Not acting on nuclear Iran is Obama’s ‘biggest failure,’ Romney says

US President Barack Obama’s failure to torpedo Iran’s unsanctioned nuclear program represents his worst foreign policy failure, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday.

Romney criticized Obama’s strategy of diplomatic engagement with Iran, saying it had produced no results. “We’re closer to a nuclear weapon as a result of that,” he said.

“Perhaps the biggest failure … is a nuclear Iran,” said Romney, adding that Tehran’s nuclear drive represented the biggest threat to the US and the world.

The Obama administration maintains that time remains for sanctions and diplomacy to work on Iran before a military strike might be needed.

The statements echo Romney’s language on Obama’s Middle East policy on numerous previous occasions. At the Republican National Convention in Tampa in late August, Romney charged that “President Obama has thrown allies like Israel under the bus,” and “has failed to slow Iran’s nuclear threat.”

Romney pledged to bring about a different state of affairs if elected to the White House.

“I will have a very different approach with regards to Iran,” he said. “And it’s an approach which, by the way, the president’s finally getting closer to. It begins with crippling sanctions. That should have been put in place long ago.”

Romney’s criticism of Obama comes on the heels of a controversy regarding the omission and the subsequent reinstatement, at the behest of Obama, of key pro-Israel provisions from the Democratic Party’s 2012 platform.