Mitt Romney campaigning in Ames, Iowa, May 2007.

I realize that the 2007-2008 presidential debates were an eternity ago in terms of “political time”, but I’m resurrecting the following quote from Mitt Romney for a reason. He was asked about his views on Vladimir Putin. As part of his response, he outlined his rather scrambled view of international politics:

What we have today in the world is four major, if you will, strategies at play.

One, there are the nations with the energy, like Russia. They’re trying to use energy as a way to take over the world.

Then there’s China, which is saying, “We’re going to use communism plus sort of a Wild West form of — of free enterprise. We’re going to give nuclear weapons to — or nuclear technology to the Iranians. We’re going to buy oil from the Sudanese.” You’ve got China.

Then you’ve got al Qaeda, which says, “We want to bring everybody down.”

And then finally, there’s us, the only major power in the world that says, “We believe in free enterprise and freedom for the individual.”

And this great battle is going — going on right now, and it’s essential for us to strengthen other friends like ourselves and to confront one by one these other strategies and help turn them towards modernity, so that the world our kids inherit does not have to know war.

Romney has had several years to educate himself on what’s really going on in the world, especially on nuclear weapons issues.

If Romney’s the best that New START opponents have to offer, then they’re doing it wrong.

I’m talking, of course, about Romney’s Washington Post editorial today, in which he blunders through a stale, much-debunked series of arguments against the New START treaty.

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