Sen. Tom Cotton said that the strategy employed by NATO and the Obama administration in the war on terror is not working.
"You have to go on offense against the Islamic State," said Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas and a member of the Armed Services committee and Intelligence committee,
in an interview on MSNBC.
"President Obama's job is to keep us safe," he added. It's not to minimize the fear that Americans justly fear about terrorism."
Former Washington Post editor Eugene Robinson said to Cotton in the MSNBC interview that Obama "seems to be doing exactly what you propose," by shrinking the territory ISIS controls and engaging them in Iraq and Syria.
Robinson critiqued Cotton's actions in 2015
in the Washington Post when Cotton spearheaded a letter to Iran's leaders that was "dangerously inappropriate."
Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain echoed Cotton's views,
reported The Hill. "The Obama administration still has no plausible strategy," they said.
Cotton also believes that NATO must bear its share in the battle against the Islamic State in
an interview with Arkansas' KATV.
"We should urge our European allies to increase their spending in part so we can avoid future attacks like we've seen in Brussels and Paris, or we can avoid invasion of NATO allies like Latvia and Estonia like we've seen in the Ukraine," Cotton said.
President Barack Obama cited the importance of NATO in a
USA Today report, saying that the organization is "the lynchpin, the cornerstone of our collective defense and U.S. security policy."
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