Former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Sunday accused President Obama of being 'naïve' about Russian President Vladimir Putin's agenda and lacking the foresight to have prevented Putin from taking over a Ukraine peninsula.
'There's no question but that the president's naiveté with regards to Russia, and his faulty judgment about Russia's intentions and objectives, has led to a number of foreign policy challenges that we face,' Romney said on CBS' 'Face the Nation.'
During a October 2012 presidential debate, Obama ridiculed Romney about his concern over Russia's 'geo-political' threat. He criticized the former Massachusetts governor for saying Russia -- not Al Qaeda -- was America's 'No. 1 geopolitical foe.'
'You said Russia. Not Al Qaeda. You said Russia,' Obama said regarding a question, which involved the biggest threats facing the world. 'The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because ... the Cold War's been over for 20 years,' he chided the Republican presidential contender.
'This is not Fantasyland,' Romney said Sunday. 'They are not our enemy, but an adversary on the world stage.'
He also said the United States should have worked sooner with allies to make clear the penalties that Russia could have faced if it moved into Ukraine.
The political uprising in Ukraine started about three months ago and included citizens last month ousting their Moscow-backed president.
Russian troops began moving into the neighboring Crimea region of Ukraine about two weeks ago and on Thursday officially annexed Crimea.
'This shouldn't have been a surprise,' Romney said, referring in part to unmarked Russian troops and military vehicles entering the region days before the takeover. 'This had been prepared for some time.'
Romney acknowledged that more preemptive action had only the potential to prevent the invasion.
But he also blamed Secretary of State John Kerry and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, suggesting that the Obama administration's so-called 'reset' diplomacy was a mistake.
'They thought resetting relations with Russia, handing out gifts to Russia, would somehow make Russia change its objectives. Well, that certainly wasn't the case,' Romney said. 'Russia is not our friend.'
He also called for tougher sanctions against Russia, no cuts to the U.S. military budget and re-installing missile-defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. He called their removal in 2009 a 'gift to Russia.'
bberitaa.blogspot.com contributed to this report.
Posted by Unknown on Sunday, March 23, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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