The White House has mishandled Russia for decades

By Matthew Gagnon

The year was 2012, and former President Barack Obama was embroiled in a tough re-election battle with Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Romney had just walked all over him in the first presidential debate of the cycle, and after that debate, five of the next seven national polls gave Romney a lead. Romney continued to trade leads in the polls for a week afterward, making clear that it was still anybody’s race. 

It wouldn’t be until the third debate on Oct. 22 that Obama would stop the bleeding. In that debate, Obama would savagely attack Romney on a number of fronts, most harshly on foreign policy where Obama felt he had a decided advantage. 

Responding to remarks that Romney made to Wolf Blitzer in March of that year, Obama mercilessly mocked the former Massachusetts governor. “When you were asked, ‘What’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America,’ you said ‘Russia.’ Not al Qaeda; you said Russia,” Obama said of Romney. “And, the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Obama’s arrogant and insulting condescension toward Romney didn’t end there, of course. This was also the debate where Obama ridiculed Romney for remarking that the U.S. Navy had fewer ships than it did in 1916. “Well, Governor,” Obama said, “we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.”

The two attacks, both dripping with arrogance and condescension were missing important context and were inappropriately simplistic. They were also absolutely devastating, painting Romney as a dinosaur who was desperately out of touch with modern foreign policy challenges, instead clinging to an antiquated view of the world born of the Cold War. 

After the debate, a CBS poll found that 53 percent of undecided voters believed that Obama won the debate, while only 23 percent believed that Romney did. In the national polls conducted after the debate, Obama began to show a clear advantage over Romney, and he later cruised to a comfortable re-election win weeks later. 

Flash forward nearly 10 years to today, and it is probably time that we admitted that Romney was right.

This, by the way, is exactly what I was talking about when I criticized modern presidential debates as a “substanceless wasteland of vapidity” last month, and celebrated their likely demise.

Back to Romney’s prescience, though. American presidents have been getting it wrong about Russia since far before that fateful 2012 debate. George W. Bush viewed Russian President Vladimir Putin as a friend and strategic partner, and more or less allowed him to invade Georgia in 2008 without seriously confronting Russia over the incursion. Obama dismissively ignored what Russia was doing, particularly in the Middle East, in favor of “sexier” foreign policy initiatives, and more or less let them operate unimpeded. Donald Trump, for all his repugnant gushing about Putin, took a harder line than his two predecessors, ordering sanctions against Russia in 2019. Still, he had no strategic vision for countering Russia and was ultimately uninterested in pushing back against Putin, just like Bush and Obama. President Joe Biden, up to this point, has been more or less status quo. 

Their collective failure has given Putin a free hand to act without much fear of reprisal, and we now see the result. 

For weeks, the world has watched as Putin has pushed eastern Europe toward war, engineering phony rationales for invasion, and lying to the world about his intentions, even while we have been able to see with our own two eyes what he is up to. Earlier this week, Putin declared two eastern Ukraine regions as “independent republics” and sent in Russian “peacekeepers” to more or less occupy the regions.

In response to the invasion, President Biden has made good on a threat he has been directing at Russia for weeks in announcing severe sanctions against the Putin regime, rightly calling the Russian actions an invasion. Germany, an important NATO ally, took its own punitive action, suspending the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. 

I will say that while I have been very critical of Biden’s foreign policy since he took office, I do think that (for the most part) he has more or less gotten the response to the current crisis right. 

But getting it right in the moment is no excuse for more than two decades of successive foreign policy failures by administrations from both parties, relating to Russia and with it, China. It is well past time we recognize the menace for what it is, and do something about it.

Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.