Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass said Thursday that locals in the Middle East will not work with the U.S. if they think it isn’t committed to the fight.
"Until this administration is willing to make a certain scale of commitments, I don’t think we’re going to get it [commitment] from the locals," Haas said on MSNBC's Morning Joe.
Haass said that President Obama’s reluctance to get involved in the Middle East has strained U.S. relationships with partners in the region, echoing comments made by retired Gen. Ray Odierno on Wednesday.
"A lot of people won’t associate with us unless they’re confident we’re going to be there and it’s safe to associate with us," Haass said.
"Nobody trusts him," Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough said. "Nobody’s going to deal with him because he just doesn't want to deal with us in good faith. We’ve heard that four, five years now from the Middle East especially."
According to Haass, "a big part" of President Obama’s foreign policy has been avoiding commitments in the Middle East, even as that region has descended into chaos.
"I think a big part of his foreign policy is to not overcommit in the Middle East," Haass said. "There has been a reluctance all along about any sort of a large footprint, anything like that."
Obama campaigned for president saying he would end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he withdrew troops from Iraq in 2011 to great fanfare. The rise of the Islamic State terrorist group and the resurgence of the Taliban have not greatly shaken his commitment to reduce U.S. involvement in the region, although it has postponed his plan for total withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Haass said that the consequences of Obama’s decision not to enforce his red line over chemical weapons use by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2013 was still being felt in the Syrian civil war.
"The most consequential thing he didn't do in his presidency was Syria. The red lines, the lack of follow-through, is still having reverberations," Haass said.
Obama agreed to a Russian-brokered agreement to eliminate Assad’s chemical weapons stockpile in order to avoid military action in 2013. The agreement, coupled with Russia’s entrance into the conflict on the side of Assad in 2015, has solidified Assad’s grasp on power and prolonged the civil war.
International inspectors later determined that Assad kept undeclared stockpiles of chemical weapons and frequently used chlorine bombs on civilian populations.