It brings cold comfort to Mitt Romney, I’m sure, to be reminded that he was right about Vladimir Putin in 2012. But it offers a cautionary note to anybody else who might think too quickly that ol’ Vlad has had it.
During the 2012 presidential race, Republican Romney, now a Utah senator, was ridiculed for calling Russia “our number one geopolitical foe.”
President Barack Obama responded in their next debate with —”the ’80s are calling; they want their foreign policy back.”
And Vice President Joe Biden in a later speech joined in the fun, saying Romney was “mired in a Cold War mindset.”
Well, now that Russia under Putin has invaded Ukraine, Romney’s observation sounds downright prophetic.
But, in fairness to all, Romney’s Democratic critics were hardly alone in their thinking at the time. The Berlin Wall had fallen. The Soviet Union had broken apart in 1991. al-Qaida and other international terrorist groups were posing a much more clear and present danger in the conventional wisdom of those times.
Then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev reportedly begged European leaders to include Moscow in their security institutions after the wall fell. But those calls were rebuffed.
And the mindset that the West had bigger fish to fry continued even after Putin took control of two breakaway republics in Geor-gia in 2008, with little objection from the rest of the world.
Then he took Crimea in 2014. Obama said there were costs and Russia was “isolated,” but Western sanctions had little impact. Europe continued with its commercial diplomacy, even to the point of making itself dependent, particularly in Germany, on Russian gas and oil.
Even Russian cyber-meddling in this country’s 2016 elections led to more arguing in our own parties than with consequences for Putin’s government. ,
But now that Putin has moved into Ukraine, the West faces a can of problems that we have kicked down the road for too long.
Masha Gessen, the bestselling Putin critic and New Yorker writer, says Putin learned the seeds of his current strategy from watching how President Bill Clinton and NATO handled the 1999 war in Kosovo.
NATO launched a 78-day campaign of airstrikes against Serbia to force President Slobodan Milosevic to end his military campaign of widespread killings of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Russia disapproved and refused to recognize Kosovo independence.
But now Putin is back on the world stage with what Gessen in recent interview on PBS’ “Amanpour & Company,” called a “cosplay” of the Kosovo saga.
He claims a humanitarian mission in Ukraine “to protect people who have been abused by the genocide of the Kyiv regime for eight years,” although neither he nor anyone else offered evidence of such abuses.
He accused the Ukraine government of committing numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including citizens of the Russia. Again, without evidence. Autocrats can’t be troubled by such details.
More disturbing, he appeared to question the legitimacy of the other liberated republics who made up the Soviet bloc, sounding like his deadly game of rolling into independent countries is not over.
Putin seems to have chosen an unusually opportune time for his misadventures. After pulling out of its longest war ever in Afghanistan, the United States has little appetite for new conflicts.
And our politics are so polarized that conservative influencers such as Fox News’ Tucker Carlson keep beating their love drums for Putin, who former President Donald Trump praised as “savvy” after his would-be pal Vlad recognized the independence of two Russia-backed separatist-controlled areas in eastern Ukraine.
President Biden had a more appropriate description. “America stands up to bullies,” he told reporters as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. “We stand up for freedom. This is who we are.”
Yes, at least that’s who we try to be. America stands for democracy, we like to say. But we’re still haggling about the price we’re willing to pay.
(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
