Last week, the world watched as President Biden traveled to the G7 Summit. While overseas, he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss several important issues. I had high hopes for the meeting because there was much on the agenda for the two presidents to discuss, and it was President Biden’s first time as President to meet with Putin.
Putin is well known for testing other world leaders to see how far they will allow themselves to be pushed, and he’s doing just that with President Biden. Recently, we’ve seen the hacking of the Colonial Pipeline and the hacking of JBS SA, which is the largest meat producer in the world and supplies over a quarter of American supplies. While we still don’t know all the details behind these two attacks, we know they were carried out by Russian-backed hackers.
These attacks on critical American infrastructure can’t be ignored or allowed to continue. Last week’s summit with Putin was the perfect time to make it clear the United States will not tolerate any attacks from Russian-backed interests. Instead, President Biden did nothing to hold Putin accountable and even gave him a list of infrastructure targets that should be off-limits to attacks. My list to Putin would have been much shorter: everything is off-limits.
I strongly urge President Biden to get tough on Russia and any other foreign adversary who wishes us harm, because we can’t allow attacks on American infrastructure to continue and go unanswered.
Jerry Carl represents Alabama’s First Congressional District. He lives in Mobile with his wife Tina.
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