President used final security speech to present a selective account of his record and urged Trump not to sacrifice US values in the name of national security

Without ever using Donald Trump’s name, Barack Obama savaged his successor’s stated inclinations on counterterrorism while issuing an impassioned plea not to sacrifice fundamental American values in the name of national security.

Obama used the final set-piece security speech of his presidency to present a highly selective account of his record, particularly about the mass surveillance architecture he embraced and the drone strikes that will be synonymous with his name.

In doing so, Obama argued that he avoided “overreach” and tacitly implored Trump to follow his template.

“People and nations do not make good decisions when they are driven by fear,” Obama warned at MacDill air force base in Florida, before a military audience to whom he paid tribute.

People and nations do not make good decisions when they are driven by fear Barack Obama

“These terrorists can never directly destroy our way of life, but we can do it for them if we lose track of who we are and the values that this nation was founded upon.”

Obama reserved a note of retribution for the Republican Congress that he holds responsible for preventing him from closing the Guantánamo Bay detention center. He suggested that he would continue transferring detainees until he leaves the Oval Office on 20 January, even though that tactic alone will not empty the Cuban facility.

“Until Congress changes course, it will be judged harshly by history, and I will continue to do all I can to remove this blot on our national honor,” he said.

Obama also said Congress was not doing its job because it had still not explicitly authorised a war against Islamic State (Isis) that is halfway through its second year. “Democracies should not operate in a state of permanently authorized war,” he said.

The US operation in Syria and Iraq is being conducted under the Authorisation for Use of Military Force passed in September 2001 against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks and any “associated forces”.

Yet Obama did not mention that his own administration argued to Congress against passing a new authorization to use military force in 2011, long before Isis came into existence, out of fear that Congress would pass a law that was too broadly drawn. Nor did he mention his heavy reliance on the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force – including against Isis – and his administration’s decision not to seek the repeal he suggested in a 2013 speech.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Obama combined defense of his record with an impassioned plea not to embrace the mass suspicion of US Muslims that Trump and his emerging national-security team have proposed. Photograph: Monica Herndon/AP

Similarly, Obama dismissed concerns about the scale of global mass surveillance revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, saying he had made “extensive reforms” and that the surveillance was “just targeted at folks who may be trying to do us harm”. In fact, Obama reluctantly helped pass only one law curtailing bulk surveillance, a provision that left untouched the National Security Agency’s ability to collect Americans’ international communications without warrants and the FBI’s unrestrained ability to warrantlessly search through them.

Obama asserted that the human rights critics of his drone strikes had failed to “weigh the alternatives” of more intense aerial bombing or a ground invasion, eliding the commando raids that are the stated preference of his own counterterrorism policy.

In his forthright defense of the thousands of drone strikes he has ordered, Obama insisted that he had placed appropriate safeguards around what he called “targeted strikes” but did not discuss the number of drone strikes he permitted the CIA to launch without a requirement to even know the targeted person’s name – something the rules he has put around drone strikes still do not prohibit.

While Obama said any successful counterterrorism policy must “not create more terrorists”, a survivor of his first drone strike told the Guardian in January: “If there is a list of tyrants in the world, to me, Obama will be put on that list by his drone program.”

Victim of Obama's first drone strike: 'I am the living example of what drones are' Read more

Obama combined defense of his record with an impassioned plea not to embrace the mass suspicion of US Muslims that Trump and his emerging national-security team have proposed. Placing Trump’s proposed policies on a continuum with those of fascists and other US adversaries, Obama argued he would “feed the terrorist narrative”, as terrorists want Americans to “turn on one another”.

“If we act like this is a war between the United States and Islam, we’re not just going to lose more Americans to terrorist attacks, but we’ll also lose sight of the very principles we claim to defend,” Obama said.

He swiped at Trump’s proposal to steal Iraqi oil, adding: “We are a nation that won world wars without grabbing the resources of those we defeated.”

And in what sounded like a rebuke of Trump’s enthusiasm for walling off America and “bombing the shit” out of Isis, Obama attacked the “false promises that we can eliminate terrorism by dropping more bombs or deploying more and more troops or fencing ourselves off from the rest of the world”.

He added that low-scale terrorist attacks would continue in the US as long as lax gun control makes it easy for terrorists to “buy a very powerful weapon”.

In perhaps Obama’s most concise summary of his instincts on war and peace, he urged the US to put the threat of terrorism “in perspective”, as they do not “pose an existential threat [and] we must not make the mistake of elevating them as if they do”. The US would do well to avoid “the path of great powers who defeated themselves through overreach”, he warned.

To many of Obama’s Republican critics, the argument sounds like an excuse for vacillation and inaction. John McCain, the Arizona Republican senator who lost the presidency to Obama in 2008, called the MacDill speech “a feeble attempt to evade the harsh judgment of history”.

As Obama prepares to end his presidency and hand over the substantial powers of national security to Trump – including the unresolved wars he inherited – some within security and human rights circles are holding out hope that the institutional forces that constrained Obama will also check Trump. They note that Obama’s stewardship over national security in several cases displayed more continuity with George W Bush’s record than departure from it, even as Obama’s election represented the sort of rebuke to Bush that Trump’s victory represents to Obama.

“The president-elect has said a lot of ridiculous things on the campaign trail, and frankly I think when he sits down and talks with the experts and lawyers he’ll realize that torturing people and loading up Guantánamo are really bad ideas,” said Raha Wala, the national-security advocacy director of Human Rights First.