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from https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/08/opinions/barack-obama-russia-revisionism-cupp/index.html

Opinion: Obama's stunning blind spot on Russia
CNN Digital Expansion 2016
Opinion by S.E. Cupp

Updated 9:55 AM ET, Fri April 8, 2022
Romney has been warning about Putin for 10 years. Here's what he
says now
Obama returned to the White House for first time. See how he poked fun
at Biden

SE Cupp is a CNN political commentator. The views expressed in this
commentary are solely hers. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)"The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back."

That was former President Barack Obama in 2012, schooling Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney at a debate for saying that Russia was "without question, our No. 1 geopolitical foe."
"Because the Cold War has been over for 20 years," Obama continued. "But governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to
import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policy of
the 1950s, and the economic policies of the 1920s."
The line killed, of course. But boy, does it hit differently now.

With Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the destruction of countless
towns there that until April 2 has killed over 1,400 civilians,
according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Human Rights, and pushed millions of refugees to cross international
borders or huddle in train stations hoping to survive the next bombing,
Obama's joke feels more like a gut punch.

You'd think that his smugness around Russia then -- and the subsequent
events proving him dead wrong -- would have humbled the former president.
But if he feels any regret, he's not showing it.
At a conference titled "Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy,"
hosted by the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics and The
Atlantic this week, Obama was asked point blank if he wishes he'd been
stronger on Putin knowing what we do now.
Visibly annoyed, he answered, "I actually don't, because the
circumstances were different."
He explained that Crimea's "attitudes towards Russia" in 2014 were
different. He described a "very robust response" from his
administration, which just amounted to limited sanctions.
And he defended not arming the Ukrainians because "we were concerned
about making sure that we did not give [Russia] an excuse for another incursion," and "you had issues of training."
He congratulated Europe for arriving today where he had wanted them back
then.
"I will say that as somebody who grappled with the incursion in Crimea
and the Eastern portions of Ukraine, I have been encouraged by the
European reaction, because in 2014, I often had to drag them kicking and screaming to respond in ways that we would have wanted."
And he stunningly explained how we got to a place where Russia believed
it could invade a sovereign nation. He said, western democracies "have
gotten complacent." Seemingly, the kind of warning Romney was flagging
in 2012.

Opinion: The UN is flawed, and Russia's war on Ukraine is exposing
all of its imperfections

It's hard to imagine a person being less self-reflective and more dug in
on an obvious foreign policy blunder, and one that you could easily
argue helped lay the path for this current invasion.
But when you remember just how awful Putin proved to be in the years
following Obama's debate punchline, it's actually far worse.
Less than two years after Obama essentially called Russia a JV team,
Putin marched on Crimea, annexing the southern peninsula of Ukraine.
Around the same time, he joined forces with Syria's Bashar al-Assad to
aid him in slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Syrians, just as he had
done in Chechnya years earlier.
Putin always denies allegations that he murders or "disappears" his
critics, but several were killed in the years of his presidency,
including in 2013 and 2015.
Famously, Alexey Navalny, an open Putin critic, was charged with politically-motivated bogus crimes, jailed, and poisoned. The Kremlin
denied any involvement in Navalny's poisoning.
Obama certainly is aware of all of this, yet he said this week, "I don't
know that the person I knew is now the same as the person who's leading
this charge [against Ukraine]."
This is simply bizarre. Revisionist. Amnesiac.

And, frankly, surprising. To his credit, Obama has spoken openly about
his regrets concerning the Syrian genocide and the mistakes his
administration made. He's said the war still "haunts" him.
But in Ukraine, he wouldn't have changed a thing? This defies logic.

Romney wasn't prescient in 2012, he was merely sentient, seeing Putin
for who he clearly was and understanding the threats. Obama's misreading
can be forgiven, but all this time later, with everything we now know,
it's very hard to understand his hard-headedness.
PAID CONTENT

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