One of the more remarkable contrivances in a year marked by remarkable contrivances is the panic-driven idea that Hillary Clinton is a secret centrist or, God forbid, a closet neo-conservative. The Democratic Party’s undoubtedly poll-driven efforts to appeal to disaffected anti-Trump Republicans with flag-waving displays of patriotism has not, however, been fleshed out with any substantively conservative policy proposals. But this shallow outreach is by itself alarming some vengeful liberals who would prefer to see their political enemies driven before them. The notion that Clinton is adopting a conservative foreign policy is just as much an invention of paranoid liberal imaginations. Hillary Clinton is no neoconservative. She is, however, drawing a distinction between her approach to international conflicts and diplomacy and Barack Obama’s. That represents an inherent repudiation of the president’s confused foreign policy, and that is what is driving the left nuts.

The usual suspects are beside themselves over the fact that neither Clinton nor her campaign has spurned the endorsements of former George W. Bush officials and members of the loose “neocon” amalgam. Some of the hysterical left have confused this temporary and convenient truce for an alliance, and it’s giving them heartburn. These earnest liberals have noticed a very real shift in tone from Clinton, but they are mistaking the symptoms for the source. Clinton has not embraced the ideological convictions of the unduly maligned, poorly understood neoconservative wing of the GOP. She is, however, distancing herself from Barack Obama’s objectively failed and convoluted foreign policy.

Democrats are fond of reminding Republicans of the two U.S.-led conflicts Barack Obama inherited from a president they assured themselves was a warmonger. In the process of pursuing peace, however, Barack Obama has allowed foreign conflicts to flourish. Iraq and Afghanistan no more stable than they were in 2009, and many of the gains the president inherited from his predecessor have been lost. Europe is again at war and was witness to the first invasion and annexation of sovereign territory on the continent by a hostile power since 1945. China, too, has seized territory in hotly contested and militarized areas in the South China Sea, although they went to the trouble of constructing it from scratch. North Africa is host to U.S. air power and Special Forces. Syria, too, is now a theater of operations for American air and ground assets, as is Iraq—where incremental troop augmentations have become the norm. Proxy wars between rising hegemons in the region are raging in states like Yemen to Libya.

It seems the left that was so concerned about the proliferation of armed conflicts in the Bush years became less so when that proliferation occurred under Obama, and the people dying in those wars weren’t Americans.

These are the wages of retrenchment and noninterventionism in conflicts in which the United States and its allies would have had to make a significant commitment of men and material. It is in this White House’s reliance not on partners but proxies to cool the world’s hot spots that led to such a confused state of affairs in which more than one American-backed militia is now shooting at the other. And all of this is being exploited by revisionist powers that seek to carve out destabilizing spheres of influence in their regions.

Barack Obama’s foreign policy is simply unsustainable. Hillary Clinton was destined to repudiate it, even if she cannot escape her role in this sorry state of affairs. Clinton has repeatedly sought to absolve herself of the Syrian imbroglio by contending that she was a voice for more robust, early engagement in the burgeoning civil war, only to be rebuffed by the president. When asked why the United States did not provide more humanitarian aid for the Syrian public even as the civil war became a chemical war, Clinton’s vice presidential nominee, Senator Tim Kaine, deferred. “She wasn’t the decision maker,” he said.

In a recent speech to the American Foreign Legion, Clinton even went so far as to defend America’s existing alliances and the concept of American exceptionalism. She framed her assertions as attacks on her opponent, who has dismissed both, but this was also an implicit rebuke of her former boss. Barack Obama entered the White House dismissing the ideal of American exceptionalism as chauvinism which was offensive to other nations (a point echoed by Donald Trump). He dedicated his administration to the mission of recalibrating America’s alliance structure in Europe and the Middle East. The left isn’t just furious at Clinton for failing to denounce her neo-conservative endorsers; they’re aggravated by the fact that she’s undermining Barack Obama’s legacy.

This trend is unlikely to reverse itself heading into debate season. Inexplicably amid a speech on immigration on Wednesday night, Donald Trump pledged that his administration would create “safe zones” in Syria (a complex and dangerous military operation) for which the “Gulf States” would pay. Trump will carelessly present Clinton with a variety of targets she can shoot down to present herself as a pragmatist when it comes to foreign adventurism. That should mollify her jittery liberal critics. Their focus is, however, misplaced. It is in Clinton’s implicit admission that the next president must begin the work of repairing the damage done to geopolitical stability and American preeminence by Barack Obama that has them in a tizzy. But that’s not neo-conservatism; it’s not even ideological. It’s simply reality.