Stop trying to make Mitt Romney’s foreign policy acumen happen. It isn’t going to happen. [View all]

[applegrove]

Stop trying to make Mitt Romney’s foreign policy acumen happen. It isn’t going to happen.

By Daniel W. Drezner at the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/31/stop-trying-to-make-mitt-romneys-foreign-policy-acumen-happen-it-isnt-going-to-happen/

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It’s the summer, some observers think there’s a Big Lull going on, and I understand the need for commentators to commentate about … something. So I don’t begrudge Matt K. Lewis’s effort to make “Mitt Romney 2016 — This Time, He’s the Underdog!” happen. But there was one thing in his Week column that I can’t let pass unmentioned: his claim that, “in the intervening years since 2012 — and on a range of issues, not the least of which is Russia — Romney has been proven right.” This refers to Romney’s on-air description of Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe.”

This is a meme that has popped up with increasing regularity since last fall (even though, during the campaign, Romney backed away from that assertion) to the point where his 2012 foreign policy adviser Alex Wong tried to write an “I told you so” victory lap in Politico about it. On Russia in particular, Wong wrote:


During the 2012 campaign, Obama and his surrogates — using what they clearly thought was a clever talking point — enjoyed needling Romney’s Russia policy as a throwback to the Cold War era. Employing what can only be described as willful blindness, they skipped over the recent history of the Georgia invasion, Putin’s own declared nostalgia for the Soviet Empire and all the other clear indications of a strong revanchist streak inside the Kremlin. For the Obama campaign, history stopped the day the Soviet Union fell. Throughout 2012, it was perpetually 1991.

But Romney was clear-eyed about Putin, and about the divergences between the ex-KGB agent’s interests and America’s own. Putin has never been a natural partner of the United States, and gaining cooperation from him can only be achieved by applying well-placed pressure to manipulate his interests. Granting Putin concessions and raising his international prestige—as Obama did—only emboldens him. And now the world is dealing with the consequences of an emboldened Vladimir Putin.




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