President Barack Obama has done so badly in the age of Islamist terrorism that even one of President Jimmy Carter’s State Department officials is urging the administration to fire its foreign policy team and find competent people, Mideast scholar Daniel Pipes told
Newsmax TV.
Calling Obama "a historic failure" in foreign policy, Middle East Forum president Pipes told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner that as with the aftermath of the disastrous Carter era, cleanup of the global mess left by Obama will take years.
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"There's a general agreement across the spectrum, both Republican and Democrat, that Barack Obama is an ineffectual foreign policy leader," said Pipes, who pointed to an essay published in
The Daily Beast on Wednesday by Leslie Gelb, a Carter assistant secretary of state.
Gelb, a Council on Foreign Relations member and a former New York Times columnist, writes that "the Obama team lacks the basic instincts and judgment necessary to conduct U.S. national security policy" in what could be "one of the most dangerous periods since the height of the Cold War."
Pipes agreed that the world has become "unnecessarily fraught" under Obama.
He also voiced "a lot of sympathy" for a
claim by a Mitt Romney adviser that the Islamic State would not exist and that President Vladimir Putin would be reined in today if the former Republican governor of Massachusetts had unseated Obama in 2012.
The good news, according to Pipes, is that in the wake of terrorist violence in Paris carried out last week by Islamist gunmen, non-Muslims and Westerners generally are waking up to the extent of the threat posed by radical Islam.
"This is a process that's been underway for 40 years," said Pipes. "What was once a negligible threat today is all around us, and in response, Westerners are ever more ready to use force and respond in a sustained way."
Pipes did not lay the Paris attacks at the feet of the Obama administration after
an al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen claimed responsibility for directing the killings that left 17 people dead and prompted a wave of support for the satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, targeted by the gunmen.
"I can't say that he had many options," Pipes said of Obama. "Yemen is an anarchic country. We have very few friends there and those friends are dubious friends, at best.
"It's more the broader sweep, that Barack Obama has reached out his hands to our historic enemies and have snubbed our historic friends," said Pipes.
"He's so interested in making nice with our opponents and he's unconcerned with our friends," he said. "This is the historic assertion of the Obama foreign policy. To my mind and to many others, this is a gross mistake and we've increasingly seen the consequences of that mistake."
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