The panel on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" castigated former President Barack Obama on Monday for not responding to the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons, noting that top Obama administration officials are now praising President Trump for ordering military strikes on a Syrian airbase lat week.
The panel was discussing the U.S. military launching 59 cruise missiles against a Syrian government airbase on Thursday night after the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad attacked civilians with chemical weapons two days earlier, killing over 80 people.
"The Democratic response was in some ways more interesting than the Republican response to the use of force against Syria while these people essentially who worked for President Obama distancing themselves from their former boss," said Richard Haass, president of the Council on foreign Relations.
Host Joe Scarborough then asked Haass about both of Obama's former secretaries of state, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, and other former administration officials breaking from their old boss and praising Trump for ordering the strikes.
"You had other people saying some things that were almost disloyal to Barack Obama, saying we could have never moved this quickly," Scarborough said. "Why were they doing that? Why did they all come out in force and do that?"
Haass said much of the Obama administration's lack of action was a result of over-analyzing the situation.
"There was a lot of frustration," Haass said. "There was a sense that the Obama presidency was a bit of paralysis by analysis."
He added that only a small group of people helped Obama develop his Syria policy, and they "had to make the case that what they did was a solution to the chemical problem in Syria when everybody knows it wasn't."
"History's going to be rough on this," Haass continued. "This is going to be the defining moment for the Obama presidency."
"Essentially, it showed also that President Obama was something of a departure from the Democratic foreign policy, national security mainstream," he added.
Scarborough then noted to columnist Mike Barnicle that people close to many top Obama administration officials like Kerry and then-Vice President Joe Biden expressed how "extraordinarily frustrated" they were with Obama's inaction in Syria after chemical weapons were used.
"Syria was a serious mistake that the Obama administration made in retrospect," Barncicle responded.