SALT LAKE CITY — A Utah congressman says Americans are "unquestionably" less safe since President Barack Obama took office nearly eight years ago.
Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the world is "standing on the edge of a knife," even in unexpected places such as Australia and Europe.
Allies are now openly wondering if the United States would stand by them anymore, he said. And taken with the spread of Islamic terrorism and adversarial leaders in Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, the U.S. has a difficult national security task ahead, he said.
"The truth as I see it is this president has left us unquestionably less safe than when he came into office," he told the Deseret News/KSL editorial board Thursday. "It's going to be an enormous challenge for whoever replaces him to rebuild the alliances."
Stewart, who had backed Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for president, said he isn't enamored with the presidential front-runners in either party. He hasn't endorsed another Republican candidate, but said he hopes Donald Trump is not the GOP nominee.
In a speech at the University of Utah three weeks ago, Stewart compared Trump to a fascist dictator.
"He's our Mussolini," he told students at the Hinckley Institute of Politics.
Stewart didn't back away from that statement Thursday. He said he felt he had to respond to Trump's comments that he would target the families of terrorists, presumably women and children, and also torture terrorists.
When Trump was told that would be illegal, the candidate responded by saying he's such a strong leader that the military would do it because he told them to.
A former Air Force pilot, Stewart said military officers are trained to distinguish and to not follow unlawful orders.
"And if you want to know the outcome of a military that doesn't do that then look at Nazi Germany," he said.
Stewart's comments come as the country not only considers a new leader of the free world but deals with the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, and deadly bombings in Brussels and Paris for which ISIL claimed responsibility.
The congressman reiterated that he believes putting 25,000 U.S. special forces on the ground in Syria along with aggressive air strikes is the way to defeat ISIS.
Stewart said it's difficult to prioritize which threats to national security to address first, noting most people tend to focus on Islamic terrorism while ignoring Russia, which he believes is the largest threat.
"There are enormous challenges that are growing and becoming far more adversarial than I think the American people appreciate. They have the potential to be a much more dangerous impact on the U.S.," he said.
North Korea, Stewart said, is a problem Washington doesn't know how to fix.
"You are actually dealing with somebody who is actually mentally unstable," he said of Kim Jong-un. "The things we see out of there you just shake your head at … it's just so weird."
Stewart said there doesn't appear to be any strategy or point to what the North Korean leader does, adding he has an "aggressive" nuclear weapons program.
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