Mitt Romney suffers from “political amnesia” for claims that the world has lost respect for the United States under President Obama, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) charged Sunday.
{mosads}”Gov. Romney’s suffering from political amnesia. Does he remember the reaction of the rest of the world to our invasion of Iraq?” Durbin said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program. “The fact is that many of our stalwart allies of the past thought it was a terrible decision. What President Obama has done is restore a working relationship.”
Earlier in the same program, Romney, the GOP nominee in the 2012 presidential race, hammered Obama’s foreign policy decisions, arguing that they encouraged Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine while contributing more broadly to a diminished U.S. reputation in the eyes of the world.
“The Middle East is in turmoil. Iraq is fragile and may fall back into a devastating setting. We’re not making the kind of progress in Afghanistan that had been promised. And our esteem around the world has fallen,” Romney told CBS. “It’s hard to think of a single country that has greater respect and admiration for America today than it did five years ago when Barack Obama became president. And that’s a very sad, unfortunate state of affairs.”
Durbin was quick to counter that argument, trumpeting Obama’s foreign policy accomplishments and noting the diminished reputation of the United States by the end of the George W. Bush administration.
“Osama bin Laden is gone. The war in Iraq is over. Afghanistan is coming to a close,” Durbin said. “And this president has worked with many of these nations successfully to put pressure on Iran, the sanctions, bringing them to the negotiating table.
“I’m afraid Governor Romney’s forgotten those facts.”