Clinton remains tight-lipped about a possible run for the White House in 2016, but she isn’t staying quiet about Obama’s foreign policy, criticising his lack of action in helping Syrians who rose up against President Bashar al-Assad.
“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad – there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle – the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said in an interview with The Atlantic.
Clinton worked closely with Obama during his first presidential term before stepping down in January 2013, but now it appears she is trying to distance herself from the President, who remains unpopular with US voters.
Questioned about Obama’s slogan of “Don’t do stupid stuff”, to describe his foreign policy thinking, Clinton replied: “Great nations need organising principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organising principle.”
