Chuck Hagel, who co-chairs the Obama administration’s Intelligence Advisory Board, says the United States should offer Iran “face-saving ways” out of the nuclear crisis and let Arab countries to take the lead in ousting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
In a wide-ranging interview March 9 with Al-Monitor Washington correspondent Barbara Slavin at Georgetown University, where Hagel teaches a weekly class, the former Republican senator from Nebraska hinted that private approaches to Iran were already occurring. He praised President Barack Obama’s handling of foreign policy and said Obama could do even better in the first two years of a second term.