Rejecting Republican-driven fears of a veritable World War III, President Barack Obama has sought to reassure fellow-Americans that the militant Islamic State (ISIS) cannot claim to pose any “existential threat” to the world’s most powerful nation.
At the same time, Obama has raised concerns that terrorism and instability will “continue for decades” in the Middle East, Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan with “some of these places” possibly becoming “safe havens for new terrorist networks”.
In his eighth and final State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Obama gave a glowing account of America’s military might and economic health that contrasted sharply with the grim projections by a host of Republican presidential hopefuls.
“let me tell you something. The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth, period. Period,” he said, dismissing as “political hot air” all the talk of America’s economic decline and “all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker”.
As he put it, “No nation attacks us directly or our allies because they know that’s the path to ruin. Surveys show our standing around the world is higher than when I was elected to this office, and when it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead. They call us.”
Without naming Donald Trump, Obama came down hard on the Republican presidential front-runner for his incendiary comments against Muslims. “When politicians insult Muslims, when a mosque is vandalized, or a kid bullied, that doesn’t make us safer. That’s not telling it like it is. It’s just wrong. It diminishes us in the eyes of the world. It makes it harder to achieve our goals. And it betrays who we are as a country,” he said.
“We need to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion,” Obama said, adding: “This isn’t a matter of political correctness. This is a matter of understanding just what it is that makes us strong. The world respects us not just for our arsenal, it respects us for our diversity and our openness and the way we respect every faith.”
As for the dangers posed by ISIS, Obama said, “In today’s world, even a handful of terrorists who place no value on human life, including their own, can do a lot of damage. They use the Internet to poison the minds of individuals inside our country; their actions undermine and destabilise our allies. We have to take them out.”
“But as we focus on destroying ISIS, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands. That is the story ISIS wants to tell; that’s the kind of propaganda they use to recruit. We don’t need to build them up to show that we’re serious,” he said, taking aim at the verbal onslaughts
from Republican presidential aspirants.
“We just need to call them what they are: killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed,” he said, asserting that the American-led military campaign has conducted nearly 10,000 airstrikes, taking out ISIS’ leadership, oil, training camps and weapons over the past year.
But America cannot afford to carpet-bomb civilians in the region, he said, noting that while this may work as a TV sound bite, it won’t pass muster on the world stage.
Obama also made it clear that it will not be possible for the United States to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis, terming the advocacy on this score by some Republicans “a recipe for quagmire”. A smarter approach, instead, would be to act by building a global coalition.