Mitt Romney possible presidential campaign, 2016/Foreign affairs

	; ; Possible presidential candidate; Mitt Romney
	Political offices: ; Republican presidential nominee; (2012); Governor of Massachusetts; (2003-2007);
	Date he announced he would not run: ; January 30, 2015
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This page was current as of the 2016 election.

In a 2014 op-ed, Mitt Romney criticized Congress and President Barack Obama for cutting defense spending at a time of increasing threats from Russia, China, Iran and the Islamic State.^[1]

During his 2012 campaign, Romney proposed spending "at least 4 percent of gross domestic product on military personnel, procurement, operations and maintenance, and research and development," according to The New York Times.^[2]

In November 2014, Mitt Romney criticized President Barack Obama's handling of ISIS. He said, "I think the president's wrong in saying that under no circumstances will he consider ground troops. No one wants to see our own ground troops there, but if you're going to defeat something you don't tell the enemy exactly what you plan on doing or what you won't do, you say, 'We're going to defeat you regardless of the consequence.'"^[3]

During a 2014 interview on CBS's "Face the Nation," host Bob Schieffer asked Mitt Romney if he believed "what happened in Ukraine had anything to do with what President Obama has or hasn't done?" Romney replied, "[T]he President's naivety with regards to-- to Russia and his faulty judgment about Russia's intentions and objectives has led to a number of foreign policy challenges that we face. And unfortunately not having anticipated Russia's intentions, the President wasn't able to shape the kinds of events that may have been able to prevent the kinds of circumstances that you're seeing in the Ukraine as well as the things that you're seeing in Syria. We-- we really need to understand that Russia has very different interests than ours, this is not fantasy land, this is reality, where they are a geopolitical adversary. They're not our enemy. But they are certainly an adversary on the world stage."^[4]

According to a July 2014 Politico article written by Alex Wong, Romney's 2012 presidential campaign foreign policy director, "The animating theory that underlay Romney’s view of the world was that the United States and its allies are in strategic competition with rival systems of governance, and always have been. 'Other global strategies, each pursued by at least one state or major actor, are aggressively being pursued to surpass us and, in some cases, to suppress us,' Romney wrote in his 2010 book, No Apology. That book—although viewed by many who never read it as a run-of-the-mill campaign biography—was in actuality a book about geopolitics. It identified the governance models of China, Russia and radical Islamic jihadism as the chief competitors at this point in history to American-style political and economic liberalism. To beat those actors and ensure our security, Romney wrote, U.S. leaders must first recognize that we are in fact in a competition and that our adversaries are implementing sophisticated strategies to beat us."^[5]

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