Hillary Clinton Lays Out Her Own Middle East Approach — And It’s Not Obama’s

The Huffington Post reports:

After her landslide loss in the New Hampshire primary last month, Hillary Clinton responded by tying herself tightly to President Barack Obama and slamming her opponent, Bernie Sanders, for past criticism of the president.

That embrace, though, has not extended beyond U.S. shores. On Monday, Clinton used her speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to continue to lay down a foreign policy vision starkly at odds with the Obama doctrine of restraint and retrenchment. Clinton sent a clear signal: Her presidency would replace reluctance to intervene and get bogged down in Middle East conflicts with a hawkish approach — one her aides have previously asked reporters to describe as “muscular.”

Clinton, in her AIPAC speech, repeated and, in some cases, put a finer point on arguments she advancced in the fall at a major Brookings Institute speech, and in December at the Saban Forum. But set against the backdrop of a recent profile of Obama’s foreign policy doctrine by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, as well as the decision by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to skip AIPAC’s gathering while Obama traveled to Cuba, the daylight between the world views of Clinton and Obama was that much more apparent.

Obama, as described by Goldberg, has attempted to pull the U.S. back from unwinnable conflicts in the Middle East, and has criticized a shoot-first mentality in Washington’s foreign policy network. He doesn’t seem to have won over Clinton.

Imagine that.