On Jan. 2, President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani . For the next week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren repeatedly appeared on television to argue that Trump was failing at his job as commander in chief.

This is not a moment when a president should be escalating tensions and moving us to war, the Democratic presidential candidate said on CNN, a day after saying she would not have ordered the strike.

Soleimani was a bad guy, but the question is: Whats the right response? having killed Soleimani does not make America safer, Warren said on ABCs The View. On Meet the Press, she warned that Trumps decision could expand costly U.S. military interventions and cause further suffering for millions of people in the Middle East.

As most other presidential aspirants responded with prewritten remarks, Warrens team hoped live media appearances would prove she could handle both international upheaval and scrutiny of her foreign policy expertise.

But some on the left reacted by saying the Massachusetts senator was shoring up a problematic status quo. Warren echoed Trumps talking points, wrote Jacobin, a socialist magazine, when she acknowledged Soleimanis responsibility for the deaths of thousands, including hundreds of Americans.

Vice President Joe Biden , one of her rivals in the primary race, said the Soleimani strike showed the need for a Democratic presidential nominee with experience a clear argument against candidates like Warren who havent worked on foreign policy as long. From the right, ABC host Meghan McCain forced Warren into a lengthy and tendentious exchange about whether Soleimani should be called a terrorist.

Warrens vision of global affairs can be hard to pin down. To some extent, thats by design. Conversations with more than a dozen Warren staffers and informal advisers reveal a strategy that doesnt seek to make national security a point of major contention in the Democratic primary. Shes not competing with Biden in romanticizing the Barack Obama administration, nor trying to challenge Sen. Bernie Sanders s image as a prescient critic of American power and international dominance.

Its not that Warren lacks plans. She would approach the world like she would the U.S.: using the power of government to reshape the relationship between powerful wealthy interests and significantly less powerful communities. She wants to reduce Americas foreign military presence but increase Washingtons power to tackle problems such as the way global financial corruption and authoritarianism enable each other.

With Warren nearing a make-or-break point for her campaign, the story of how she built her profile on foreign policy reflects the way shes approached her decade-old political career. She has demonstrated both liberal instincts and comfort with existing power structures, seeking to earn peoples trust that she is the right person to enact vital change. That means shes still not seen as left enough in some quarters, nor viewed as a trusted executor of the establishments priorities. But Warren is convinced shes done the work to succeed.

Entering The Foreign Policy Debate

By the time Warren first seriously engaged with foreign policy as she ran for the Senate in 2012, she was already seen as a liberal hero willing to push boundaries. She didnt seek that kind of reputation on global affairs.

Challenging Army National Guard Col. Scott Brown for the Massachusetts seat, Warren primarily talked about domestic policy. But she was vocal in supporting the eras hawkish line on Iran. Then-President Barack Obama was boasting about subjecting the Islamic Republic to expansive sanctions that would, he predicted, push it into a deal limiting its nuclear program. On her campaign website, Warren endorsed strong sanctions and went even further by saying Tehran was already pursuing nuclear weapons. Progressives pushed back , noting that Obama officials and U.S. allies rejected that claim.

At the time, there was no shortage of Democrats saying it was correct to get tough on Iran. But some voices warned against overly aggressive rhetoric that risked a rush to war. Warrens fellow Senate candidate that cycle, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, produced a television ad decrying a potential conflict, and experts were already warning that the bipartisan drive for ever-broadening sanctions was taking a humanitarian toll and could backfire. Warren wasnt saber-rattling, but she wasnt in the liberal vanguard.

Once in Congress, Warren faced an early vote pitting skeptics of the national security establishment against the Obama administration: whether John Brennan should lead the CIA. Watchdogs like the ACLU , libertarian firebrand Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Senate progressives said Brennans confirmation should depend on Obama revealing more about his controversial and secretive targeted-killing program. Some worried Brennans past in the intelligence community meant he wouldnt support reining in the power of its agencies. The coalition won a degree of new transparency from Obama, but members remained wary: Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Sanders (I-Vt.) voted against Brennan.

Warren held the White House line.

The new senator also maintained ties to the defense industry by protecting jobs related to it in her state. She had explained during her campaign that, although she opposed greater intervention abroad and wanted less defense spending, she would be thoughtful in reshaping the military, not oppositional.

But it was increasingly clear the mismatch between Warrens assertive push for a more just domestic policy and her caution on foreign policy risked trouble with more liberal elements of the Democratic base who hoped she would be their champion.

The summer of 2014 brought a stark example: Asked about Israels conduct in its campaign in Gaza and her vote to send it $225 million in additional U.S. aid even as it engaged in alleged war crimes, Warren defended the funding and Israeli military behavior, saying Palestinian civilian deaths were because of Palestinian militants tactics a controversial assertion common among Israel hawks. That, ladies and gentlemen, is your inspiring left-wing icon of the Democratic Party, commentator Glenn Greenwald wrote in a critique.

Three months later, Warren visited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on her first official trip abroad.

Warren was willing to venture from tradition on sensitive Mideast issues when she had some degree of cover, especially from Obama. Five months after her Israel trip, Warren became one of eight Democratic senators to skip Netanyahus GOP-sponsored address to Congress criticizing the presidents negotiations with Iran, and when Obama unveiled his final nuclear deal, she was one of its early supporters in the Senate.

Her path reflected the larger Warren political playbook: maintaining institutional credibility and power while pressuring the establishment and the Democratic Party consensus in carefully chosen ways.

In the spring of 2014, she used her first major national security speech to describe how U.S. military actions harm foreign civilians, fueling anger abroad. Warren didnt outright condemn Obamas counterterrorism programs, which killed hundreds of non-militants despite the administrations claims that they were surgical, but she used her platform as one of the best-known members of his party to argue that reforming the U.S. approach to global affairs was about more than just keeping Democrats in office.

When we debate the costs and benefits of intervention when we discuss potential military action around the world the talk about collateral damage and civilian casualties too often seems quiet, she said. The failure to make civilian casualties a full and robust part of our national conversation over the use of force is dangerous.

Warren was one of a minority of Democrats who rejected two military requests Obama made of Congress: She voted against funding for U.S.-aligned rebels in Syria in 2014 and against more weapons to Saudi Arabia for a bloody intervention in Yemen in 2016. And she joined a challenge to Obamas top generals by supporting Sen. Kirsten Gillibrands (D-N.Y.) proposal to change how the armed forces handle sexual assault.

Warren picked her biggest fight with Obama and with decades-old foreign policy orthodoxy on behalf of the chief aim of her political career: keeping capitalism in check.

In 2015, she led congressional resistance to the presidents Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement.

Obama sold the accord as good for the U.S. economy and vital for rallying American partners against the rise of China, rallying influential supporters from both parties accustomed to bipartisan support for trade deals. Warren argued that the agreement would overwhelmingly benefit corporations. Her credentials shifted the dynamics of the fight, turning it from a traditional dispute between ideological leftists and technocratic neoliberals into a serious battle over the Democratic agenda in which both sides could claim credibility and policy chops, and attracting progressives eager for a leader.

Obama used Republican support to win the authority he wanted to secure the deal. Warren and her allies, however, won the war. They made the TPP politically toxic. Hillary Clinton disavowed it as a Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, and Obama chose not to push it through before Trump took office.

Auditioning For Commander In Chief

Warren entered the Trump era as one of his most likely Democratic challengers. Early on, she moved to ensure national security experience wouldnt be a weakness in any potential match-up. She secured a spot on the Senate Armed Services Committee weeks after Trumps victory and soon hired a new top adviser: Sasha Baker, a high-ranking aide to Obamas last secretary of defense who peers say had a reputation as a savvy institutionalist with a sense of how to get things done in Washington.

Bakers role was to be an operator in service of Warrens goals not to fill a blank slate.

She ran for the Senate and talked about Pentagon reform as a candidate and then chose to get on Armed Services. Its her interest in bringing a progressive perspective to the sources of American power that makes Sasha Baker possible rather than the other way around, said Heather Hurlburt, an analyst at the think tank New America who has tracked how Democrats talk about foreign policy for years.