Krauthammer: Aleppo Is Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy

Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer declared that historically President Barack Obama’s legacy will feature the deterioration of Aleppo in the Syrian civil war and not the Iran deal, as he may have hoped it would be.

Krauthammer pointed to a reluctance by the president to warn off the Russians from getting involved in the conflict.

“Obama imagines the Obama deal is his legacy,” Krauthammer said. “It is not. Aleppo is his legacy. History will remember this as kind of the symbolism of the whole policy of retreat and the inevitable outcome. It’s not as if this civil war was going to go one way or the other because of what the United States did. The civil war essentially was in some kind of equilibrium a year and a half ago. When the Russians decided their side, Assad, was losing, the rebels were actually on the advance in Aleppo and elsewhere. He stepped in to rescue Assad but then he saw there was no response on part of the west. No penalties whatsoever — even economic coming from the United States and he decided to drive the advantage.”

“We are reduced now to giving speeches from our U.N. spokeswoman, pleading saying to the Iranians, the Russians and Assad, ‘Have you no shame? Have you no pity?'” he continued. “The answer is obvious. They have none. The only thing that could have stopped this ultimately would have been some kind of turn from the United States, warning from the United States to keep the Russians out. We didn’t and now we have what we have.”

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