US shouldn’t reward Putin ‘with acquiescence and weakness’: Former GOP lawmaker

Former Rep. Allen West, R-Flo., said the United States can’t reward Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s bad behavior with “acquiescence and weakness” on “Life, Liberty & Levin.”

“It is very sickening to us to see what is happening,” he told host Mark Levin. “Because if you go back and look at history and World War II, if we had to stop [the German dictator] early on … when he took over Czechoslovakia, when he made incursions into the Rhineland — you cannot continue to reward bad behavior and despots and dictators with acquiescence and weakness as we saw with Neville Chamberlain, when he weighed the document saying that there would be peace in our times.”

“There comes a time when you have to stand up and believe, as my mom used to say, you have to stand for something, else you’ll fall for anything.”

The United States needs to “live up to” the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, he added. That agreement stated that Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine would enjoy protection from an invasion if they surrendered their nuclear weapons pursuant to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The United States has not abided by the Budapest Memorandum, he said.

“I think that’s an important thing for us as Americans is to live up to our agreements and to once again be restored as the shining city, the city that sits upon a hill. And men and women [who] raised their right hand to support and defend the Constitution and to be willing to lay down their lives, make the last full measure of devotion for that, they understand the risks.”

The combat veteran said his family believes in constitutional conservatism and former President Ronald Reagan’s “mantra” of peace through strength.