Among those of us who write frequently about Hillary Clinton’s chances of becoming president, there have generally been two key assumptions: First, that Clinton’s biggest obstacle to winning the Democratic nomination, such as it is, will be the rising economic populism within the party, not a foreign policy schism. And second, that Barack Obama and his advisers will give Clinton a fair amount of latitude in distancing herself from his administration, because they understand that this will help her in 2016, and because they believe a Clinton victory is their best hope of protecting his legacy.

Since Sunday, however, when Clinton’s provocative interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg came out, both assumptions have looked somewhat questionable.

In the interview, Clinton was surprisingly critical of Obama’s foreign policy worldview, mostly from the right. “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,” Clinton told Goldberg. In general, she derided Obama's approach as simplistic. “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Clinton said, alluding to a phrase Team Obama has used to summarize its foreign policy.

In response, the president’s top campaign strategist, David Axelrod, huffed on Twitter that, “Just to clarify: ‘Don't do stupid stuff’ means stuff like occupying Iraq in the first place, which was a tragically bad decision”—a decision Clinton famously supported while in the Senate. Meanwhile, the liberal activist group MoveOn has issued a statement urging Clinton to “think long and hard before embracing the same polices advocated by right-wing war hawks that got American into Iraq.”

Clinton’s aides have tried to downplay her comments, saying they arranged the interview before they knew Obama would strike Sunni radicals last week. But it’s fair to say Hillary, too, has long assumed that the bigger threat to her 2016 nomination chances was economic policy rather than foreign policy. Though she often talks about income inequality in ways that seem targeted to reassure liberals (even if this liberal doesn’t find the talk reassuring), she has felt comfortable staking out more hawkish national security positions than Obama, not least in her recently-released memoir.