“This is the problem with the United States. You have to look for a statesman who has real experience in politics for years," Assad said. | Getty Assad on Trump: Obama, Clinton, Bush had no foreign policy experience, either

Syrian President Bashar Assad on Wednesday downplayed Donald Trump’s lack of foreign policy experience, suggesting Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton had no record of competency in world affairs.

Asked by NBC News’ Bill Neely whether the presumptive Republican nominee’s inexperience worried him, Assad responded with questions of his own. “Who had this experience before? Obama? Or George Bush? Or Clinton before? None of them had any experience,” he said, according to an excerpt of the interview that aired Wednesday on “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt."


“This is the problem with the United States,” he said. “You have to look for a statesman who has real experience in politics for years. Not because, to have position in Congress for few years, or minister of foreign affairs, for example, that doesn't help you have the experience.”

Despite his intimation that Trump’s lack of foreign policy experience doesn’t disqualify him from the White House, Assad did say the real estate mogul’s election could be dangerous — though he spoke broadly and in general terms.

“If anyone who doesn't have experience in any position, a White House, or in the presidential palace in Syria, in other countries, of course it is dangerous for the country generally,” he said.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump has praised some of the actions of a series of political strongmen, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Assad, whose country has been ravaged by more than five years of civil war.

In September, Trump told Fox News, “I think in terms of leadership, he’s getting an A and our president is not doing so well.” In an interview last month with ABC’s “This Week,” though, Trump called Assad “a bad guy.”

“But they're all bad guys. We're supporting rebels,” Trump said. “You know they talk about the Syria Free Rebels. We're supporting rebels. We don't even know who they are.”

Assad suggested that he is not a dictator but a patriot who is doing his job and hopes “that history will see me as the man who protected his country, from the terrorism and from the intervention, and saved its sovereignty and integrity of its land.”