Barack Obama Defends His Foreign-Policy Record. Is He a Wartime President?
It’s a long response, and the whole thing is worth reading, but essentially Obama attacked those who have criticized his failure to respond more forcefully to the crises in Ukraine and Syria, saying that “many who were proponents of what I consider to be a disastrous decision to go into Iraq haven’t really learned the lesson of the last decade.”
In a remark that seems aimed at the senior senator from Arizona, Obama said that his administration’s foreign policy approach “doesn’t make for good argument on Sunday morning shows,” but “steadily advance[s] the interests of the American people and our partnership with folks around the world.”
Mark Landler of the New York Times summarized the response, saying, “Mr. Obama said his foreign policy was based on a workmanlike tending to American priorities that might lack the high drama of a wartime presidency but also avoided ruinous mistakes.”
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