After declaring that a Washington Post editorial that said President Barack Obama’s foreign policy was based on “fantasy” was the “understatement of the year,” former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that Obama’s weakness has created a leadership vacuum in the world that has been filled by leaders like Vladimir Putin who “do not share our values.”
The Washington Post opined on Monday that Obama’s foreign policy was based on “fantasy.”
For five years, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces.
“If we want peace, we have to be ready for war,” Rumsfeld said on Fox News’ On the Record on Monday while discussing the crisis in Ukraine. “U.S. weakness has shaken the world.”
Rumsfeld said the Obama administration “lacks a foreign policy” and a strategy, and that is “sending a signal across the globe that the United States… is in decline.”
He said his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin last decade was “uncomfortable” and described Putin as someone who is a tough “KGB-type” who had “fundamentally different interests” than ours.
“He is today punching way above his weight class,” Rumseld said of Putin before noting that America was “punching way below ours.”
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