White House Backs Off From Obama’s Critique of Cameron
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Version 0 of 1. WASHINGTON — In his much-discussed interview with The Atlantic magazine, President Obama unloaded on a number of American allies: Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other Persian Gulf countries. On Friday, a White House official walked back Mr. Obama’s comments about the closest of the allies, Britain, and its prime minister, David Cameron. “President Obama values deeply the special relationship between the United States and our allies in the U.K.,” the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, told reporters on Air Force One after he was asked about the comments, which provoked a storm of angry headlines and commentary in the British news media. The president, Mr. Earnest insisted, had not directly criticized Mr. Cameron in interviews with The Atlantic’s national correspondent, Jeffrey Goldberg. Mr. Obama, he said, viewed the prime minister as a “particularly effective interlocutor” and a “partner and ally when it comes to confronting core national security priorities for both our countries.” In the article, Mr. Goldberg wrote that Mr. Obama was disappointed that Britain and France, after having led the charge for a NATO military intervention in Libya, did not follow up in working to stabilize the country. Mr. Cameron stopped paying attention to Libya because he was “distracted by a range of other things,” the president said. That did not go down well in Britain. “Obama savages Cameron on Libya,” said a headline in The Independent. “Obama lays the blame for Libya mess on Cameron,” said The Times, which described his comments as an “extraordinary” attack on a sitting British leader. “It’s a bit rich of President Obama to single out Britain and France, and not include the United States,” Malcolm Rifkind, a former British foreign secretary, said to the BBC. “If there’s criticism, looking at your own action is sometimes appropriate.” Mr. Obama and Mr. Cameron had cultivated a chummy relationship. They played table tennis at a school in London in May 2011, two months after the United States and Britain launched airstrikes against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya. In March 2012, Mr. Obama took Mr. Cameron to a college basketball game in Dayton, Ohio, where they ate hot dogs while the president explained the game to his British guest. Mr. Obama was even more critical of the former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, saying he “wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defense and essentially set up the entire infrastructure.” The White House did not address those comments on Friday. Mr. Obama saved some of his strongest words for Saudi Arabia, which he said needed to learn how to share the Middle East with its archenemy, Iran. “Free riders aggravate me,” the president said. On Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry met with King Salman and other senior Saudi officials, but said only, “We have to talk about Syria.” Mr. Earnest refused to back down from Mr. Obama’s characterization of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as a failure and an authoritarian. Mr. Goldberg did not quote the president on Mr. Erdogan, but wrote that he was “immensely” frustrated by him, in part because he had refused to deploy Turkish troops to stabilize Syria. “We did spend some period of time urging the Turks to engage more effectively with our counter-ISIL coalition,” Mr. Earnest said, using the administration’s acronym for the Islamic State. “Even though we have been able to effectively cooperate with the Turks on Syria in a whole host of areas, we have also expressed our concern with some aspects of the political climate inside of Turkey.” |