ABC reporter Jim Avila asked White House spokesman Josh Earnest about the perception of the Obama administration's weakness abroad Wednesday, in light of the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime despite White House warnings, Russia granting asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowden and the violent situation in Egypt that the administration will not explicitly call a coup.
Earnest referred to some of them as "intractable problems" for the U.S.:
AVILA: On the big -- on the big picture of foreign policy right now, you have Russia ignoring our request for Snowden, ignoring our request for cooperation with Syria and growing pressure in Syria. You have Egypt ignoring requests to stop the violence, and you have Syria ignoring requests to stop using chemical weapons or killing their own people. These are all greeted with -- or responded to by the Obama administration with harsh condemnations, we're greatly disappointed, but there is a perception among some that this is weakness on the part of the Obama administration. Can you address that?
EARNEST: Well, I would say a couple of things about that. You are referring to some very difficult and in some cases intractable problems that are -- that in some cases are bearing some very severe consequences for the people who live in these countries. There's no doubt about that. The United States has a -- has a responsibility to be a part of the international effort to address those problems for a variety of reasons. One of them is that it is in -- it is the desire of the United States of America to have good relationships with these countries, and what we are trying to do is -- in many of these cases is to marshal some international support and to work with our friends and allies, to work with our partners in the region, and we have done that with some success and with some progress that's notable in a variety of circumstances. And, you know, what we would like to see moving forward is a continued effort on the part of the international community to work together to address some of these problems. But we would also like to see in a lot of these situations the leaders of these countries to respect the basic human rights of the people that they govern -- the people that they lead. That's true of the Assad regime in Syria, and that's certainly true of the interim government in Egypt, sort of the two most intractable problems that we've been dealing with lately.