The liberal magazine The New Republic admitted that Mitt Romney was right about Russia after the Vladimir Putin-led nation invaded the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea late last week.
“Russia…is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe. They fight every cause for the world’s worst actors…But when these—these terrible actors pursue their course in the world and we go to the United Nations looking for ways to stop them, when—when Assad, for instance, is murdering his own people, we go—we go to the United Nations, and who is it that always stands up for the world’s worst actors? It is always Russia, typically with China alongside,” Romney said in a 2012 interview during his presidential campaign.
Since the interview, Syria’s Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against his own people and China has come out “in agreement” with Russia’s invasion of Crimea.
“This all seems…exactly right,” Isaac Chotiner admitted Monday for The New Republic..
Romney’s comments on Russia were roundly mocked in 2012 by a press that did not seem to like Romney very much compared to his Democratic opponent Barack Obama, who told Romney in a debate that “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back. Because the Cold War has been over for 20 years.”
“Governor Romney offered his judgment today that Russia is our nation’s number one geopolitical foe. This conclusion, as outdated as his ideas on the economy, energy needs, and social issues, is left over from the last century. Does Governor Romney believe that a Cold War foreign policy is the right course in the twenty-first century?,” said former Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig in a statement distributed by the Democratic National Committee and featured on the blog of liberal anchor Rachel Maddow.
“I don’t know what decade this guy is living. It sounds like ’72, ’52 even. It’s not Stalin over there. It’s not Khrushchev. It’s not Brezhnev. It’s [Dmitry] Medvedev,” said red-faced MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews.
“If Mitt Romney has his way, the military-industrial complex will get its beloved Cold War back,” cried The Nation magazine.
But Romney was not the only media villain who knew what he was talking about.
“Yes, I could see this one from Alaska,” 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin recently wrote on Facebook. “I’m usually not one to Told-Ya-So, but I did, despite my accurate prediction being derided as ‘an extremely far-fetched scenario’ by the ‘high-brow’ Foreign Policy magazine.
“Here’s what this ‘stupid’ ‘insipid woman’ predicted back in 2008,” Palin continued, quoting her previous comments. “‘After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama‘s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.'”
