In a speech yesterday, Obama offered an important window into his biggest disagreement with Clinton
Matthew Yglesias
Vox

President Barack Obama delivered a commencement address at the Air Force Academy on Thursday — not really an occasion for a big partisan political speech. But he did briefly offer a defense of his decision to not intervene more forcefully in the Syrian Civil War, an aspect of his presidency that's met with the least approval from the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, and an area where his thinking is likely somewhat different from Hillary Clinton's.

Obama's view, essentially, is that the kind of small force with a limited mission that people have proposed is a mirage. The Iranians must have initially envisioned a small force with a limited mission, too. But once they committed themselves to propping up Assad, they had to keep pouring more and more into the mission. By the same token, if Obama had put American troops on the ground to try to help the rebels win the war, he would, in practice, have had to keep doing more and more until they eventually won the war.

The real disagreement between Obama and the bulk of the DC foreign policy community is about the bigger picture. Starting with the Persian Gulf War, continuing through the Clinton administration's policy of "dual containment," and accelerating with the 2003 invasion of Iraq and 2007 troop surge, the United States has been continually and forcefully present on the ground in the Middle East. This has built up an expectation in the media that political crises in the region are problems that the United States ought to solve with military force, if necessary — an expectation that doesn't exist with regard to, say, central Africa.

Obama sees this as fundamentally myopic — a perpetual motion machine of intervention in which the United States is perennially putting out fires whose root causes can only be addressed by the governments in the area. It's not that he wants to do nothing in the Middle East, but he wants to see more of America's attention focused on East Asia and on our longstanding relationships with Europe and Latin America. In that view, the odd thing about Syria isn't that he didn't send troops in to fix everything. It's that a strange presumption exists that it's somehow incumbent on the United States to fix that specific problem. Especially when the world actually has a ton of problems and Syria doesn't seem highly amenable to fixing.