President Barack Obama's foreign policy failures have the world looking a lot like it did at the close of the Carter administration, says House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
"This is like 1979 all over again," the California Republican said Thursday on
Fox News Channel's "On the Record with Greta Van Susteren."
The last time Americans were being held hostage was in 1979 in Iran; today, they are being held by the Islamic State (ISIS), McCarthy said. Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and now have invaded Ukraine, he added.
Before Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed in the Benghazi attacks in 2012, the last American ambassador to die in the line of duty was Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan
— in 1979.
Another similarity, McCarthy said, was that in 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed the SALT II Treaty with the Soviet Union to limit nuclear weapons. Today, Congress is considering Obama's Iran nuclear deal.
People rose up against the SALT II agreement, and it was never ratified, McCarthy noted. "America rose up, led this world economically and also made the world safer," he said.
He said he expects the same to happen with the Iran deal.
McCarthy said the Camp David Gulf Cooperation Council summit on Thursday with Persian Gulf nations was a prime example of America's lost standing in the world. Most heads of state did not show up, sending other representatives, in what many considered a snub over Obama's policies.
"The king of Bahrain is at a horse show with the queen of England," McCarthy said. "So, that to me says a lot about respect, but also what this administration has done to our allies around the world.
Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton described the summit as a "catastrophe," telling Van Susteren that Obama's statement after the summit was worse than he had expected.
"The so-called security guarantee isn't going to reassure the six oil-producing monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula," he said. "It's going to confirm in their mind that the president doesn't have a clue what the strategic threat of a nuclear Iran is."
Instead, Arab states are likely to talk to Russia and China about protection, Bolton said. "It's a real deterioration of America's posture in the Middle East."
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