“This is a different Putin, much more aggressive,” Bush added. “I don’t begrudge anybody trying to develop better relationships with any country; but it’s clear that, in this particular case, the much- heralded reset didn’t work out.”
“There are things that we could do given the scale of our military to send a strong signal that we’re on the side of Poland, the Baltics and the countries that truly feel threatened by the ‘little green men’, this new cyber warfare and these other tactics that Russia now is using,” Bush said, employing a term used to describe covert Russian forces.
“I think we ought to consider putting troops there for sure.”“To deal with Putin, you need to deal from strength,” Bush said. “He’s a bully, and bullies don’t — you enable bad behavior when you’re nuanced with a guy like that. I think just being clear — I’m not talking about being bellicose, but just saying, ‘These are the consequences of your actions.”
One of the key factors that put Russia on this path was George Bush’s insistence on putting a missile shield in Poland to protect America from Iran.
I will give Rmoney a point for the debate where he tried to argue that Russia was a bigger threat than we were caring about. He was right that Russia was going to up their international dickishness, but his solution of military intervention was an awful idea. Actually, all the NeoCons going on about how we need to get involved in Europe are morons who don’t think their things through all the way, but I will give credit where credit is due and say that Rmoney was right that Putin was going to be a bigger pain than he was letting on. We just have far more problems that need fixing before Europe.
Obama probably agreed with Romney about Putin, but was constrained in saying so because it was abundantly clear to him that he would be reelected and had to maintain a foreign relations strategy that would continue through a second term rather than risking something for the sake of “candor.
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