Secretary of State John Kerry admitted that President Obama’s failure to enforce his self-imposed “red line” against Syria “cost us significantly.”

“I believe it is important for us to – and I know the cost – this has been a topic of conversation here – of the president’s decision when he decided not to enforce the red line through the bombing,” Kerry said Sunday at the Saban Forum in Washington, referring to Obama’s August 2012 decree that Syria using chemical weapons would be a “red line.”

In 2013, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad used sarin gas to reportedly kill more than 1,400 people. Obama threatened to bomb Syria — but ultimately deferred the action to Congress, which declined to green light the military action.

At the weekend forum in Washington, Kerry deflected blame from lack of enforcement of the red line away from Obama and to Congress.

“People have interpreted it as his decision not to when, in fact, he never made a decision not to bomb. He made the decision to bomb. He simply decided he had to go to Congress because Tony Blair – not Tony Blair – because David Cameron lost the vote in the Parliament on a Thursday, and on Friday, President Obama felt, hearing from Congress, ‘Oh, you got to come to us, you got to come to us,’ he would go there and get the decision,” Kerry said.

Yet, Kerry maintained, that he himself saved the day — sort of. “Well, the decision wasn’t forthcoming, and in the meantime, I got a deal with Lavrov to get all of the chemical weapons out of the country,” he said, referring to Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister.

“So in effect, we got a better result out of not doing it, but it was the threat of doing it that brought about the result, and the lack of doing it perception-wise cost us significantly in the region, and I know that and so does the president. As much as we think it’s a misinterpretation of sort of – it doesn’t matter. It cost. Perception can often just be the reality,” the nation’s top diplomat said.