In her speech in San Diego last Thursday on Donald Trump’s “dangerously incoherent” foreign policy, Hillary Clinton struck a decisive body blow against her presumptive Republican rival, putting him on the defensive and reassuring Democrats who feared that Clinton might not have the mettle to take on Trump. Yet, while there is much to cheer in the crisp and cutting way that Clinton characterized Trump’s reckless behavior and policy preferences, liberals have good reason to be disquieted by the alternative that Clinton offered.

While presenting herself as the heir of Barack Obama, and generously praising the president’s decisiveness in ordering the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Clinton also sent a clear message that she was in many ways closer to Obama’s hawkish neoconservative critics. The contrast between Obama and Clinton was underscored by the president’s own foreign policy speech delivered earlier that day, which took up many of the same themes, but in a strikingly different tone and tenor. The two speeches were clearly meant to be complementary, but there were enough significant differences to make clear that Clinton intends to be a much more hawkish president.

Obama and Clinton both took the same stance against Trump (he went unmentioned by Obama, but was clearly part of the subtext). Both argued against Trump’s pessimistic vision that the United States was in decline, and affirmed that America remained a great power and the essential pillar of the international order. But running through Obama’s speech was an awareness of the dangers of America over-extending itself, as well as an attempt to draw a simple lesson from the failed wars in Vietnam and Iraq: that the country must be prudent about using military force.

The themes of prudence and international co-operation, which were notably absent in Clinton’s speech, were sounded throughout Obama’s speech:

Of course, leading wisely also means resisting the temptation to intervene militarily every time there’s a problem or crisis in the world. History is littered with the ruins of empires and nations that overextended themselves, draining their power and influence. And so we have to chart a smarter path. As we saw in Vietnam and the Iraq War, oftentimes the greatest damage to American credibility comes when we overreach, when we don’t think through the consequences of all of our actions. And so we have to learn from our history. And that also means we’re doing right by our men and women in uniform... And we lead not by dictating to other nations, but by working with them as partners; by treating other countries and their peoples with respect, not by lecturing them. This isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s in our self-interest. It makes countries more likely to work with us, and, ultimately, it makes us more secure.

Obama’s emphasis that the military is the solution of last resort includes an explicit defense of one policy where he and Hillary Clinton differed, in Syria. “My decision not to conduct strikes against Syria after it used chemical weapons was controversial among some in Washington,” Obama said. “But because we seized a diplomatic option, backed by our threat of force, nations came together and we accomplished far more than military strikes ever could have—all of Syria’s declared chemical weapons were successfully removed.” Clinton, of course, was a strong advocate of a larger military intervention in Syria.