Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has outlined her foreign policy proposals, which call for “intensifying and accelerating” President Obama’s strategy against the Islamic State. Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Clinton called for sending more U.S. special forces to Syria and for imposing a no-fly zone over Syria.
Hillary Clinton: “A more effective coalition air campaign is necessary, but not sufficient. And we should be honest about the fact that, to be successful, airstrikes will have to be combined with ground forces actually taking back more territory from ISIS. Like President Obama, I do not believe that we should again have a hundred thousand American troops in combat in the Middle East. That is just not the smart move to make here. If we have learned anything from 15 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s that local people and nations have to secure their own communities. We can help them, and we should, but we cannot substitute for them.”
Clinton also proposed a “intelligence surge,” and called on technology companies to work with the government on issues of encryption. A growing number of officials have called on companies to offer government agencies a backdoor into their encrypted tools in the wake of the Paris attacks, even though officials have not presented any evidence that the Paris attackers even used encryption. Click here to see our recent interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald on encryption, mass surveillance and the aftermath of Paris.