Hillary Clinton issued a call to strengthen America’s international alliances and commitment to “defeating terrorism” in the wake of Thursday’s terrorist attack in Nice, France that left at least 84 dead.
“Every American stands in strong solidarity with the people of France, and we say with one voice: we will not be intimidated,” Clinton said in a statement. “We will never allow terrorists to undermine the egalitarian and democratic values that underpin our very way of life. This cowardly attack only strengthens our commitment to our alliance and to defeating terrorism around the world.”
The former secretary of state expanded on her approach in a Thursday night phone interview on Fox’s “O’Reilly Factor,” pointing to singular attacks on civilians as proof that we’re fighting “a different kind of war.”
While Clinton declined to answer O’Reilly’s question about issuing a formal declaration of war against the Islamic State, she repeatedly used the word to describe the effort to defeat the terror group.
“We’ve got to do more to understand that this is a war against these terrorist groups, the radical jihadist groups,” she said.
Clinton proposed modernizing NATO to better prepare for future terrorist attacks, accelerating the coordination of intelligence sharing between countries, and avoiding playing into ISIL’s hands by sending American troops into Iraq or Syria.
Instead, she said, “We’ve got to go after their headquarters. We have to keep pushing them into a smaller and smaller territory so that we can take out their leadership, take out their infrastructure.”
