Editor of The Weekly Standard Bill Kristol said the increasing violence across Egypt highlights the United States' broader weakness in the region Sunday on ABC's "This Week."
The combination withdrawal from Iraq, the United States' inability to remove Bashar al-Assad from power, and President Obama's refusal to enforce his stated "red line" on Syrian chemical weapons have all contributed to a perception of American weakness by many in the Middle East, Kristol said.
The regional consensus that the United States cannot be taken seriously, Kristol noted, has inhibited the Obama administration from having any meaningful influence over the Egyptian military's crackdown on civilians or the civil war in Syria:
GEORGE: STEPHANOPOULOS: And Bill it's created a series of difficult headlines for the administration. I want to put some of them up there right now: "Egypt's Blood, America's Complicity," "Obama's Greatest Failure," "The Passive President," "Spineless on Egypt." I think this is kind of an existential problem. I think this would likely be happening to any president given our relative decline in power. But is there something the administration could have done earlier to change the course of these events?
BILL KRISTOL: I think so. We have been withdrawing from the Middle East, it's very clear. We didn't leave troops in Iraq. We said Assad must go in Syria and Assad stayed. And then, this is big, almost exactly a year ago, I think it was August 20th, 2012, the president said "we have a red line in Syria." The Assad regime's use of chemical weapons. We didn't enforce that red line. Everyone I've talked to said you now look weak. You cannot say you have a red line and then do nothing about it. This time we tried to persuade, the defense secretary Chuck Hagel has made, what, 17 phone calls to the Egyptian military to try to tell them "don't do this, don't do this." And they just think we will not enforce -- we're not taken as seriously as we should be. In the context of U.S. withdrawal and weakness, we get a Syrian civil war and 100,000 dead, we get the Muslim Brotherhood and the military fighting in the streets of Cairo, it's not good.