let s get to the military though. that s what i m trying to get. he should have answered the first question. look, governor romney has called for $5 trillion of tax cuts that he says is he going to pay for by closing deductions. the math doesn t work he continues to claim that he is going to do it. he then wants to spend another $2 trillion on military spending that our military is not asking for. now, keep in mind that our military spending has gone up every single year that i have been in office. we spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined, china, russia, france, the united kingdom, you name it. and what i did was work with our joint chiefs of staff to think about what are we going to need in the future to make sure that we are safe? and that s the budget that we have put forward. but, what you can t do is
we have changed for the first time since f.d.r. since f.d.r. we have always had the strategy of saying we could fight in two conflicts at once. now we are changing to one conflict. look, this, in my view, is the highest responsibility of the president of the united states which is to maintain the safety of the american people and i will not cut our military budget by a trillion dollars, which is the combination of the budget cuts that the president has as well as a sequestration cuts. that, in my view, is making our future less certain and less secure. i won t do it. bob, let me make comments on this. first of all he the is he is he success strer is not something i proposed something congress has proposed and that will not. not reducing our military spending it s maintaining it i think governor romney maybe hasn t spent enough time looking at how our military works. you mentioned the navy, for example, and we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. governor, we also have fewer horses a
the environment in the middle east with the arab spring came a great deal of hope that there would be a change towards more moderation, an opportunity for greater participation on the part of women and public life and in economic life in the middle east, but, instead, we have seen in nation after nation a number of disturbing events. of course, we see in syria 30,000 civilians having been killed by the military there, we see in libya an attack apparently by, i think we know now, by terrorists of some kind against our people there, four people dead, our hearts and minds go to them. maly has been taken over by al qaeda type individuals. we have in egypt a muslim brotherhood president, so what we are seeing is is a pretty dramatic reversal in the kinds of hopes we had for that region. of course, the greatest threat of all is iran, four years closer to a nuclear weapon. and we re going to have to recognize that we have to do as the president has done.
president saying well we will let the u.n. deal with it, and assad excuse me, kofi annan came in and said we have a seas fire that didn t work. look to the russians and see if you can do something. we should be playing the leadership role there. not on the ground with military. all right. play a leadership role. we are playing leadership role. we organize the friends of syria. we are mobilizing humanitarian support and support for the opposition. and we are making sure that those we help are those who will be friends of ours in the long term and friends of our allies in the region over the long term. but, you know, going back to libya because this is an example of how we make choices. you know, when we went into libya, and we were able to immediately stop the massacre there, because of the unique circumstances and the coalition that we had helped to organize, we also had to make sure that muammar qaddafi didn t stay there. and to the governor s credit you supported us going int
military long term. we don t know what the world is going to throw at us down the road. we make decisions today in a military that will confront challenges we can t imagine. in the 2,000 debates there was no mention of terrorism, for instance and the year later 9/11 happened. so we have to make decisions based upon uncertainty. that means a strong military. i will not cut our military budget. we have to also stand by our allies. i think the tension that existed between israel and the united states was very unfortunate i think also pulling our missile defense program out of poland in the way we did was also unfortunate in terms of if you will, disrupting the relationship in some ways as it existed between us. and with regards to standing for our principles. when the students took to the streets to tehran and people there protested, the green revolution occurred for the president to be silent, i thought, was an enofer must enormous mistake. we have to strong for our