Was Mitt Romney Right?

Judging judgements isn't as easy as it seems.

Let me put the conclusion right up here: No, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does not prove that Mitt Romney was right when he said, in 2012, that Russia is “our number one geopolitical foe.” But before I explain why, let me begin with the fundamentals.

How do we judge judgments?

For a start, we need time and an outcome.

Imagine that I say, “the Toronto Maple Leafs will win the Stanley Cup this year.” Time passes. The Leafs really do win the Stanley Cup. You faint. After you wake, you conclude that my prediction was correct. (Sorry, that’s a Canadian joke. For non-Canucks, the Leafs last won a Stanley Cup when the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper. Canadians think betting against the Leafs is a safer investment than buying a snow shovel.)

That’s simple. But judging judgements isn’t always so easy. Or rather, it shouldn’t be if you think carefully.

Now imagine that I look at the roster of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and the team’s record, and I compare them with rosters and records of other teams, and I conclude that the Leafs will win the Stanley Cup. Time passes. They win. I can then say that I was correct. But more than that, I can reasonably claim that I was meaningfully correct: The fact that my prediction was correct suggests my perception of reality and my reasoning were solid. I wasn’t merely lucky. I was good.

(There should be an asterisk on that, however. It’s possible the Leafs won due to factors I didn’t consider. Maybe the other team got food poisoning. Or a rich Leafs fan decided to end the misery with widespread bribery. Whatever.  If so, my correct call could be chalked up to luck, not insight. So while it is reasonable to think my prediction was correct because my analysis was correct, further analysis is needed. And the conclusion is unlikely to ever rise to the level of effective certainty. Hence the asterisk. Does this sound complicated? Good. Judging judgements is not easy. For more discussion of why, see the work of the University of Pennsylvania psychologist Philip E. Tetlock. It is discussed in Superforecasting, which I co-wrote with Tetlock.)

But now picture me throwing a dart at a poster with the logos of the 32 teams of the National Hockey League. The dart thuds into a blue maple leaf. “That’s it!” I cry. “The Leafs will finally end the drought!” And the Leafs win.

What can we say about my judgement then? Again, it was indisputably correct. But it wasn’t meaningfully correct. You should not conclude that I have a superior grasp of professional hockey. In fact, you should probably discount whatever I say about hockey. Or anything else, for that matter.

History is littered with correct judgements that were not meaningfully correct.

The 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat was predicted by several psychics. A 2000 episode of The Simpsons was likely the first time the phrase “President Trump” was heard on television. And in a 1969 episode of Laugh-In, comedian Dan Rowan, delivering the “news from 1989,” mentioned “President Ronald Reagan” – long pause for laughter – and said East Germany had torn down the Berlin Wall.

I don’t have to show that these correct judgements were not meaningfully correct because no reasonable person would take them seriously. Psychics are psychics. Comedians make jokes, not predictions. (Dan Rowan’s full joke: “There was dancing in the streets today as East Germany finally tore down the Berlin Wall. The joy was short-lived, however, as the wall was quickly replaced with a moat full of alligators.”)

It gets trickier when serious people make serious predictions.

I recall a political scientist who claimed he had predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union a decade before it happened. Impressive? Yes. Until you looked at the reasoning and discovered that he expected the USSR to be brought down by internal religious strife.

In a brilliant essay, polymathic energy expert Vaclav Smil described how, in 1975, he published forecasts of Chinese energy demand in 1985 and 1990. That was bold. Mao was still in power when Smil made his forecasts, but he was old and sick. And it was far from clear who would take power following Mao’s death or how China would change. Nonetheless, Smil made his forecasts, Mao died, Deng Xiaoping came to power, and China began a spectacular economic transformation. When enough time passed, Smil checked his forecasts and … they were extremely accurate.

That sounds like a major forecasting triumph, right? But then Smil pulled the carpet out from under his own feet: If you look carefully at the reasoning underlying his forecasts, Smil noted, he actually got the key underlying factors horribly wrong. It was only thanks to dumb luck that his errors combined to produce forecasts that were bang on.

Most people are not as clear-eyed and intellectually rigorous as Vaclav Smil. If they get lucky and nail a big call, you can be sure they will chalk it up to prescience. But what about other people? If someone makes a big call that turns out to be correct, only thanks to dumb luck, will they examine the reasoning behind the call and realize that this person is not a latter-day Nostradamus?

Probably not. People seldom even think to take a quick look at the reasoning behind a judgment, much less subject it to careful scrutiny. Instead, when an expert gets a big call right, they declare the person prescient and beg him or her to dispense more wisdom. It’s so common, it is close to routine. It happened after the 2008 financial meltdown. It happened after the 2016 election of Donald Trump. It happens every time stock markets take a major turn for the better or worse. (I’m going to write a series about investment gurus in the near future. Even lunatics have been hailed as geniuses after making a single lucky call.)

All that matters is that the outcome. If the Leafs win, it doesn’t matter that I made my prediction by throwing a dart.

Psychologists call this “outcome bias.” Outcomes weigh far too much in our judgements than they should. And that’s true even when people understand why that’s wrong. It’s a struggle to bear in mind that when we judge judgements, the reasoning matters at least as much as the outcome. But remember that, we must. Otherwise, we could wind up betting money on the Maple Leafs because a dart-throwing idiot says we should.

Now let’s take a close look at what Mitt Romney did and did not say. And what it actually means.

In a March, 2012, interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Romney did indeed say Russia is “our number one geopolitical foe.”

That statement became infamous when the Obama campaign later used it to accuse Romney of being yesterday’s man. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” Obama said in the third debate between the two men, “because the Cold War’s over for 20 years.”

But now it’s 2022. After years of escalating aggression, Russia has invaded Ukraine, Europe is in turmoil, we Gen-Xers are having flashbacks to childhood nightmares of nuclear war, and the whole international order is wobbling. It sure does feel like Russia is “our number one geopolitical foe.”

Many people have recalled Romney’s words and declared him vindicated. CNN. The Atlantic. Too many pundits to count. Romney has said so, too. “Mitt Romney is Entitled to His ‘I Told You So,’” reads a headline in National Review.

But did he really tell us so?

All these judgements are heavy on conclusion, light on analysis, taking it almost as a given that we now know Romney was right: He said Russia was the “number one geopolitical foe” in 2012 and Russia just invaded Ukraine. Quod erat demonstrandum, as the scholars say.

That’s outcome bias talking. Before we can say Romney was correct in a meaningful sense, we must look carefully at his reasoning.

Fortunately, Romney didn’t just call Russia “our number one geopolitical foe” and leave it at that. He spelled out his thinking very clearly. Here is his first full statement in the original interview with Wolf Blitzer: “Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe. They – they fight every cause for the world’s worst actors.”

”You think Russia is a bigger foe right now than, let’s say, Iran or China or North Korea?” Blitzer asked.

Here is Romney’s response in full:

“Well, I’m saying in terms of a geopolitical opponent, the nation that lines up with the world’s worst actors.  Of course, the greatest threat that the world faces is a nuclear Iran.  A nuclear North Korea is already troubling enough.

But when these — these terrible actors pursue their course in the world and we go to the United Nations looking for ways to stop them, when — when Assad, for instance, is murdering his own people, we go — we go to the United Nations, and who is it that always stands up for the world’s worst actors?

It is always Russia, typically with China alongside.

And — and so in terms of a geopolitical foe, a nation that’s on the Security Council, that has the heft of the Security Council and is, of course, a — a massive nuclear power, Russia is the — the geopolitical foe and — and the — and they’re — the idea that our president is — is planning on doing something with them that he’s not willing to tell the American people before the election is something I find very, very alarming.” (emphasis mine)

In context, Romney’s argument looks quite different than the way it’s being portrayed now. He explicitly did not think Russia was the greatest threat. Iran was. Followed by North Korea.

Romney called Russia the “number one geopolitical foe” for a very specific reason: When the United States goes to the United Nations looking for ways to stop “terrible actors” like Iran and North Korea, Russia gets in the way. In Romney’s view, Russia isn’t itself a “terrible actor.” And Romney doesn’t so much as hint that it may become one.

Months later, Romney and Obama met in the third presidential debate and Obama made his joke about the 1980s calling to get their foreign policy back. How did Romney respond?

Notably, he did not say Russia was the “number one” geopolitical foe. He repeatedly said it is “a” geopolitical foe. That’s a big climbdown.

But he repeated the same reasoning: “It’s a geopolitical foe, and I said in the same – in the same paragraph, I said, and Iran is the greatest national security threat we face. Russia does continue to battle us in the UN time and time again.”

A decade later, the world looks very different. The country Romney called the “greatest threat” – Iran – has been quiet for quite some time. And Russia has transformed.

It is now a “terrible actor.” Arguably, it is the worst of the “terrible actors” — and “battle” has ceased to be a metaphorical description of what Russia does in the United Nations and is instead a literal description of what Russia is doing in Europe.

I like, respect, and admire Mitt Romney. But there is nothing in what he said in 2012 to suggest he saw this coming.