Utah Sen. Mitt Romney made a thinly veiled reference to a moment from a 2012 presidential debate in a statement condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine and the foreign policies of two previous presidents.
“Putin’s Ukraine invasion is the first time in 80 years that a great power has moved to conquer a sovereign nation. It is without justification, without provocation, and without honor,” Romney said.
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Romney said Putin’s actions were predictable given a “tepid” response from the United States to “his previous horrors in Georgia and Crimea.” He took aim at “our naive efforts at a one-sided ‘reset,’” a reference to an attempt by the Obama administration to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia, as well as “the shortsightedness of ‘America First,’” former President Donald Trump’s foreign policy approach.
Romney, who was the Republican presidential nominee in 2012 against then-President Barack Obama, continued: “The ‘80s called, and we didn’t answer.”
During his candidacy, Romney called Russia the U.S.’s greatest geopolitical foe, a comment mocked by Obama during a debate that year.
“When you were asked, ‘What’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America?’ you said ‘Russia.’ Not al Qaeda; you said Russia,” Obama said at the time. “And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
Romney was then portrayed as a candidate stuck in a Cold War mindset and unprepared for the threats of the day from forces such as al Qaeda. But as Putin prepared to invade Ukraine, some Democrats, including Rep. Ted Lieu, said Romney had been correct.
“This action by Putin further confirms that Mitt Romney was right when he called Russia the No. 1 geopolitical foe,” the California Democrat told CNN this week.
In his statement condemning Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Romney continued, “The peril of again looking away from Putin’s tyranny falls not just on the people of the nations he has violated. It falls on America as well.”
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“History shows that a tyrant’s appetite for conquest is never satiated,” he said. “America and our allies must answer the call to protect freedom by subjecting Putin and Russia to the harshest economic penalties, by expelling them from global institutions, and by committing ourselves to the expansion and modernization of our national defense.”
