi overpumping. we now have it in our power to bring down those oil prices by massively rapidly moving to renewables. why aren t we doing that? why are we going on begging? two years ago, trump was begging russia and china to cut their production because oil prices had fallen by $15, which was
killing american oil companies, and now biden and blinken are begging saudi arabia to cut its production, excuse me, to raise its production to ease the pain on us now. but what both those have in common is we re always begging. we re either begging them to cut their protection or to raise their production because they re the swing producers. let s stop begging and let s have a strategic plan to end our addiction to their oil. that is the one thing that would truly, truly undermine putin and putinism. tom friedman, always good to talk to you. thanks, tom. up next, to tom friedman s point, the impact the war is having on the millions of refugees who fled their home and start the challenge of starting over in a new country. that s the one. at university of phohoenix, you could earn your master s degree in less than a year for under $11k. learn more at phoenix.edu.
choices once he got everything wrong from the beginning were lose early and lose small, lose late and lose big. there clearly is some effort there to lose early and big. lose early and small, and the way to do that is to claim that they were just going for, you know, a link between crimea and russia and the eastern regions. but i think we shouldn t underestimate how confused they might be themselves and what kind of divisions might be going on there. i still think, though, anderson, putin s overall fallback position is to try to create as absolutely as many refugees as he can from ukraine into the surrounding eu and nato countries. and put them under tremendous stress so they will come to zelenskyy and get him or force him eventually to cut whatever deal putin wants. i still think that s his plan. do you think that could work? look, there s the population, pre-war population of ukraine was 44 million or so.