Mitt Romney on Face the Nation this morning said 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,” notably the situation in Ukraine and the United States’s response to the crisis in Syria.
Host Bob Schieffer noted that Romney might be tempted to say “I told you so” after being mocked by President Obama during the 2012 presidential debates for emphasizing that Russia was a geopolitical adversary of the United States.
“Russia has very different interests than ours. This is not fantasyland, this is reality,” Romney said. “They’re not our enemy, but they’re certainly our adversary on the world stage.”
Romney also said that Putin’s actions should not have taken Obama by surprise as many people had predicted that Russia would try to seize further territory. He said that Obama should have worked with our allies from the beginning of the protests in Ukraine to coordinate a response to possible Russian aggression.