No Bright Spots

NewsBusters reports NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel was asked by the former CEO of Home Depot Ken Langone to name one country with which U.S. relations are better under President Obama than under his predecessor. Speaking on CNBC's Squawk Box, Engel replied:

I think you would be hard pressed to find that. You would naturally want to say Europe, but generally the relations with a lot of European countries have gotten worse.

Our allies have become confused. For eight years you had the Bush administration with a very interventionist policy, driving into world affairs, driving primarily into the Islamic world army first, or fist first. And that was very unpopular with many of our allies. But toward the end, after 8 years, people adjusted to it.

Now you have a presidency that for the last six years is pulling out very rapidly. And that is creating a kind of pump action, a vortex of instability that has left allies like Saudi Arabia, like Egypt, like even some European countries very confused. Are we going in? Are we pulling out? Are we leading? Are we trying to set the agenda? That has been a lot of frustration.

So in terms of the foreign policy objectives laid out in West Point, yes, he talked about ending these two unpopular wars. But I do sympathize with some of the things said in the Wall Street Journal. Right now we have a black hole in Syria. Iraq is in a state of collapse. Libya is about to go back into a civil war. And this was the one case where we intervened militarily. So I think there is a lot of problems on the horizon in the foreign policy world.