President Obama was asked by ABC’s Jonathan Karl about Mitt Romney’s 2012 assertion that Russia is the United States’ “number one geopolitical foe.”
As CNN reported at the time, Obama “seized on the comments and turned them into a debate zinger.”
At the foreign policy presidential debate in October 2012, the president told Romney: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back – because the Cold War has been over for 20 years.”
You can watch discussion by John King, Margaret Talev and Peter Baker on Obama’s response to Romney about who is America’s #1 geopolitical foe followed by a transcript of the relevant portion of that particular exchange. You can go to the White House for the full transcript of the press conference by clicking here.
Jonathan Karl: And in the light of recent developments, do you think Mitt Romney had a point when he said that Russia is America’s biggest geopolitical foe? If not Russia, who?
President Obama: With respect to Mr. Romney’s assertion that Russia is our number-one geopolitical foe, the truth of the matter is that America has got a whole lot of challenges. Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors not out of strength, but out of weakness. Ukraine has been a country in which Russia had enormous influence for decades, since the breakup of the Soviet Union. And we have considerable influence on our neighbors. We generally don’t need to invade them in order to have a strong, cooperative relationship with them. The fact that Russia felt compelled to go in militarily and lay bare these violations of international law indicates less influence, not more.
And so my response to them continues to be what I believe today, which is Russia’s actions are a problem. They don’t pose the number-one national security threat to the United States. I continue to be much more concerned when it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan, which is part of the reason why the United States, showing its continued international leadership, has organized a forum over the last several years that’s been able to help eliminate that threat in a consistent way.
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