By Alex Bregman

On April 25, New York Times White House correspondent Mark Landler spoke to Yahoo News Chief Washington Correspondent Olivier Knox on “Yahoo News Live” about President Obama’s decision to send up to 250 more U.S. military personnel to fight ISIS in Syria and his new book, “Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power.”

On the timing of Obama’s announcement about forces in Syria, Landler told Knox: “He’d like to leave the Syria conflict to his successor with Raqqa, which, of course, is the stronghold of the Islamic State in Syria, and Mosul, which is the largest Iraqi city still under ISIS control in Iraq — he’d like to leave both of those either liberated or well on the way to being liberated. In order to do that, I think he feels like he has to up the tempo of the battle against ISIS.”

Landler noted that this increase in forces goes against Obama’s initial strategy of dealing with Syria: “This has been President Obama’s fear from the start in getting involved in Syria, and here he is adding to the existing number of troops, and it does have a slight feeling of a slippery slope.” He continued, “With today’s announcement we’re now looking at a significant number of forces on the ground, and though the White House always draws this distinction between forces that are involved in combat and merely support, it’s a pretty fine distinction.”

In Landler’s new book, he writes about the differences on foreign policy between Obama and his former secretary of state turned Democratic frontrunner for president, Hillary Clinton. Specifically on Syria, Clinton had argued for a much more “robust” approach from the start. On why Clinton has not brought up these differences very much on the campaign trail, Landler said, “My hunch is, as we pivot from the primary season to the general election you’re going to start to hear a lot more, and she will probably begin to show a bit of daylight with him on some of these core war-and-peace-related issues.”

Landler also wrote in the New York Times this weekend and in the book that Clinton is “the only hawk left in the [2016] race.” Knox asked: If Clinton is a hawk, what does that make GOP opponents Donald Trump and Ted Cruz? Landler said: “If you listen to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, they sound almost like superhawks. They talk about needing to see whether we can make desert sand glow, in the words of Ted Cruz when speaking about bombing ISIS, or they talk about vastly increasing our military resources, in the case of Donald Trump. But if you dig beneath the surface with both of them, it’s more complicated.” He continued, “There’s sort of this odd paradox with both of them. They speak in extremely robust, muscular, hawkish rhetoric, but if you dig a little bit deeper their positions actually have an isolationist tinge to it. … Where Hillary is different is, she’s really foursquare behind a full network of U.S. alliances, a full commitment of U.S. engagement around the world — very much the post-World War II model of a liberal international order headed by the United States, I think more aggressively than President Obama has been and perhaps more aggressively than either of these two Republican opponents would be.”

