Goldberg: Let’s go to Obama and Clinton. I think they are quite different in the way they approach the world. Some people are arguing to you that they’re not different at all. Explain where you come out on this.

Landler: A common argument is that, on the spectrum of American foreign-policy thought, from total dove to total neoconservative, they’re both liberal internationalists. They both believe in rules-based order; they’re both about preserving the post-World War II world that Truman and Acheson and others built. And they sit close to each other on the spectrum. But my argument is that if you look at their instincts and reflexes and the way that they are apt to respond to a crisis, they just come at it very differently, and this is in part because they come from very different places both in terms of time and geography. Obama grew up in the ’70s, and he had this itinerant existence, living in Indonesia for a period—

Goldberg: Looking at America from the outside in—

Landler: Looking at America from outside in, as sort of an expatriate’s view of America—

Goldberg: And Hillary is literally in the middle of America looking out—

Landler: Yes. She’s in the heartland, but also in the 1950s, with a conservative Navy petty officer father. And so she viewed America as a country that was a force for good, that American interventions generally could be a positive rather than a negative thing. And I think Obama was much more skeptical about that.

Goldberg: Dispositionally, is Hillary closer to John McCain or Barack Obama?

Landler: In basic disposition, John McCain. Though in practical terms, given her pragmatism, I think she would govern more cautiously than McCain would govern.

Goldberg: You’ve heard what Obama says about Libya—we tried to do everything right, but it didn’t work, and this informed his decision-making about Syria. She was a hawk on Libya, but do you think there’s a chance it somehow changed her reflexes?

Landler: If you look at the way she’s approached Syria, starting out forward-leaning on aiding the rebels back in 2012 and continuing to favor a no-fly zone today, I would argue that she still believes that Libya could end well—

Goldberg: She thinks that even today?

Landler: Even today, that it could end well. My view on Obama is—and you may or may not agree with this—that he looked at Libya and it confirmed all the preexisting problems he had with interventionism.

Goldberg: He never really wanted to do it.

Landler: He didn’t want to do it, and then he did it, and then it turned out badly, and this confirmed his instincts.

Goldberg: Maybe it turned out badly in part because he never thought that it could work in the first place.

Landler: I think she would argue that our impulse was right, and it was messier than it should have been for a whole variety of reasons, but that it’s still a work in progress and—importantly—it shouldn’t prevent us from doing similar things in different places. And if you look at Syria, I believe she thinks there’s more of a prospect for the U.S. to make a difference on the ground than he does.