In her pursuit of the Democratic nomination for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton has emphasized her ties to President Barack Obama. She regularly tells the story of how he wooed her into serving as his secretary of state and recites, typically to a roar of applause, the line: “President Obama doesn’t get the credit he deserves.”

But the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday, and a presidential election that has suddenly taken a turn toward foreign policy, have complicated Clinton’s strategy of aligning herself closely with Obama, who is widely popular among Democratic primary voters and whose support she will need should she advance to the general election.

On Saturday in the second Democratic debate, Clinton declined to directly respond to a question about whether she thought Obama had underestimated the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which French officials have said was responsible for the attacks.

But she did — indirectly and deftly — contradict Obama’s comments, made in a television interview recorded a day before the attacks, that the Islamic State had been “contained” in Iraq and Syria.

“We have to look at ISIS as the leading threat of an international terror network,” Clinton said. “It cannot be contained; it must be defeated.”

Clinton’s campaign has said for months that it sees no reason to break with Obama. Clinton has instead positioned her agenda around plans to “build on the progress” of the Obama administration. In places like South Carolina where African-American voters, in particular, overwhelmingly support the president, Clinton devotes much of her stump speech to effusively praising Obama’s success in reviving the economy after the 2008 financial crisis.

In a New York Times/CBS News survey released last Thursday, 79 percent of Democrats said they were satisfied or very satisfied with Obama’s presidency and 60 percent said they would like to see the next president continue his policies.

But the renewed emphasis on terrorism in the past few days has laid bare Clinton’s long-held differences with Obama on foreign policy and when the United States should intervene in conflicts abroad.

For four years as secretary of state, Clinton played a prominent role in nearly every foreign policy issue of Obama’s first term, often pushing the White House to embrace a more aggressive approach. She urged the administration to join a NATO-led coalition to oust Col. Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, proposed that more forces be left in Iraq and pushed to funnel arms to moderate Syrian rebels.

“I assume she and her advisers are trying to calibrate Obama’s approval rating right now,” said Paul R. Pillar, a former CIA analyst who teaches at Georgetown University. But he added, “I think the conventional wisdom, that Hillary Clinton is a more hawkish person and would be a more hawkish president, with everything that adjective implies, is correct.”

Clinton has gone further than Obama on Syria by proposing that a coalition put in place a no-fly zone to provide safe areas for Syrians, an approach several Republican presidential candidates have also embraced. And she frequently talks about how she pushed Obama to arm some Syrian rebels.

“I did early on say we needed to try to find a way to train and equip moderates very early on,” Clinton said Saturday. “Because I thought there would be extremist groups filling the vacuum.”

The images from France have not prompted Obama to abandon his deep reluctance to send additional U.S. troops to Iraq and Syria.

“We don’t believe U.S. troops are the answer to the problem,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, said Sunday. “The further introduction of U.S. troops to fully re-engage in ground combat in the Middle East is not the way to deal with this challenge.”

In an interview with ABC News on Sunday, Rhodes sought to clarify Obama’s comment that the Islamic State had been contained. Rhodes said, “The fact is, we have been able to stop that geographic advance and take back significant amounts of territory in both northern Iraq and northern Syria.”

Obama’s reaction to the attacks in France reminded foreign policy experts of the gulf between the president and Clinton, which first emerged in their 2008 primary contest as Obama contrasted his anti-war message with Clinton’s 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

“Both when she was secretary of state and since, she has had a sense of focusing not just on the cost of action, but the cost of inaction,” said Dennis B. Ross, a former senior adviser to Obama who is now a distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “President Obama has been much more inclined to the cost of action versus the cost of inaction.”

But for Clinton, embracing an inclination toward intervention is potentially an even more precarious proposition in a Democratic primary than breaking with Obama.

Clinton’s Iraq war vote, which she has repeatedly said was a mistake, was a major factor in her defeat in the 2008 primary, and it remains a vulnerability.

On Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a Democratic rival, assailed her for supporting the war. “I don’t think any sensible person would disagree that the invasion of Iraq led to the massive level of instability we are seeing right now,” he said.

Appearing acutely aware of how liberal primary voters, particularly in Iowa, view her hawkish reputation, Clinton said on Saturday that “this cannot be an American fight” and that the United States should not bear “the bulk of the responsibility.”

Those remarks allowed Republicans to tie Clinton to an administration that they widely view as ineffective in combating the Islamic State. “The president has admitted he does not have a strategy as it relates to ISIS,” Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and a Republican presidential candidate, told CNN. “Hillary Clinton last night said that it’s not — it’s not our fight.”

He added, “It is our fight, and without our leadership in building a coalition to destroy ISIS, it won’t happen.”

At a campaign event in Ames, Iowa, on Sunday, Clinton tried to expand on her earlier statement, saying that the United States should play a leadership role and “be rallying our partners and allies, pulling countries off the sidelines.”

Her seemingly incongruous comments on the issue speak to the reality that there may be no real political upside for Clinton in coming out early with a detailed plan for Syria, said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“Even if she could convince people she’s right today, by a year from now, on Election Day, the situation will have morphed,” O’Hanlon said. “And in the meantime, she would have scared a lot of people with a little too much of what the Democratic base doesn’t want to hear right now.”