U.S. President Barack Obama needs to back up his diplomatic efforts with sticks as well as carrots or there will be worse instability in the Middle East, Anne-Marie Slaughter, President and CEO of the New America Foundation, told HuffPost Live at Davos on Friday.
"We're risking this whole region going up in smoke through displacement of people, violence, and radical instability," she warned.
Slaughter, who was the first female Director of Policy Planning at the State Department under Hillary Clinton, said that Obama is right to grasp the “limitations of U.S. power,” but that his diplomatic approach contains a fatal flaw.
The president is “wrong in not being willing to use an essential tool, that diplomacy has to be backed by credible threat of force," Slaughter said.
According to Slaughter, this approach was proven successful when Syrian leader Bashar Assad agreed to divest of chemical weapons following a U.S. ultimatum last year. As Syrian peace talks in Geneva limped into their third day on Friday, Slaughter told HuffPost Live Obama should repeat a similar move.
"Obama has to say either we get an agreement or we are prepared to use force,” Slaughter said. “We are not going to let the entire country fragment, another 100,000 be killed and millions of people be displaced."
Watch Slaughter's interview above, and see more updates from Davos below: