President Barack Obama and French President Francois Hollande participate in a news conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, November 24, 2015.
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Hollande said he and Obama “shared our relentless determination to fight terrorism anywhere and everywhere”, and agreed more needed to be done to combat Islamic State’s efforts domestically and in Iraq and Syria, where the group controls wide swathes of territory.
President Hollande will be at the White House Tuesday, a day after meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron, who pledged France new assistance for its airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Syria.
The president’s strong language yesterday came on the heels of a renewed travel alert, which warned USA travelers of “possible risks of travel due to increased terrorist threats”.
Obama said North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ally Turkey had a right to defend its airspace-but he also appealed to Russian Federation to engage at the side of the 65 countries battling to repel IS in Syria.
The U.S. president’s opponents have criticised him for not being more aggressive in speaking out about Isis, but he has refused to take actions because it might work “politically” or make him “look tough”. “It can not be tolerated”.
On Morning Edition, NPR’s Scott Horsley explained that Hollande is trying to bridge a tough divide: the United States and Russian Federation have a fundamentally different view of the civil war in Syria.
But Turkey’s downing of a Russian warplane has created problems for both France and the United States. “That would be extremely damaging”, Hollande said.
After leaving Washington, Hollande is scheduled to hold talks in Germany with Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday. Turkey is a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member, like the United States and France, and the agreement requires both to support Turkey against Russian Federation.
France, said the American president, “stood alongside” the United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001, ignoring all periods of friction between the two allies, particularly during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that France had strongly opposed.
Obama spoke to the National Security Council on Tuesday and learned that there was no credible threat against the U.S. from the Islamic State.
Though France and the U.S. share the overriding strategic goal of destroying Islamic State, Washington has been slow to grasp the gravity of the situation in Europe, said Simond de Galbert, a French diplomat who served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After weeks of waging a separate bombing campaign, mainly targeting Syrian rebels who don’t belong to the Islamic State, Russia began striking the extremist group in earnest after a bomb brought down a Russian passenger plane last month, killing all 224 on board.
Hollande’s meeting with Obama follows the attacks in Paris that killed 130 people at the national sports stadium, a concert venue and bars and restaurants in heart of the French capital.
“In short”, he said, “this was not only a strike against one of the world’s great cities, it was an attack against the world itself”.
The planning comes amid a diplomatic effort to ease Assad from office.
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“‘For better or worse, right or wrong, [the USA needs] Putin if there is going to be any resolution and any kind of political transition in Syria”, Miller said”.
