In Iran, Cuba, and elsewhere, President Barack Obama appears to be making up foreign policy as he goes along, with no rationale that he has bothered to explain publicly, Republican Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania told "MidPoint" guest host Ric Blackwell on
Newsmax TV on Monday.
"I'm not sure that any American knows exactly what our stance is and what our position is in the world," he said.
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Kelly said that a diminished American presence internationally has fostered global turmoil, especially in the Middle East, and left people here and abroad scratching their heads in puzzlement.
"They long for American leadership, and they wonder what happened to the great U.S. and why have they become so absent?" he said.
Recent overtures to hostile regimes in
Cuba and
Iran are cases in point, he said.
"Right now, I would say in that part of the world, any kindness is interpreted as weakness," said Kelly, adding that Obama, lacking any discernible policy of his own, "is willing to sit back and let others dictate what our foreign policy should be."
"I'm very leery of anything the president does right now," said Kelly. "I'm watching and trying to figure out, long-range, what are his policies. There just doesn't seem to be anything there that makes sense for America."
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He said that maintaining "strict sanctions" on Russia and Iran is critical, especially as their revenues dry up with the falling price of global oil.
On domestic policy, Kelly said the president is missing an opportunity to exploit all of the country's natural resources to push America toward energy independence and create more jobs. Kelly, whose state is a major producer of coal, argued that clean energy and coal mining can — and should — co-exist.
"This is an administration that does not believe in fossil fuels," said Kelly, who recently offered the president a Christmas-time lump of coal as a way of pressing him on energy policy.
"If you take coal, if you take natural gas, if you take oil and you look at, we have an abundance of it," he said. "It's affordable and it's accessible. If we use that then to drive our cost per unit of energy down, we put ourselves in a very strong position when it comes to a global economy."
"When we look at what the United States is blessed with, we have the ability to drive the cost of energy per unit to a lower rate," he said ."We can afford then to build things, make things, ship them around the world at a very competitive price, and win that battle."
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