U.S. President Barack Obama holds a news conference in the briefing room at the White House in Washington on Dec. 18.NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP / Getty Images
U.S. leadership paid off in 2015, President Barack Obama said on Friday – claiming credit for the global deal to prevent the planet from overheating, the pact keeping Tehran from getting nuclear weapons, the trans pacific trade agreement and the defeat of the deadly scourge of Ebola.
Only hours before he climbed aboard Air Force One for a family holiday in Hawaii, Mr. Obama said years of unstinting effort pressing others to deal with climate change had finally delivered in the form of the Paris agreement on curbing greenhouse gases.
"This would not have happened without U.S. leadership," Mr. Obama said, adding that the Paris pact was not his only triumph of this sort in 2015. "By the way, the same is true for the Iran nuclear deal, the same is true for the TransPacific Partnership, the same is true for stamping out Ebola, … which was the potential end of the world."
The President said U.S. leadership – meaning his own measured approach – has delivered. "At each juncture, what we've said is that American strength and American exceptionalism [are] not just a matter of us bombing somebody." Results may not come "overnight," but they do come, he added, saying that "this year, what you really saw was that steady persistent leadership on many initiatives that I began when I first came into office."
By this time next year, Mr. Obama will know who will replace him in the Oval Office after his eight years and two terms as President. But in an unusually self-reflective news conference on Friday, Mr. Obama said his aim was to achieve even more in his final year, including making another effort to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay – something he said he would deliver in his first year after being elected in 2008.
"I said at the beginning of this year that interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter – and we are only halfway through," Mr. Obama said, adding that the last half of the final quarter was often the most exciting. "In 2016, I'm going to leave it all out on the field."
But with Republicans holding majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the chances of sweeping legislation in the President's final year are slim. Hopes have all but disappeared for immigration or tax reform, although there is some bipartisan backing for further changes to the criminal justice system to reduce the massive U.S. prison population.
Mr. Obama also said he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin years ago about the dangers of propping up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. "I was right," Mr. Obama said, adding: "Assad is going to have to leave in order for the country to stop the bloodletting."
Mr. Obama hinted he might try to shutter Guantanamo – the multibillion-dollar prison complex on a U.S. naval base held in land leases from Cuba – next year by executive action even if, as expected, Republican opposition continues to ban bringing any of the detainees to the U.S. mainland.
He said fewer than 100 prisoners will be in Guantanamo by early next year. Hundreds have been released, a handful have been tried – including Canadian Omar Khadr, the only enemy combatant charged and convicted of murder, terrorism and spying for battlefield acts in either the Afghanistan or Iraq wars. And the military trials of high-ranking al-Qaeda leaders are not expected until 2020.
"It will be an uphill battle," Mr. Obama said, reiterating his long-standing assertions that the prison sullies the U.S. reputation and is immensely costly and counter-productive.
"Guantanamo continues to be one of the key magnets for jihadi recruitment," Mr. Obama said, used by Islamic extremists to perpetuate the "notion of a gross injustice that America is not living up to its professed ideals [and] create this mythology that America is at war with Islam."
The President admitted that the threat from violent extremists has shifted from sophisticated networks like al-Qaeda – capable of massive attacks such as the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings that turned airliners into human-guided missiles, destroyed New York's twin towers and set the Pentagon ablaze – to harder-to-detect "lone wolves" and extremists like the married couple who massacred 14 people in California earlier this month.
"All of us can do our part by staying vigilant, by saying something if we see something that is suspicious, by refusing to be terrorized and by staying united as one American family," the President said.
Air Force One was to land in San Bernardino, where Mr. Obama planned to meet with some of the survivors of the California attack as well as relatives of victims, before flying on to Hawaii.