NRO:
President Obama fails to understand that when America leaves a vacuum in a strategic location, bad actors quickly fill it, Charles Krauthammer said tonight.
Appearing on Friday’s Special Report, Krauthammer discussed an op/ed Robert Gates and Condoleeza Rice penned, which criticized Obama for calling no-fly zones a “half baked idea” and leaving much of the Middle East out of America’s influence. Krauthammer noted that as the president’s long-time secretary of Defense, Gates’ attack was “absolutely devastating”:
WALLACE: “There was a brutal op-ed piece today in the Washington Post, written interestingly enough by Condi Rice, George W. Bush’s secretary of state, and former Bush and Obama defense secretary, Bob Gates about Syria. Here are some of the highlights, ‘Putin’s move into Syria is old-fashioned, great-power politics; he, Mr. Putin see as vacuum created by our hesitancy to fully engage in places such as Libya and stay the course in Iraq. No fly zones and safe harbors for populations are not half-baked ideas.’ Charles, it doesn’t get much rougher than that. Gates and Rice throwing President Obama’s words — the half based line came from him the last news conference — obvious that Gates and Rice, throwing president Obama’s words right back at him.”
KRAUTHAMMER: “—And in a way that’s utterly mocking. The sentence you read about Putin’s move is old-fashioned, great power politics — is followed by a parenthetical that says, “which still exists in the 21st century.” That is to mock a president who believes that when the calendar turned on January 2000, that was the abolition of 5,000 years of power politics. And as he said at the U.N., the control of territory no longer is a measure of power in this century. This is a man truly living in a make-believe world and they wanted to emphasize that. And the fact that one of those who wrote this, as you say, had served Obama himself as defense secretary for more than one term, is absolutely devastating. When they talk about the vacuum created, Obama doesn’t recognize the entire idea of a vacuum, that bad guys or geopolitical adversaries like the Russians and the Iranians will come in, and have come in as a result of the evacuation by Obama of Iraq, and essentially as you said, giving up on Syria entirely.