Hillary Clinton derided President Obama’s famous, if unofficial, foreign-policy mantra as unworthy of a great nation.
“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Clinton, who served as secretary of state during Obama’s first term, told The Atlantic.
Obama offered a saltier version of that phrase to reporters as he scolded them for their coverage of his foreign policy during a recent trip to Asia. “With the chat being off the record, a definitive accounting of what was said is hard to come by; it is clear, though, that the thrust of the president’s message was this: Foreign policy is hard, you guys are scoring it like a campaign debate, and moreover, you’re doing it inaccurately,” Rolling Stone recounted. ”He went further, telling the dozen or so reporters that what he favored was a judicious use of American power, and that his primary concern was not to get the country embroiled in situations from which it might take a decade to extract ourselves. He offered up an oddly sophomoric mantra for his foreign policy: “Don’t do stupid s***.”
Clinton allowed that Obama was “trying to communicate to the American people that he’s not going to do something crazy.”