President Barack Obama needs to come home from Cuba and deal with the attacks in Brussels and with the threat of radical terrorism, GOP presidential candidate John Kasich said Tuesday morning.
"Clearly our intelligence capability to operate around the world is one of the great vulnerabilities," the Ohio governor told Fox News' Martha MacCallum on the "America's Newsroom" program.
"The way you deal with this to make sure you have the counter-terrorism capability to stop these kind of unbelievable murdering that has gone on here."
Kasich further said there is much closer cooperation needed with people around the world, and Obama needs to move quickly.
"He needs to assemble a group of people who can dig in and begin to rebuild the intelligence we need worldwide," said Kasich. "At some point we need to confront ISIS and destroy them.
"So I see it as a two-fold process: put together the coalition to destroy ISIS and take the comprehensive action. And secondly, rebuild the intelligence community worldwide."
And when it comes to Syrian refugees, the United States needs to screen them, as Paris terror attack suspect Salah Abdeslam and others said they were able to sneak into Europe through the refugee process, said Kasich.
"I think Europe popped open its doors without having a proper vetting process," the governor said. "But that's one of the things that needs to be reviewed to figure out how they are going to act moving forward.
"They made an agreement with Turkey to try to stem the flow of these migrants."
Kasich said he believes there should be a coalition of Arabs and westerners to destroy ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and at the same time rebuild U.S. intelligence capabilities.
He also said he agrees with rival candidate Ted Cruz' contention that the United States is at war with radical Islam for some time, and extremists are waging war "not only against the west," but "against all of civilized society. And that's why it's vital that civilized society come together.
"They need to be calm, they need to be strong, they need to be smart, and they need to take care of business."
And there is no solace that the problems seem to be growing overseas.
"The problem is they have not been effective at being able to do the vetting that they need to do and it gets down again to the problem of do we know who these people are, and where they are, and how do we act against them," said Kasich.
"When they bleed, we bleed in America. We are all in this together, that's why we need to act together."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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