Sarah Palin: Weak Obama Has Emboldened Putin

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was mocked in 2008 for warning that Russia’a Vladimir Putin may invade Ukraine if Barack Obama were elected President, and the former GOP vice presidential nominee on Monday said that President Barack Obama’s weakness has emboldened Putin and perhaps even the Chinese.

Appearing on Fox News’s Hannity, Palin said that the world looks at Putin as someone who wrestles bears and drills for oil while it views Obama as a weak president who wears “mom jeans” and “equivocates and bloviates.”

“Anyone who carries the commonsense gene would know that Putin doesn’t change his stripes,” Palin said. “He harkens back to the era of the czars… and he wants that Russian empire to grow again to exert huge power and dominance.”

Palin said that Russia was able to develop its energy resources to strengthen its economy and military. She said that China, because of its energy needs, may allow Russia to seek more conquests and acquire land to fuel the energy trade between the two countries.

“I’m right,” Palin said about the link between “energy and security” and “energy and prosperity.”

Palin said America needs “our pipelines” and blasted environmentalists for holding up America’s domestic energy production in the name of protecting obscure species, quipping that the “earthworm can take one for the team.”

Palin blasted Obama for “leading from behind” and not knowing how to exercise the foreign policy of “peace through strength” that “only a strengthened United States military can do” and which is “the only way that our world will be safer and more secure.”

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Palin said:

After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.

As Breitbart News reported, for those comments, the high-brow Foreign Policy magazine and its editor Blake Hounshell, who now is one of the editors of Politico, mocked and dismissed her, writing that her comments were “strange” and that “this is an extremely far-fetched scenario.”