On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders took aim at the three most prominent Americans who have slammed President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran deal: former President Barack Obama and former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. After Obama had released a long statement filled with prevarications, Clinton had declared America’s “credibility is shot” and Kerry had intoned Trump’s decision “weakens our security, breaks America’s word” and “isolates us from our European allies,” Sanders had had enough.
Sanders fired back, “I think based on each of those individuals’ lack of success in this entire process on foreign affairs, they would probably be the last three people that we would look to for advice and counsel, and whether or not we had made the right decisions.”
Here is how the chagrined and resentful trio had expressed their opinions:
Kerry: “Instead of building on unprecedented nonproliferation verification measures, this decision risks throwing them away and dragging the world back to the brink we faced a few years ago. The extent of the damage will depend on what Europe can do to hold the nuclear agreement together, and it will depend on Iran’s reaction.”
Obama:
Clinton:
It’s hard to imagine three people who have had such a disastrous effect on American foreign policy. Even Obama devotee and virulent Israel-hater Stephen Walt admitted:
In particular, Obama and his team mistakenly viewed the Arab Spring as a large-scale, grass-roots uprising clamoring for liberal democracy and embraced it too quickly. They also underestimated the ability of violent extremists to exploit power vacuums in failed states and the resilience of authoritarian regimes in places like Syria or Egypt. These misunderstandings led to Obama’s disastrous intervention in Libya, his inept diplomatic interference in Yemen, and the premature demand that “Assad must go” in Syria.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg; we could also mention the Benghazi massacre, the emboldening of Vladimir Putin as he marauded across eastern Europe, and, of course, Obama’s abandonment of Iraq. As Jeff Jacoby noted:
In his rush to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, he created a power vacuum into which terror networks expanded and the Taliban revived. Islamic State’s jihadist savagery not only plunged a stabilized Iraq back into shuddering violence, but also inspired scores of lethal terrorist attacks in the West.
Sanders nailed it.