Obama is slated to hold a news conference Saturday before leaving Warsaw for Spain, the last stop on an overseas trip he cut short after the deadly attack that killed five police officers and injured seven others Thursday night.
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The president said North Atlantic Treaty Organisation had halted its long-term collective decline in defense spending after many years and was starting to increase military budgets in response to an array of threats from terrorism, a resurgent Russian Federation and instability on its southern rim.
Describing Dallas shooting suspect Micah Xavier Johnson as a “demented individual”, Obama said he “is no more representative of African Americans than the shooter in Charleston was representative of white Americans, or the shooter in Orlando or San Bernardino were representative of Muslim Americans”. The shootings, and the ensuing protests in some US cities, led to an uncharacteristic response from the president: He cut his five-day, two-country European trip to four days.
In a conversation Saturday, Merkel and Obama agreed that “a highly integrated UK-EU relationship” would serve both parties’ interests, the White House said.
President Obama condemned the shootings as a despicable act in a statement from the NATO Summit in Poland.
“So we can not let the actions of a few define all of us”, he said.
But the divisive issue of gun control could not be separated from the tension between police and local citizens, he said. He said the U.S.is unique among advanced countries in the scale of violence it experiences.
Obama also tried to calm public anxiety about personal safety, saying violent crime is actually down in the U.S. “We are not going to be able to identify, ahead of time, and eliminate every madman or troubled individual who might want to do harm against innocent people”.
“We have to make sure that all of us step back, do some reflection and make sure that the rhetoric we engage in is constructive and not destructive”.
Obama sought to turn more US strategic attention to Asia during his presidency but has been dragged back to Europe and the Middle East by conflicts in Ukraine and Syria. “You’ve seen, nearly uniformly, peaceful protests and you’ve seen, uniformly, police handling those protests with professionalism”, Obama said.
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“So as tough, as hard, as depressing as the loss of life was this week, we’ve got a foundation to build on”, he said.
