The interview with Clinton is consistent with a view of American exceptionalism. Why Clinton spoke out on Obama

Hillary Clinton has taken her furthest, most public step away yet from President Barack Obama, rejecting the core of his self-described foreign policy doctrine and describing his decision against backing Syrian rebels early on as a “failure.”

She also stood unequivocally with Israel in its current battle with Hamas in a lengthy, detailed interview on foreign policy with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, which was conducted last week prior to the president’s authorization of airstrikes against Islamist militants in Iraq. The interview was published late Saturday.


Obama’s foreign policy doctrine as a whole has been slammed as too slow to respond, too passive instead of proactive, especially as crises have unfolded everywhere from Ukraine to the Gaza Strip. In the interview, Clinton, who served as secretary of state during Obama’s first term, argues there’s a balance that can be struck between muscularity and isolationism — bolstering the concept of American exceptionalism, which she promotes in her new book, “Hard Choices.”

A source familiar with the interview said Clinton’s team gave the White House a warning that it had taken place. Clinton aides described the interview as one intended to promote her memoir, and Goldberg as a long-planned-for target on a list of interviews around the book — and not part of an overarching political strategy related to 2016.

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Political watchers will be tempted to characterize Clinton’s comments as calibrating away from an unpopular president as she looks toward a second presidential campaign. But Clinton has always been more of a hawk than Obama, and she has reached a point where she seems comfortable explaining their differences. Still, while her comments may not have been a specific effort to escape the creeping shadow of global chaos stretching over the White House, they will be viewed that way.

“I guess she is ready to begin to rip the Clinton franchise away from the Obama franchise,” said Steve Clemons, an Atlantic foreign policy blogger. “This is a staggeringly important interview and, in many ways, is going to reawaken the substantial resistance to her as a reckless interventionist by some quarters. … Her comments on Syria are very provocative.”

One Democratic operative who asked not to be identified said the clear takeaway from the interview was simply that Clinton advisers are “good poll readers,” a reference to Obama’s sinking public approval ratings. A Clinton adviser replied, “That’s ridiculous,” stressing she has no polling operation.

Syria, where the civil war has contributed to the current conflict in Iraq, was on track to become a clear flash point between Clinton and Obama before she even left the administration, and it remains one area where the two are obviously still divided.

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In his own interview with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, published this weekend, Obama reiterated his belief — which he also stated in a separate interview with Goldberg two months ago — that early arming of Syrian rebels in that conflict was a “fantasy” because it would mean arming an opposition made up of “former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth” who had little chance against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces.

But Clinton never agreed with this view, and still doesn’t.

“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad — there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle — the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.

Obama’s approval ratings have sunk, and the string of second-term foreign crises appears endless, from Russian-backed rebels’ alleged downing of a civilian plane in Ukraine to the rise of the militants of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, who are threatening America’s Kurdish allies in Iraq. Clinton’s approval ratings are higher than Obama’s, but a recent POLITICO poll showed they, too, have suffered as Republican critics continue to go after her over the 2012 attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, and amid the myriad crises abroad.

Obama, who ran for president promising to get the U.S. out of Iraq and now finds himself engaged there again, has been slammed by his critics as too slow to embrace the display of American power abroad. Clinton’s aides, meanwhile, insist that she is simply being more candid about her views now than the canned version of herself in her 2008 presidential campaign. In any case, a more visible separation from Obama was, as Goldberg himself notes, only a matter of time.

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On the West Wing’s self-described foreign policy doctrine — “Don’t do stupid s—t,” or “Don’t do stupid stuff” — Clinton was blunt.

“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” she said. “… I think [Obama] was trying to communicate to the American people that he’s not going to do something crazy. I’ve sat in too many rooms with the president. He’s thoughtful, he’s incredibly smart, and able to analyze a lot of different factors that are all moving at the same time. I think he is cautious because he knows what he inherited, both the two wars and the economic front, and he has expended a lot of capital and energy trying to pull us out of the hole we’re in.”

She added, “I think that that’s a political message. It’s not his worldview, if that makes sense to you.”

The interview was with a columnist who is widely seen as the preeminent voice of the moderate-right foreign policy establishment, and one who has focused extensively on the Middle East and Israel. It was slotted two weeks ago for early the following week, meaning two weeks before Obama made an announcement authorizing airstrikes in Iraq.

Clinton did not denounce the president and took pains to praise him at times, noting the difficulty and complexity of the crises he faces.

She made it clear, for instance, that she “advocated” for arming the Syrian rebels but acknowledged there was no way to know with absolute certainty whether it would have made a difference.

( Also on POLITICO: Obama rebukes Syrian 'fantasy')

“I did believe, which is why I advocated this, that if we were to carefully vet, train, and equip early on a core group of the developing Free Syrian Army, we would, number one, have some better insight into what was going on on the ground,” she said.

“Two, we would have been helped in standing up a credible political opposition, which would prove to be very difficult, because there was this constant struggle between what was largely an exile group outside of Syria trying to claim to be the political opposition, and the people on the ground, primarily those doing the fighting and dying, who rejected that, and we were never able to bridge that. … So I did think that eventually, and I said this at the time, in a conflict like this, the hard men with the guns are going to be the more likely actors in any political transition than those on the outside just talking. And therefore we needed to figure out how we could support them on the ground, better equip them, and we didn’t have to go all the way, and I totally understand the cautions that we had to contend with, but we’ll never know. And I don’t think we can claim to know.”

The topic of Syria has been fraught between the Clintons and Obama for much of the last 18 months. At a closed-press event for Sen. John McCain’s institute last year, as POLITICO first reported, Bill Clinton, in a question-and-answer session with the senator, said that Obama should act more forcefully to help the Syrian rebels and that any president risked looking like a “total fool” if they learned the wrong lessons from public opinion polls.

With Goldberg, Hillary Clinton pushed back when asked whether Obama could be accused of “underreaching” in his foreign policy approach.

“You know, I don’t think you can draw that conclusion,” she said. “It’s a very key question. How do you calibrate, that’s the key issue. I think we have learned a lot during this period, but then how to apply it going forward will still take a lot of calibration and balancing.”

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Clinton has in the past discussed the suggested plan to arm Syrian rebels, an idea she and then-CIA head Gen. David Petraeus both pushed, as one of the fights she’d lost internally, including giving it a pointed reference in her book. Over the past 18 months she has crept around the edges of where there was daylight between her and Obama on specific issues. But now she is using the word “failure,” a pointed description that, according to several people familiar with her thinking, dovetails with her frustration with the administration’s response to certain issues in recent months.

A number of Democrats have privately insisted that while they expected Clinton to move away from Obama on the margins of foreign policy, it would be risky to separate too broadly. The risk? Affronting Democrats who did not support her in the 2008 presidential primary against Obama, and whose backing she’ll need if she is to run for president again. But Clinton has clearly decided that on certain issues, there is great risk in staying silent.

On the question of the raging conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Clinton stood firmly with Israel.

“If I were the prime minister of Israel, you’re damn right I would expect to have control over security [on the West Bank], because even if I’m dealing with [Palestinian leader Mahmoud] Abbas, who is 79 years old, and other members of Fatah, who are enjoying a better lifestyle and making money on all kinds of things, that does not protect Israel from the influx of Hamas or cross-border attacks from anywhere else.”

Clinton also pointed to growing anti-Semitism in Europe as she defended Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and said: “I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets. … Israel has a right to defend itself. The steps Hamas has taken to embed rockets and command-and-control facilities and tunnel entrances in civilian areas, this makes a response by Israel difficult.”

Her successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, was recently caught on a hot mic on “Fox News Sunday” appearing to criticize Netanyahu’s description of the Gaza operation as “pinpoint,” given the number of civilian casualties.

“I don’t know a nation, no matter what its values are — and I think that democratic nations have demonstrably better values in a conflict position — that hasn’t made errors, but ultimately the responsibility rests with Hamas,” Clinton said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict. … So the ultimate responsibility has to rest on Hamas and the decisions it made.”

Poll after poll has shown that the American public has little stomach for conflict abroad, or for engaging U.S. troops in drawn-out battles. Some believe, as Goldberg noted, that the U.S. does not have a good enough track record to enforce rules elsewhere.

“I know that that is an opinion held by a certain group of Americans, I get all that. It’s not where I’m at,” Clinton said. Her organizing principle? “Peace, progress, and prosperity,” she said. “This worked for a very long time.”

When Goldberg noted that she “symbolizes” a type of foreign policy engagement that has dwindled in popularity in the U.S., Clinton said, “That’s because most Americans think of engagement and go immediately to military engagement. That’s why I use the phrase ‘smart power.’ I did it deliberately because I thought we had to have another way of talking about American engagement, other than unilateralism and the so-called boots on the ground.”

She added, “You know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling back, you’re not going to make any better decisions than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward. One issue is that we don’t even tell our own story very well these days.”

Goldberg said he considers defeating communism and fascism to be “a big deal,” to which Clinton exclaimed, “That’s how I feel! Maybe this is old-fashioned. OK, I feel that this might be an old-fashioned idea — but I’m about to find out, in more ways than one.”

Goldberg interpreted that declaration from Clinton as essentially a statement of candidacy. Clinton has made similar asides in other interviews, but reading the tea leaves about whether she is going to run sort of misses the point — everything in her actions suggests she already is.