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The Public Doesn’t Share Romney’s Cold War Mentality on Russia

Doug Mataconis reads too much into the recent verbal slips of Romney and his advisers: So, no I don’t think that the Romney campaign is dumb enough to think the USSR still exists. I also don’t think, however, that this is just a simple slip of the tongue. They’re sending a message here, and it’s […]

Doug Mataconis reads too much into the recent verbal slips of Romney and his advisers:

So, no I don’t think that the Romney campaign is dumb enough to think the USSR still exists. I also don’t think, however, that this is just a simple slip of the tongue. They’re sending a message here, and it’s mostly to the GOP base.

This gives the Romney campaign too much credit for political calculation. I don’t think anyone in the campaign was trying to “send a message” by referring to the Czech Republic as Czechoslovakia or calling the Russians Soviets. The first mistake doesn’t send any message at all. The Romney adviser who said this, Pierre Prosper, mentioned Czechoslovakia in the context of using the usual talking point about the cancellation of missile defense installations that most Czechs and Poles never wanted. There is nothing subtle about this. It’s the same thing we’ve heard from the campaign for years. If they were intentional, these statements were particularly poorly-timed, since they came on the same day as Biden’s criticism that Romney was trapped in a Cold War mindset. Indeed, they blunders would not have been made if the Romney campaign hadn’t tried to issue a “prebuttal” of Biden’s attack.

None of these little slips matters. The criticism of Romney’s “Cold War mindset” is valid because he deliberately chose to describe Russia as an enemy in terms that haven’t made sense since the Soviet era. Instead of backing away from the absurd description of Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe,” Romney and his advisers have reaffirmed it. It’s certainly true that some Republicans are wedded to the idea of Russia as a neo-Soviet menace. We heard this nonsense a lot back in 2008 during and after the war in Georgia, and Romney has occasionally expressed the view that he thinks Putin is intent on “rebuilding the Russian Empire,” which is a slightly different description of the same misguided view of Russian ambitions and post-Soviet political realities.

I suspect most Americans and most Republicans simply aren’t very receptive to fear-mongering about Russia. For one thing, 60% of Americans were under the age of 44 according to the 2010 census, and more than half of them are too young to have been alive during the Cold War. Those of us born in 1979 and later can vaguely remember the final years of the Cold War, but we have lived most of our lives during the decades since the dissolution of the USSR. As Scott Clement found earlier this year, Americans simply don’t worry about Russia anymore:

Today, there’s virtually no consensus any more that Russia is the bad guy. This year, for instance, a scant 2 percent picked Russia as America’s arch-nemesis. Yes, there’s a resistance against being too trustful — fewer than one in five have called Russia an “ally” at any point in time — but calling Russia America’s “number one geopolitical foe” makes Romney seem anachronistic, if not stuck in the Cold War.

The accompanying graph Clement used showed a significant difference between age groups in their attitudes towards Russia, but even a majority of older Americans does not perceive Russia as unfriendly or as an enemy:

Gallup finds that more Americans viewed Russia favorably than not earlier this year, and this has been true for every year during the past decade except 2003 and 2009. Bad feeling about the wars in Iraq and Georgia took their toll, but a favorable American view of Russia keeps coming back after each downturn. It makes some sense politically for Romney to be hawkish on Iran, which is exceptionally unpopular in the U.S., but there is no obvious political advantage in playing the Russophobe. It goes against Romney’s normal instinct to cater and pander to the electorate, and it suggests that even Romney’s ability to tell people what they want to hear is being overwhelmed by the influence of his hawkish foreign policy team.

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