The Democratic response to President Donald Trump's use of force following last week's chemical weapons attack in Syria was in many ways "more interesting" than how Republicans reacted to the news, Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass said Monday.
"These people essentially who worked for [former] President [Barack] Obama [were] distancing themselves from their former boss," said Haass as part of a panel discussion on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program, during which the roundtable chastised the former president for failing to respond when chemical weapons were used before in Syria.
John Kerry, one of Obama's former secretaries of state, praised the airstrikes. His first Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, fell just short of praising the airstrikes, instead complaining about Trump's stance on refugees, but on Thursday, the day before the strikes were launched, she called for Syrian airstrips to be hit so Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could not launch further attacks.
Haass said he believes much of the Obama administration's hesitation on Syria came because of "a bit of paralysis by analysis."
Show host Joe Scarborough said comments from Kerry, Clinton and others were "almost disloyal" to Obama, "saying we could never have moved this quickly."
"History's going to be rough on this," Haass agreed. "This is going to be the defining moment for the Obama presidency. It proves that what you don't do can matter every bit as much as what you do when you govern. All these people, one disagreed at the time probably thinking about their futures, but essentially it showed also that president Obama was something of a departure from the democratic foreign policy national security mainstream, which are tougher."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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