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Former Vice President Dick Cheney blasted President Obama as the weakest president of his lifetime on Wednesday, following the president’s speech defending his foreign policy approach at the U.S. Military Academy commencement ceremony.
“He is a very, very weak president,” Cheney said in an interview with Fox News. “Maybe the weakest — certainly in my lifetime.”
{mosads}Cheney went on to say that during a recent trip to the Middle East, allies he had “dealt with all the way back to Desert Storm” expressed alarm at the president’s handling of foreign policy.
“They all are absolutely convinced that the American capacity to lead and influence in that part of the world has been dramatically reduced by this president,” Cheney said. “We’ve got a problem with weakness, and it’s centered right in the White House.”
In his speech, Obama said that those who “suggest that America is in decline, or has seen its global leadership slip away, are either misreading history or engaged in partisan politics.”
In an implicit rebuke of the foreign policy practiced in the Bush administration, Obama said he would betray his duty to the troops if he dispatched them every time somewhere in the world “needed fixing, or because I was worried about critics who think military intervention is the only way for America to avoid looking weak.”
“Some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences, without building international support and legitimacy for our action or leveling with the American people about the sacrifice required,” Obama added. “Tough talk draws headlines, but war rarely conforms to slogans.”