Ed Royce: “This is not a new cold war. President Reagan ended the cold war. The way he did that, frankly, was by leading, but also…”

“This is not a new cold war. President Reagan ended the cold war. The way he did that, frankly, was by leading, but also with a strategy which drove down the price of oil and gas, which was the stranglehold, which not only Russia had over Eastern Europe, but also funded the ability of the former Soviet Union militarily to carry out an expansion program. Today, you have the circumstance where President Putin relies almost solely--70 percent of the exports, 52 percent of the budget, as I indicated--from a monopoly position on oil and gas. That is why I think it is very important that we understand what the polls and what the Hungarians understood when they exported 2 billion cubic yards of gas last year to Ukraine in order to try to keep the ability of Russia from manipulating the situation into leading to the very chaos that was brought about. We need to understand, when the U.S.-EU annual summit just occurred and the EU asked us to be part of a program to ship gas into that market in order to offset this monopoly control and pricing by Russia, that we should be part of this. This is part of this bill. Also part of the bill is the important consequence of communicating to the people in that region and offsetting the propaganda that Russia right now is sending into the country.…”