The chaos in Yemen and around the world is a direct result of President Barack Obama’s idle threats and lack of a “coherent foreign policy,” according to American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar Michael Rubin, who appeared as a guest Thursday on Newsmax TV’s “America’s Forum.”
“Unfortunately President Obama doesn’t understand that empty red lines have consequence, that not really effectively dealing with terrorism has consequence, and trusting regimes like the Islamic Republic of Iran have consequence,” said Rubin, author of “Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes.”
“We heard Secretary of State John Kerry warn Iran. That’s the equivalent of putting them on double secret probation. The Iranians simply don’t take Kerry or Obama or the United States seriously anymore.”
The United States has a president “who doesn’t seem to be able to think strategically and also has a poor tendency to put himself into a bubble, to listen to what he wants to hear, and not to be able to have the introspection to understand that his own understanding of the world and his own strategy are failing,” according to Rubin.
There is no issue with the Saudis taking on Iran in Yemen, but Rubin said he’s concerned that the situation there is shaping up to be “Syria version 2.0.”
“You have the Iranians on one side and you have the Saudis on the other side and ultimately you have the United States on the sidelines,” he said. “No one trusts us anymore.
“Not even our own allies trust us, because the Obama doctrine is: embrace adversaries and throw allies under the bus.”
Rubin charged that under Obama’s leadership, the world today is “even more perilous” than it was during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, whose tenure included numerous international crises, including the 1979 takeover of the American embassy in Iran.
“What we have now is literally the destruction of policy worldwide,” he said. “The Middle East is only one aspect of it. We have taken our eye off Chinese expansion, the Latin American policy has been weak. All over the world, we do have this problem that our enemies don’t fear us and our friends don’t trust us.”
Once America loses credibility on the world stage, it cannot be restored “with a wave of a wand,” he said.
Obama “doesn’t understand that it’s the proverbial finger in the dike preventing a deluge of chaos. And when you do have that chaos, it’s not going to be multilateralism or the United Nations which are going to fill the vacuum,” Rubin said. “It’s going to be the forces of evil, terrorists, the Islamic Republic of Iran — and that’s what we’re going to be paying the price for.”
Americans have repeatedly failed to hold Obama accountable for his actions, and the resulting global unrest may just be “the tip of the iceberg,” according to Rubin.
“We got what we paid for,” he said, adding that “we’re seeing the real unvarnished Obama now and the question is, what damage can he do in the next 20 months?”
All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.