Donald Rumsfeld: Obama’s perceived weakness led to foreign affairs crises

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said no one would need to worry about how to fix problems in Syria, Iraq, Ukraine and Libya if the U.S. had maintained a strong place of leadership on the world stage.

“Those are the questions you wouldn’t have needed to ask if we had not run our economy modeling it on Europe, which is a failed model, and incurred the kind of debt and reduced the defense budget in such a way that we send signals out to the world of weakness,” Mr. Rumsfeld said on “The Mike Broomhead Show.” “Signals that suggested the United States is not going to be what it’s been in the past, and therefore, people are free to do things in the past they wouldn’t have thought of doing.”

Mr. Rumsfeld, interviewed  by Rusty Humphries from The Washington Times, said President Obama lacks a clarity of mission that makes him a bad leader that others are unwilling to get behind.

“If there’s one thing that we’ve seen, it’s that this presidency has been exemplified by not providing the kind of clarity of vision that a leader must provide if in fact they want followers,” he said. “If you don’t decide what your mission is, where you’re going, and give people confidence you will go there and not back off and not move aside, you’re not going to get any followers.”

The former secretary of defense also said Mr. Obama has failed to deliver on another promise to the country: hope.

“I don’t think he’s given the nation much hope to be honest with you,” he said. “I think his world view is what it is and it’s, in my view, inconsistent with the reality that we live in and, as a result, his approach, his instincts, his decisions, his programs tend to be things that do not create a more hospitable environment for investment and risk-taking and jobs and innovation and creativity.”

Mr. Rumsfeld talked specifically about increased regulations that are driving countries away from doing their business in the U.S. And instead of making the U.S. a more appealing place to do business, the administration is trying to punish those who move away, he said.

“They’re talking now about finding a way that they can try to penalize any country that is behaving rationally and that is trying to move from a less hospitable place to a more hospitable place,” he said.