Molly O’Toole compares Trump’s anti-Clinton attacks on foreign policy to Sanders’:

As the presumptive GOP nominee for weeks, Trump already has honed a retort, questioning the former secretary of state’s judgment. He’s barraged her vote for the Iraq war and blamed her push for intervention in Libya with the current “mess,” as Obama himself put it last week.

Sanders has criticized Clinton many times for poor foreign policy judgment, and Trump is trying to do the same, but Trump is in an even weaker position than Sanders was to make these attacks. On Libya, for example, Clinton could deflect Sanders’ attack by pointing to a Senate resolution Sanders co-sponsored that included a call for a U.N.-backed “no-fly zone.” Sanders wasn’t committing to a war for regime change when he backed that resolution, but it muddied the waters enough that his criticism didn’t seem to do much damage. Sanders’ position on the Libyan intervention was much more skeptical than Trump’s initial outright support for it, but Sanders couldn’t use that to his advantage. Trump will have an even tougher time going after Clinton for bad judgment when he is on record demanding that the U.S. do what he attacks Clinton for supporting in Libya. Both Obama and Clinton have been lucky to have general election opponents that can’t credibly attack them on one of their biggest blunders.

The other problem Sanders had in taking on Clinton on foreign policy was that these issues weren’t the focus of his campaign, he didn’t talk very much about them, and when he did he often had to fall back on reminding people that he voted against the Iraq war. Even though Sanders could point to an unambiguous record of better foreign policy judgment, he still struggled to use Clinton’s weaknesses against her because foreign policy was never his strong suit. If Sanders didn’t pay much attention to foreign policy overall, he nonetheless generally knew what he was talking about. Trump doesn’t have Sanders’ record, and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. All of that puts him at a great disadvantage in any debate on foreign policy with Clinton, which is all the more unfortunate when we remember just how shoddy her record is.