Continuing to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Increasing our partnering and cooperation with countries to deal with that terrorist threat. But if you look at the basic goals that I've set: making sure that we are maintaining pressure on terrorist organizations so that they have a limited capacity to carry out large-scale attacks on the West. And so this has been this huge, tumultuous change and shift, and so we've had to adapt, even as it's happening in real time, to some huge changes in these societies. I don't recall all the wise men in Washington anticipating this. So, there were all kinds of theories.ДЄnd then the Arab Spring happened. We were going to promote Palestinian and Israeli peace talks. We were going to try to promote increased economic development in the Muslim countries to deal with this demographic bulge that was coming into play. We were going to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, trying diplomacy first. I came in with some very clear theories about what my goals were going to be. Well, partly it's because of the nature of what's happened in the Middle East. Under your administration, the country is still very involved in that region, but I don't think we have as clear a sense of what is the sort of strategic goal of that engagement. The Bush administration had an idea about preventative war and about rollback and democracy promotion. In the Middle East, where we're still very much engaged despite the draw-down from Iraq, the Clinton administration had a policy they called Dual Containment of Iraq and Iran. And that, I think, has been the real challenge over the last six to eight years.ДЈ There are still about 10,000 American military personnel serving in Afghanistan in training and advisory roles, and about 3,000 American troops are in Iraq to train Iraqi soldiers to fight ISIS. To look at the new threats and opportunities that are out there. To double-down on our investments in things like cybersecurity. 3 It does mean, though, that by not having 180,000 people in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can then more strategically deploy, with a smaller footprint, special forces, trainers, partnering, that allows us to get at the actual problem and then frees us up to be able to send a team to prevent Ebola. And what I've been trying to do is to make sure that over the course of the last six years and hopefully the next two, we just have more tools in our toolkit to deal with the actual problems that we have now and that we can project into the future, rather than just constantly relying on the same tools that we used when we were dealing with Germany and Japan in World War II.ДЄnd so ending two wars was important, not because I was under any illusions that that would mean we wouldn't have any terrorist threat. Asymmetric threats from terrorist organizations. So the biggest challenge we have right now is disorder. Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined. The closest we have, obviously, is Russia, with its nuclear arsenal, but generally speaking they can't project the way we can around the world. That we don't have a peer in terms of a state that's going to attack us and bait us.

So what I do think is accurate in describing my foreign policy is a strong belief that we don't have military solutions to every problem in the 21st century. Now, I also think that if we were just resorting to that and we didn't have a realistic view that there are bad people out there who are trying to do us harm - and we've got to have the strongest military in the world, and we occasionally have to twist the arms of countries that wouldn't do what we need them to do if it weren't for the various economic or diplomatic or, in some cases, military leverage that we had - if we didn't have that dose of realism, we wouldn't get anything done, either. It wasn't perfect, but the UN, the IMF, and a whole host of treaties and rules and norms that were established really helped to stabilize the world in ways that it wouldn't otherwise be. And one of the great things about American foreign policy in the post-World War II era was that we did a pretty good job with that. But you've reduced the number of problems that you have and the security and defense challenges that you face if you can create those norms. If we have arms treaties in place, it doesn't mean that you don't have a stray like North Korea that may try to do its own thing. I think it is realistic for us to want to use diplomacy for setting up a rules-based system wherever we can, understanding that it's not always going to work.

Obama get it done