A lot of Americans are in denial about the threat of the Islamic State (ISIS), former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News on Tuesday.
Appearing on Fox News Channel's
"On the Record with Greta Van Susteren," Rumsfeld compared today to the time before the United States entered World War II.
"I think back to the 1930s when the Holocaust was going on and Nazis were killing Jews by the tens of thousands," he said. "And the United States government turned away ships filled with Jews from our ports."
The Obama administration must recognize the enemy and call it what it is — radical Islam, Rumsfeld said.
"And any idea that you can defend everywhere at every moment of the day or night against every conceivable technique is simply wrong," he added. "If you try to defend everywhere you defend nowhere. The only way you can deal with it is to go after those people."
Rumsfeld said terrorism is nothing new, noting he has dealt with it since he was President Ronald Reagan's mideast envoy in the early 1980s. The difference today, he said, is that the weapons are more lethal and modern media make it easier to see.
Rumsfeld called newly sworn-in Defense Secretary Ash Carter as a "good man" and a good appointment.
He said Carter will likely be effective dealing with people below him in his department, but won't have any sway with the Obama White House, which isn't interested in his ideas.
"How successful he will be getting the president or the key people, Valerie Jarrett and the other people that are so influential in the department, to alter their behavior or their advice or their views, I don't think that's going to happen," he said.
Neither the press nor Congress will have any effect on Obama's foreign policy in his last two years, Rumsfeld said.
"It would have to be people in his Cabinet, people in his White House staff going in and saying, 'Look, we have been wrong, we are making a mistake."
Turning to Ukraine, Rumsfeld said the policy of America and Western Europe is creating "free play for Putin."
Europe is impotent in dealing with Russia's incursion, he said, because they have allowed themselves to become dependent on Russia for oil and energy.
"Right before our eyes, the world … is letting things happen there that rather than dissuading further adventuresome behavior by the Russians, it encourages it," he said. "You have to ask what's next? The Baltics? Central Asia?"
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