MSNBC's Morning Joe panel ripped the Obama administration's handling of Syria and the Islamic State, saying Friday there was no cohesive strategy to deal with either mounting foreign policy crisis.
Former American diplomat Nicholas Burns said the terror attack by ISIS in Turkey this week was a wake-up call for the United States. The central question for Obama, he said, was whether he was trying to defeat ISIS or simply contain it.
"I'm not sure we have a defeat policy in place ... The Islamic Sate is metastasizing into Libya," Burns said. "It is a shrinking organization, but it's nowhere close to being a defeated organization, so that's, I think, the big question for American policymakers. for this administration and the next administration."
Burns complimented the White House in its retraining of the Iraqi army, but he said it had been far too "risk-averse" in Syria regarding helping rebel groups and putting troops on the ground there.
Atlantic Council senior fellow Dr. Evelyn Farkas said she agreed that there was no strategy in place to defeat ISIS. Additionally, she said the United States is seeking a partnership with Russia to target jihadist groups within Syria didn't constitute a strategy.
Syria has been devastated for years by civil war, and dictator Bashar al-Assad has remained in power despite Obama's insistence that he step down. The war has triggered a full-blown refugee crisis in Europe.
"There is no end game. I mean, this is a problem. You can't separate. What they've been trying to do all along, the administration, is separate the counterterrorism fight from resolving the conflict in Syria," Farkas said. "You can't do that. They're linked."
Host Joe Scarborough, a strong critic of Obama's foreign policy, wondered why the administration was "so flummoxed" by Syria.
"You talk about a problem from hell that the entire West has just turned a blind eye to, and this administration still does not have a comprehensive policy towards the biggest geo-political crisis of the last four years," he said.
Burns, who served under President George W. Bush, sympathized that the crisis in Syria was an extremely difficult problem for any president. However, he pointed to Obama's long interview with the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, where he explained his hesitance to take action there.
"The president is entirely risk-averse," Burns said. "I think he believes that anything that we do is going to end up being bad for the country."
He recommended a humanitarian policy to bring in medical relief and food to those affected by the Syrian war, as well as set up no-fly zones and safe havens on the border with Turkey. Co-host Mika Brzezinski called such measures "obvious," and Scarborough asked why Obama hadn't done it.
"They're risk-averse, and because there is risk, obviously. When you have to set up a safe zone, your military has to go in there and control the air space," Farkas said. "The Russians have all these air-defense systems. It's challenging. We're going to have call their bluff and say, Russians, don't fly here. We're letting the civilians have this space where they can go and seek a safe place to live and get fed."
Scarborough said he felt Obama's legacy was at stake with the disastrous situation in Syria.
"The chaos of Syria likely will be every bit as much the president's legacy 10 years from now, as Iraq was George W. Bush's legacy," Scarborough said. "I'm not so sure people are going to be looking any more kindly on Barack Obama's inaction than on George W. Bush's overreaction."