CNN correspondents Christiane Amanpour and Jim Sciutto on Tuesday panned President Obama's foreign policy in the Middle East.
Amanpour said that Obama had been "out-leveraged" by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Syria just as he had been in Ukraine.
Putin recently deployed military assets to Syria to shore up the bargaining position of long-time ally Bashar al-Assad.
"It looks like Putin has skillfully, some might say, simply out-leveraged the United States, which is not there, has no skin in the game, has no cards on the table," Amanpour said.
"Most unfortunately that seems to be a trend that also happened with Ukraine, and actually [the Rusians are] still there in Ukraine," Amanpour said.
Sciutto and CNN host John Berman contrasted Putin's aggressive policy with the U.S.'s program to train and equip Syrian rebels, which produced disastrous results in part because it required rebels to accept unworkable constraints about which enemies they could engage on the battlefield.
"Let's show what Russia has in Syria. It is interesting by comparison," Berman said. "Five hundred actual Russian troops—boots on the ground—45 aircraft, tanks, armored personnel carriers, surface-to-air missiles, fuel tanks. The U.S. has 50 guys they've trained. Fifty guys, Syrians they trained that occasionally hand the arms over to [Islamic State]."
"And four or five that made it to the battlefield," Sciutto added. "That's an utter failure."
Criticism continued when the conversation turned to Afghanistan, where the Taliban recently topped months of steady territorial gains with the capture of Kunduz, its first capture of a major city since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
"It becomes an indictment, again, as we saw in Iraq, of the Obama administration policy of train and equip. We spend a decade there, trillions of dollars training Afghan forces and they couldn't hold this ground," Sciutto said.