EDGARTOWN, Massachusetts: Hillary Rodham Clinton is contrasting her vision for America’s role in the world with President Barack Obama’s ahead of a possible 2016 White House bid, after working to carry out Obama’s foreign policy mission for four years as secretary of state.

In an interview published last weekend, the former secretary of state drew the sharpest distinctions yet from Obama in a rebuke of his cautious approach to global crises. “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Clinton said in a weekend magazine interview, referring to a version of the phrase Obama and his advisers have used privately to describe his approach to foreign policy.

Asked for her organizing principle, she replied: “Peace, progress and prosperity. This worked for a very long time.”

Clinton wrapped her critiques in expressions of respect for the president and sympathy for the tough global decisions he grapples with from the Oval Office. On Monday, a vacation day for Obama, he dealt with issues involving Iraq, Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, as well as terrorism and Ebola in Africa.

“He’s thoughtful, he’s incredibly smart, and able to analyze a lot of different factors that are all moving at the same time,” she said. “I think he is cautious because he knows what he inherited, both the two wars and the economic front, and he has expended a lot of capital and energy trying to pull us out of the hole we’re in.”

In a wide-ranging interview published on The Atlantic’s website, Clinton offered an uncompromising defense of Israel’s battle against Hamas in Gaza and argued against Obama’s decision not to build up a rebel fighting force to confront Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Clinton previously described her advocacy for the Syrian rebellion in “Hard Choices,” her memoir about her time leading the State Department. Obama has said supporting the rebels would not have stopped Al-Qaeda-inspired groups from rampaging across Syria and inside Iraq today.

Clinton and then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta reportedly argued for arming the rebels who first stood up to Assad three years ago. Since then, the question of “arming the rebels” has become more complicated, as fighters linked to Al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist groups have joined the rebellion.

She told The Atlantic she can’t say definitively that her recommendations as secretary of state would have made a difference, but “the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.”

The White House declined to respond to Clinton’s comments, but said her team gave them a heads-up before the interview was published.

The White House did say the president, along with first lady Michelle Obama, planned to see Clinton Wednesday at a party on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard, where Obama is vacationing. Clinton visiting for a memoir-signing session at a bookstore, while the Obamas are in the midst of a two-week vacation.

It was unclear whether former President Bill Clinton also planned to attend the party.