Seated with talk show host David Letterman, U
Seated with talk show host David Letterman, UReuters

President Obama said on Tuesday that he expects “full cooperation” from the “Muslim world” in protecting U.S. diplomats from protests in the Middle East.

“The message we have to send, I think, to the Muslim world is, we expect you to work with us to keep our people safe,” Obama said in a taped interview with CBS’s late night talk show host David Letterman. "We expect their full cooperation because that's the only way the world works."

Last week, protesters attacked American embassies in Egypt, Libya and Yemen, while burning American flags. The attack against the U.S. embassy in the Libyan city of Benghazi resulted in the brutal murder of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

“In this part of the region, as they emerge, into a new form of government, part of what they’re going to have to do is to recognize that democracy is not just casting a ballot, it’s respecting freedom of speech and tolerating people with different points of view,” Obama said, according to reports. “And it means that you’ve got to make sure that you never have any excuses for the kind of violence against innocents we saw last week, and that’s a message that I’ve sent very clearly to the leaders of various countries, and we expect their full cooperation, because that’s the only way the international order works.”

White House spokesman Jay Carney last week said Obama spoke with Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and was “very clear” that “our mutual obligations include the protection of diplomats.”

“Our first job is obviously to make sure that we’re reinforcing security at these embassies, that we’re fully investigating what happened and bringing these murderers to justice; that’s our number one priority,” Obama told Letterman. “But the broader issue here, is there’s a lot of change that’s taking place in the middle east and we as Americans always stand on the side of democracy, we want people to have opportunity to determine their own fates, their own destinies.”