Mick Hartley

Well, this is encouraging:

Hillary Clinton will order a "full review" of the United States' strategy on Syria as a "first key task" of her presidency, resetting the policy to emphasise the "murderous" nature of the Assad regime, foreign policy adviser with her campaign has said.

Jeremy Bash, who served as chief of staff for the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, said Mrs Clinton would both escalate the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and work to get Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, "out of there".

"A Clinton administration will not shrink from making clear to the world exactly what the Assad regime is," he said in an exclusive interview with The Telegraph. "It is a murderous regime that violates human rights; that has violated international law; used chemical weapons against his own people; has killed hundreds of thousands of people, including tens of thousands of children."

It would certainly mark a dramatic change from the Obama years of inaction. Will she also be rethinking the Iran deal? That would sort of come with the territory, you'd think, if she's serious about Assad.

It would be remiss, meanwhile, as we contemplate the glorious years ahead, not to reference Paul Berman's rather extraordinary piece in the Tablet: The Grandeur of Hillary Clinton.