

On Sept. 9, 2013, Hillary Clinton returned to the Obama White House for the first time since leaving her job as secretary of state seven months earlier. Still undecided about a presidential bid, Clinton kept her profile low. But the occasion — a White House summit on animal trafficking — seemed to promise a photo-op with zero political risk.

Instead, Clinton walked into a national security crisis and found herself huddling in the Oval Office with President Barack Obama about an issue that haunts them both to this day, and which Donald Trump invoked in Sunday night’s presidential debate as evidence of Clinton’s poor judgment.


The issue was Obama’s chemical weapons “red line” in Syria, an ultimatum that led Obama to threaten the use of force against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad before ultimately accepting a peaceful resolution. Although Obama defends the outcome, critics in both parties — including three former Obama defense secretaries — accuse him of dangerous indecision and lack of resolve. Trump has called the episode a national “humiliation.”

Trump told the debate audience that the episode “was laughed at all over the world, what happened,” and he sought to pin it directly on Clinton.

“She was there as secretary of state with the so-called line in the sand,” the Republican nominee said, in an apparent reference to what is usually called Obama’s “red line.”

“No, I wasn’t. I was gone,” Clinton protested. “At some point we need to get the facts out.”

But the facts are less convenient than either Clinton or Trump suggested.

Although she was a private citizen at the time, Clinton did play a supporting role in the red-line saga. As it unfolded in late August and early September 2013, she had several conversations with Obama and his top aides and with Secretary of State John Kerry. She issued several public statements supporting Obama, including unplanned remarks on the day of her White House visit.

In doing so, Clinton put her stamp on one of the most consequential episodes of Obama’s presidency, one she has sometimes defended — and at other times tried to distance herself from, as she did on Sunday night.

Trump’s own position is not simple, either. Though he now ridicules Obama’s aborted military action, at the time he urged Obama in a tweet not to follow through on his threat to bomb Syria. He did so even after many observers argued that American credibility was on the line, a view Trump now appears to endorse. But Trump also argued that Obama never should have issued his red-line ultimatum in the first place.

But it was Clinton who had the direct role in the saga.

When she arrived at the White House on Sept. 9, she found Obama’s national security team scrambling.

Two weeks earlier, Obama had threatened airstrikes against Syrian government forces to punish them for using chemical weapons — a violation of a rhetorical “red line” Obama had drawn months earlier.

Obama was wary of entanglement in Syria. Hours before Clinton’s arrival, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave him an escape hatch. Putin offered to force his ally, Assad, to surrender his chemical arsenal if Obama promised not to bomb.

Clinton had not spoken publicly on the subject since Obama’s initial threat, drawing snarky jibes for a two-week silence on Twitter — though she had already been advising Obama and his aides behind the scenes. Now she found herself meeting with Obama in the Oval Office, huddling with top White House officials, and hastily revising her planned remarks before the media to include a public statement on the Russian offer, in which she called Putin’s plan “an important step.”

Obama accepted the Russian proposal a few days later; there would be no U.S. airstrikes. But Obama traded a military conflict for a political one. On the right, the phrase “red line” has become mocking shorthand for weakness and indecision.

Clinton has mostly defended Obama’s performance, backing him at key points as the drama unfolded and declaring its outcome a “net positive.” Since she began running for president, however, Clinton has conceded that the episode left U.S. allies uncertain about American resolve.

“I do think that not being able to follow through with it cost us. I’m certain of that,” Clinton said in a September 2015 event in Washington, D.C.

Lately, Clinton and her aides have preferred to avoid the subject altogether. In a January debate, Clinton refused to say whether she thought the saga had harmed America’s credibility. And during a Sept. 21 appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” her campaign manager, Robby Mook, also dodged the question, saying the decision “was made after she was out of office” and refusing to characterize Clinton’s view. Her campaign did not provide a comment for this story.

The subject puts Clinton in an uncomfortable spot, caught between one of Obama’s most criticized foreign policy decisions and her close embrace of a president beloved by Democratic voters whose support she needs in November.

Trump has eagerly exploited the awkwardness. In a Sept. 7 news release, his campaign said Clinton “strongly backed” Obama’s red line and that she “backed measures that fell far short of the steps that needed to be taken to swiftly resolve the situation.”

“According to experts, this vacuum of American influence directly led to the rise of ISIS,” the release added.

Many experts would dispute that. Trump’s release also did not specify what “steps” should have been taken.

Trump also neglects to mention his own evolving view. In a Sept. 7, 2013, tweet, he urged Obama not to follow through on his threatened attack: “President Obama, do not attack Syria. There is no upside and tremendous downside,” Trump wrote.

It is true that Clinton backed Obama’s original red line. Obama established that marker in an August 2012 news conference after being asked what could prompt him to take military action in Syria. Obama replied that “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. … There would be enormous consequences.”

Obama’s comment surprised some White House officials who worried about its implications. But four months later, in December 2012, Clinton doubled down on it. “We have made our views very clear. This is a red line for the United States,” she said. Clinton said she wouldn’t “telegraph in any specifics what we would do … but suffice to say we are certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur.”

Clinton left the State Department in February 2013. That August, Assad’s forces fired nerve gas into a Damascus suburb, killing a U.S.-estimated 1,429 people, including more than 400 children.

Obama couldn’t ignore it. “There need to be international consequences,” he said on Aug. 28, vowing two days later to take “limited, narrow” military action. Pentagon planners drew up targets and moved warships. On Sept. 3, Kerry laid out the case for action. “It is directly related to our credibility and whether countries still believe the United States when it says something,” Kerry said.

Clinton watched the drama in cautious silence at first. She’d been burned by her support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and knew the public had little appetite for a new military intervention in the Arab world. “Parallels were drawn with the run-up to the war in Iraq,” she recalls in her 2014 book “Hard Choices.”

But the absence from the all-consuming debate of Clinton — the presumed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee — quickly grew conspicuous.

“Hillary has no right to remain silent,” former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer tweeted on Sept. 3. BuzzFeed mocked Clinton when she finally broke a two-week Twitter hiatus not to comment on Syria but to congratulate a woman who swam from Cuba to Florida.

The plot took an abrupt twist on Aug. 31, when Obama startled the world — including many of his own advisers — by announcing he would ask Congress to authorize a strike beforehand. Critics said Obama was losing his nerve and passing the buck for his own red line.

But Clinton came to his defense. “Secretary Clinton supports the president’s effort to enlist the Congress in pursuing a strong and targeted response to the Assad regime’s horrific use of chemical weapons,” a Clinton aide told reporters on Sept. 3.

Now Clinton was drawn into the unfolding drama. In the following days she spoke multiple times with both Kerry and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, offering them political and diplomatic advice. She urged McDonough to enlist the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, to push through a quick bipartisan vote in his committee authorizing the use of force against Syria — a move she felt would give Kerry and Obama leverage before an upcoming meeting with Putin. Clinton even lobbied other senators, including New York Democrat Charles Schumer, to back the controversial measure.

The White House more than welcomed Clinton’s advice. At one point in early September, according to Clinton’s book, McDonough told Clinton that the president wanted to call her again. Clinton demurred, saying that Obama must be too busy. He phoned her anyway.

By then Obama was losing control of the situation. On Aug. 30, Britain’s Parliament unexpectedly voted against military action. Support in the U.S. Congress began to look perilously weak.

Trump, meanwhile, tweeted almost daily as the crisis played out, repeatedly imploring Obama not to strike Syria. “What will we get for bombing Syria besides more debt and a possible long term conflict? Obama needs Congressional approval,” Trump tweeted on Aug. 29, 2013.

But Trump also condemned Obama for having drawn the red line in the first place. “The only reason President Obama wants to attack Syria is to save face over his very dumb RED LINE statement. Do NOT attack Syria, fix U.S.A.,” he tweeted several days later.

The Trump campaign declined to comment.

Then, on Sept. 9, Clinton arrived at the West Wing for the summit on animal trafficking, joined by her daughter, Chelsea, who had made the issue a high-profile cause for the Clinton Foundation. By then, the plot had thickened further in the form of the Russian offer to force Assad to relinquish his chemical weapons if the U.S. agreed not to bomb. (Putin strongly opposed U.S military action against his Syrian ally.)

Soon after her 1 p.m. arrival, Clinton was briefed on the latest developments, then ushered into an Oval Office meeting with Obama. With Congress poised to deal him an embarrassing defeat, she advised that he accept the Russian plan. "I told the President that if the votes for action against Syria were not winnable in Congress he should make lemonade out of lemons and welcome the unexpected overture from Moscow," she recounts in "Hard Choices." Clinton told Obama she was wary of a possible Russian stalling tactic, and understood that the deal would do little to resolve the larger Syrian crisis — but that it was still worth trying. Obama, in need of political cover, asked her to make a public statement to that effect.

Rescue workers work the site of airstrikes in a rebel-held part of eastern Aleppo, Syria, on Sept. 21, 2016. (Photo provided by the Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets.) | AP Photo

After huddling with Obama's national security speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, Clinton appeared before a press corps that had been expecting to hear her views on elephant poaching. Reading from a new introduction to her planned remarks, Clinton said that “it would be an important step” if Syrian leader Assad surrendered his chemical stockpile, one possible thanks only to a “credible military threat" by the U.S.

A few days later, Obama formally agreed to the Russian proposal and halted Pentagon planning for airstrikes. Some key U.S. allies, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, were appalled, saying Obama had sent a dangerous signal of weakness to adversaries like Iran. In the months to come, three Obama defense secretaries — Leon Panetta, Robert Gates and Chuck Hagel — would say he mishandled the situation. “The credibility of the United States is on the line,” Panetta told Yahoo News in October 2014. “It was important for us to stand by our word and go in and do what a commander in chief should do.”

“If you cock that pistol,” Gates told Business Insider in January 2016, “you have to be ready to fire it.”

“I wouldn’t have drawn the line, but once he drew it, he had no choice but to go across,” Trump argued during a Republican primary debate in September 2015. “Somehow, [Obama] just doesn’t have courage. There is something missing from our president. Had he crossed the line and really gone in with force, done something to Assad, if he had gone in with tremendous force, you wouldn’t have millions of people displaced all over the world.”

Obama’s backers call that ridiculous and contend that the final outcome was a clear success. Defying skeptics, international inspectors removed 1,300 tons of chemical weapons from Syria — some from sites now controlled by the Islamic State.

“We ended up getting rid of a weapons-of-mass-destruction threat that was worse than what the CIA wrongly estimated was in Iraq, for which we went to war. Why is that considered a failure?” said Derek Chollet, a former senior Obama Pentagon official who advises Clinton’s campaign. (Recent evidence has emerged suggesting that Assad may have hidden some of his arsenal. The U.S. also believes that the Syrian regime has since attacked civilians with chlorine gas, a substance not covered by the 2013 agreement.)

Clinton's instincts are more hawkish than Obama's, and since joining the presidential race she has repeatedly said she would take stronger action in Syria than Obama has. She cites her support for a 2012 plan to arm Syria's rebels, which Obama rejected, and says she would consider imposing a "no fly" zone in northern Syria.

Yet when it comes to Obama's "red line," Clinton has never directly criticized him. In a September 2015 discussion about military force with The Des Moines Register editorial board, however, Clinton did argue generally that, "If we say we’re going to do something publicly," a president must explain "why we have to go through with doing it ... so that we don’t raise expectations and cause miscalculations."

She did not link Obama or Syria directly to that comment. And, when asked specifically about the red-line saga during a Jan. 17 Democratic primary debate, Clinton defended Obama, calling the agreement with Russia "a very positive outcome."

"We were able to get the chemical weapons out. Getting those chemical weapons out was a big, big deal," she said.

The debate moderator, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, then followed up by asking again whether the episode had damaged American credibility abroad. Clinton would not take the bait. "I think as commander in chief, you have to be constantly evaluating the decisions you have to make," Clinton said.

Then she quickly changed the subject.

