The last time the candidate of the party that occupied the presidency sought to succeed the president, he steered clear of the latter’s foreign policy. To wit, Mitt Romney kept George W. Bush and his invasion of Iraq at arms length. Conversely, Hillary Clinton has been only too happy to identify herself with President Obama’s foreign policy, in which she was instrumental as his first secretary of state. But no longer, writes Amy Chozick in the New York Times.
… the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday, and a presidential election that has suddenly taken a turn toward foreign policy, have complicated Mrs. Clinton’s strategy of aligning herself closely with Mr. Obama, who is widely popular among Democratic primary voters and whose support she will need should she advance to the general election.
On Saturday in the second Democratic debate, Mrs. Clinton declined to directly respond to a question about whether she thought Mr. Obama had underestimated the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which French officials have said was responsible for the attacks.
But she did — indirectly and deftly — contradict Mr. Obama’s comments, made in a television interview recorded a day before the attacks, that the Islamic State had been “contained” in Iraq and Syria.
“We have to look at ISIS as the leading threat of an international terror network,” Mrs. Clinton said. “It cannot be contained; it must be defeated.”
Former CIA analyst Paul Pillar is one of the few go-to experts for reporters who is truly dependable. He told Ms. Chozick:
“I assume she and her advisers are trying to calibrate Obama’s approval rating right now. … I think the conventional wisdom, that Hillary Clinton is a more hawkish person and would be a more hawkish president, with everything that adjective implies, is correct.”
In fact
Mrs. Clinton has gone further than Mr. Obama on Syria by proposing that a coalition put in place a no-fly zone to provide safe areas for Syrians, an approach several Republican presidential candidates have also embraced. And she frequently talks about how she pushed Mr. Obama to arm some Syrian rebels.
“I did early on say we needed to try to find a way to train and equip moderates very early on,” Mrs. Clinton said Saturday. “Because I thought there would be extremist groups filling the vacuum.”
Simplifying it to a fare-thee-well is Dennis Ross, hawkish former adviser to President Obama, now a fellow at the conservative think tank WINEP (Washington Institute for Near East Policy):
“Both when she was secretary of state and since, she has had a sense of focusing not just on the cost of action, but the cost of inaction … President Obama has been much more inclined to the cost of action versus the cost of inaction.”
In any event Ms. Clinton is treading a fine line between Democrats who have no interest in seeing any more boots on the ground in the Middle East and Republicans who are holding the Paris attacks against President Obama as evidence he didn’t do enough to stop the Islamic State.