This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 10th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

To the extent you can pull a bit of substance out of last night's presidential debate between Donald

Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Much of that substance focused on Syria and Russian involvement there.

Chris Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute offers his thoughts.

What came across in this debate from the side of Hillary Clinton as it relates to foreign policy seems to be that she wants to arm more groups in the Middle East

and stick the U.S. toe in the water of continued involvement there.

Right, I mean Hillary Clinton, while she was still Secretary of State in 2011, 2012,

as the Syrian Civil War was worsening, argued in favor of greater U.S.

involvement than ultimately occurred.

It's false.

It's incorrect to say that the Obama administration has done nothing in Syria

But they have been so far reluctant to harm Syrian rebels who they are

concerned may turn those weapons on us or shift their allegiances or be defeated and have their weapons taken from them as happened to the Iraqi forces that we armed in Iraq.

So she was fairly consistent, I think,

in the debate last night in kind of reiterating

her support for arming opposition groups inside of Syria, anti-aside groups.

She also talked about safe zones and a no-fly zone, which in 2016 involves potentially action against a Russian

aircraft that are flying over Syria periodically. So that's a lot more, it seems to be dangerous

than when it was first proposed back in 2012.

But she didn't really back away from that.

She did clarify that she would not support the use of ground troops in Syria

...