Hillary's Predictable Syria Protest

Hillary's Predictable Syria Protest

08/26/14

Zane Albayati

Domestic Politics, The Presidency, Foreign Policy, United States

The purpose of Mrs. Clinton’s seemingly provocative comments is clear—to distance herself from Obama’s increasingly unpopular foreign policy.

Much has been made of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, where she deliberately, albeit delicately, disparaged certain aspects of the Obama foreign policy. Immediately after, the Washington punditry began in earnest to promote the narrative of a rift between Mrs. Clinton and President Obama over the latter’s management of U.S. foreign affairs. Obama’s neoconservative and liberal-internationalist critics quickly exploited the comments in efforts to vindicate their perennial belligerence. Charles Krauthammer uncharacteristically praised Clinton, writing in the Washington Post that she was altogether correct in her criticism. On CBS, Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer echoed Krauthammer's sentiments. Even The Weekly Standard, no friend of Clinton’s, couldn’t help but to enthusiastically wade into the supposed rift, running a Special Guest Editorial entitled “Obama’s Foreign Policy Failures,” which featured verbatim excerpts from the now famous interview.

Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/hillarys-predictable-syria-protest-11151

In order to stand out in the upcoming Democratic primary contest, as well as in a general-election setting, Clinton is frantically searching for ways to distance herself from Obama’s increasingly unpopular foreign policy, a foreign policy she integrally participated in crafting during Obama’s first term, even if the policies she now professes support for are not all too different from the ones her former employer presently advocates.