Back in January, 1991, over the objections of his Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, President George H. W. Bush sought a Congressional resolution authorizing him to launch a war to expel Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi military forces from Kuwait, which Saddam had invaded a few months earlier. Bush might have been acting purely out of devotion to constitutional principle, but seeking the resolution was good politics, too. Although the resolution passed, most Democrats voted against it, and then the war ended in a swift American victory. (That was another disappointment to Cheney, who had wanted to keep the war going long enough to take Baghdad and remove Saddam.) Bush’s popularity in the spring of 1991, a year and a half before he would be up for reëlection, was sky-high.

Most of the Presidentially ambitious Democrats in Congress—including Joe Biden and John Kerry—decided not to run against him. It wasn’t just that Bush looked unbeatable; they had voted against what appeared to be an American military triumph, and it looked like that would be an insuperable disadvantage in the campaign. One could say that Bush’s decision to ask Congress to authorize his war made Bill Clinton President, because Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, hadn’t had to vote, and it cleared out a good deal of his competition for the 1992 Democratic nomination.

All this was background to George W. Bush’s decision to seek Congressional authorization for the second Iraq war, in the fall of 2002—again over the opposition of Dick Cheney, who didn’t think he needed it. For Democrats who thought they might want to run for President one day, with the 1991 precedent in mind and the country still on high alert because of the September 11th attacks, a “no” vote looked disqualifying.

In the late summer of 2002, Hillary Clinton, then the junior senator from New York, came to a New Yorker breakfast to make a few remarks and take a few questions. I don’t remember what she spoke about, but I do remember asking her this: “Senator Clinton, do you believe that, in seeking a resolution authorizing a war against Iraq, the Bush Administration is setting a booby trap for Democratic senators who might want to run for President?” She smiled, paused, and as I recall, with a look of pure saucer-eyed innocence, said, “Booby trap? I’m sorry. I’m not familiar with that term. Next question?”

So, yes, somewhere under all the layers of control there is a sense of humor. But the vote did turn out to be a booby trap for her. Clinton voted yes; the war went badly; and, in 2008, her assent gave Barack Obama, who hadn’t been in the Senate to vote (and who had spoken out against the war), a decisive advantage in the Democratic primary campaign. Just as the first of the Bush family’s Gulf War resolutions made Bill Clinton President, the second made Barack Obama President—and Hillary Clinton not President.

All of this is background to Clinton’s striking decision to remind us, via an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, of The Atlantic, that she is more hawkish than Obama. Although there’s no vote she has to cast, and none that Obama seems inclined to seek from Congress, there can be no doubt that she actually is more hawkish. But everything in politics has, and should have, an element of calculation. What’s her calculation here? It can only be a belief that she has such an overwhelming lead among Democrats that, unlike in 2008, the Party’s dovish base cannot deny her the nomination; and that the electorate in November, 2016, will agree with her that we need a more hawkish President than Obama.

The first part of the equation is persuasive, the second part less so. The idea that American politics today is “hyperpartisan” may be true enough, but it isn’t entirely clarifying, because it implies that each party has an immobile, deeply felt, fully worked out set of convictions. This is not the case, on either side. It’s possible that in two years a populist Republican nominee could tap into red-state America’s long tradition of isolationism and suspicion of high finance, present even Obama as having been too militarily engaged in insoluble faraway conflicts, and run to what we’d traditionally think of as Clinton’s left, on both foreign and economic policy.

One of the scariest parts of practicing politics at Clinton’s level is the ever-present possibility that what seems like a no-brainer stance will later turn out to be ruinous. In writing “Hard Choices,” her book about her time as Secretary of State, which came out last month, Clinton decided not to be very candid; it makes for dull reading. She then decided, toward the end of her time promoting it, to become more candid. One of those decisions, made in quick succession, will turn out to have been wrong—but it’s hard to tell which one.