Former President Barack Obama slammed President Trump on foreign policy despite Trump’s successes and Obama’s numerous failures.
One example is ISIS proliferated while Obama was in office and was decimated swiftly by Trump.
According to The Daily Wire:
Speaking on the leftist podcast “Pod Save America” on Wednesday, former President Barack Obama, whose disastrous efforts with foreign policy included supporting the tyrannical Iranian regime, the largest terrorist-supporting government on earth; championing the dangerous Iran nuclear deal; withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq in late 2011, leading to the rise of ISIS; ousting Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, thus paving the way for anarchy and ISIS to gain a foothold there, and conducting a “reset” with Russia while Russian military gained ground in eastern Ukraine, among other failures, slammed President Trump on foreign policy, snapping, “He doesn’t have the patience and the focus to really substantially change a lot of U.S. foreign policy.”
Just this week, Lebanon, an arch-foe of Israel, started talking to Israel; they “kicked off their first negotiations in 30 years on nonsecurity issues,” The New York Times noted. That follows the series of Arab countries starting to make peace with Israel, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Obama was prompted by host Tommy Vietor, who asked, “You spent countless hours with Vice President Biden talking about national security. What did you learn about how he thinks about diplomacy and counterterrorism and the use of military force that others would not have seen?”
According to Breitbart, Obama answered:
Well, a couple of things. One, and I think this is most important, is when people ask me what surprised me most about the presidency, you know, what I always tell them is: I understood but didn’t fully appreciate the degree to which we kind of underwrite the international order. And in the sense that even our enemies can expect us to behave like adults on the international stage. You know, if there’s a crisis somewhere, people don’t call Moscow or Beijing. They call us and say, “What are we going to do to help?” If there is ethnic cleansing, if there is a conflict, if there is a natural disaster. And the reason that we can serve in that role, even if we’re not perfect, is that we have the infrastructure. We have experienced diplomats. We have institutional traditions that allow us to show leadership on the international stage — whether it’s in the Paris Peace Accords, whether it’s on the Iran Deal, you name it.”
“The thing that over the last four years, it’s not as if Trump has been all that active internationally,” Obama said pompously. “I mean, the truth is he doesn’t have the patience and the focus to really substantially change a lot of U.S. foreign policy. What he’s done is he’s systematically tried to decimate our entire foreign policy infrastructure. And the thing I know about Joe is that he respects people who know history and have expertise, and he’s going to pay attention to somebody who has worked in Africa to find out, like, ‘how should I deal with a particular crisis there’ as opposed to calling it a bunch of I won’t say the word countries, right? He has a respect and understanding for what American leadership can do.”
Nile Gardiner, a former aide to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, said at the very end of Obama’s presidency that his Middle East policy was a failure, stating, “President Obama’s approach was extraordinarily naive in the Middle East. He also failed to combine his optimism with any hard power. That really enabled a number of very dangerous actors to emerge and to threaten directly the United States and its allies. It isn’t very clear that the Obama White House has any real strategy for eradicating ISIS. It’s a containment strategy; it’s not one of victory,” as The Washington Times reported.
This shouldn’t be surprising, Obama’s lack of foreign policy instincts have followed him post-presidency.
