September 9, 2014 | Quote
Obama Lacks Eyes and Ears in Hot Spots Around the World
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The Middle East has the weakest U.S. ambassadorial presence. When the Egyptian military toppled the democratically-elected government of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, there was no ambassador in Cairo. Ambassador to Iraq Robert Stephen Beecroft was nominated for the Cairo post on May 8. David Andrew Weinberg, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, decried the long ambassadorial absence from Cairo.
“The United States did not have an ambassador in Egypt after August of last year until last month,” he said. “That’s an enormous gap of time, almost the entire time in which Egypt had an interim government after Morsi.”
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U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Joseph W. Westphal arrived in Riyadh on March 27, one day before Obama began an important state visit there. The Senate moved Westphal’s nomination to the front of the line to confirm him before Obama’s trip. “He had no time in which to build relationships there or to set the ground for the president’s trip, and there was no one there for five months during which [the] U.S.-Saudi relationship had one of its biggest meltdowns in modern history,” Weinberg said.
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