Trump slams 'dumbest' foreign policy as Clinton vows no more troops in Iraq

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have struck a pointed contrast on deploying ground troops to Iraq in the first televised forum featuring the two presidential nominees.

During the town hall held by NBC News and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America in New York on Wednesday, Clinton pledged that the US was “not putting ground troops into Iraq ever again, and we are not putting ground troops into Syria”, while Trump disagreed.

The Republican nominee, who has long talked about the importance of “taking the oil” in the Middle East, said of Iraq: “We would leave a certain group behind and they would take the various sections where they have the oil.”

The forum, which featured the two candidates speaking separately but back-to-back, came just hours after Trump laid into Clinton as “trigger happy”. During an address on defense spending in Philadelphia earlier in the day, Trump suggested there wasn’t a country in the Middle East that Clinton did not want to invade – an assertion he repeated on Wednesday evening.

The United States currently has roughly 5,000 troops deployed in Iraq, mostly as official non-combat advisers for the Iraqi military, along with special operations forces who conduct and assist in raids against Islamic State. Navy and air force pilots also participate daily in air attacks on the terrorist group.

The NBC News discussion, moderated by Matt Lauer at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan, centered on national security and foreign policy. While both candidates had fielded many of the same questions before, the evening marked the first opportunity of the general election for both candidates to tee up their arguments before the American public.

It also arrived a little under three weeks before the first presidential debate on 26 September, serving as a test run for the first time Clinton and Trump will share the same stage with millions of voters watching at home. While Clinton was more controlled in her responses, reiterating the same talking points on issues ranging from the controversy over her use of a private email server as secretary of state to her support for the Iraq war, Trump maintained his signature freewheeling style that skirted specifics on policy.

Facing a question from an audience member on military sexual assault, Trump stood by a tweet from 2013, in which he suggested the epidemic was a consequence of allowing women to serve in the military.

“26,000 unreported sexual assults [sic] in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?” Trump had tweeted at the time. When confronted about the tweet, Trump defended his statement by saying “it is a correct tweet”.

He then demurred, however, from saying women should no longer serve in the military and insisted firmly if incoherently that “something has to be happened”.

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Although he was specifically asked what he would do, if elected president, to curb military sexual assault, Trump remained vague. “We have to come down very hard on that and do something about that,” he offered.

Trump also touched on his bumpy relationship with various foreign leaders. In the aftermath of his surprise trip to Mexico last week, he contended that it had been a success because Luis Videgaray, the country’s finance minister, had resigned on Wednesday. Videgaray reportedly played a key role in facilitating the visit, prompting Trump to boast that “the people who arranged the trip have been forced out of government”.

Trump also furthered his so-called “bromance” with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, whom he repeatedly praised and cast as a better leader than Barack Obama. In particular Trump cited Putin’s 82% approval rating as a sign of the Russian leader’s acumen.

Trump went on to characterize his relationship with Putin as mutually beneficial.

“If he says great things about me, I’m gonna say great things about him,” Trump said. “I think when he calls me brilliant, I’ll take the compliment. OK?

“I think I would have a very, very good relationship with Putin and a very good relationship with Russia,” he added.

Clinton, by contrast, sought to re-emphasize her foreign policy expertise while defending her legacy while serving as Obama’s secretary of state. The Democratic nominee repeated once more that it was “a mistake” for her to use a private email while at the helm of the State Department.

“I have made no excuses for it. It was something that should not have been done,” Clinton said.

She went on to reaffirm that there was neither evidence of her system being hacked nor that she had exchanged classified information on her private server.

“Nothing, and I will repeat this … none of the emails sent or received by me had such a [top secret] header,” Clinton said, while referring to an investigation by the justice department that ultimately brought no charges upon her.

The Department of Justice investigation did find a handful of classified markers in Clinton’s emails, some of which FBI director James Comey said she should have known about, but concluded there was no evidence she had intentionally mishandled classified information.

Moments before Clinton appeared at the forum, Democrats on the House oversight committee released an email exchange between her and former secretary of state Colin Powell, in which he advised her on how to bypass state department servers.

Asked by Clinton about restrictions on his use of a personal Blackberry, Powell responded that he had a personal computer hooked up to a private phone line “without it going through the state department servers”.

“Be very careful,” he wrote. “I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data.”

Clinton did not reference Powell in her remarks at the forum, choosing instead to express regret for her actions. She struck a similar tone when discussing her support for the Iraq war, although not without pointing out that Trump also backed the invasion but has refused to acknowledge his support.

“I took responsibility for my decision,” Clinton said of her vote for the Iraq war. “My opponent has refused to take responsibility for his support.”

Indeed, Trump falsely stated that he had been against the war all along – a claim that went unchallenged by Lauer. Clinton also pointed out there was “no difference” between her position on Libya and that of Trump.

“He’s on record extensively supporting intervention in Libya,” she said.

Trump, in turn, criticized the Obama administration as pursuing “the dumbest foreign policy” he had ever seen.

“The generals have been reduced to rubble,” Trump said, when pressed on the assertion he has made during his campaign that he knows more about Islamic State than military generals.

Asked what his own strategy would look like against the militant group, Trump declined to say.

“I have a substantial chance of winning – make America great again,” he said. “If I win, I don’t want to broadcast to the enemy what my plan is.”

A new NBC News/Survey Monkey poll found Trump holding a sizeable lead over Clinton among military and veteran voters, with 55% to her 36%. Clinton has nonetheless earned endorsements from a wide swath of national security experts, including former aides to Republican presidents George W Bush and Ronald Reagan, who have deemed Trump as too dangerous to assume the role of commander-in-chief. A number of surveys have also found voters more inclined to trust Clinton’s handling of terrorism over that of Trump’s.