Trump slams 'dumbest' foreign policy as Clinton vows no more troops in Iraq

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have struck a pointed contrast on deploying ground troops to Iraq in the first televised forum featuring the two presidential nominees.

During the town hall held by NBC News and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America in New York on Wednesday, Clinton pledged that the US was “not putting ground troops into Iraq ever again, and we are not putting ground troops into Syria”, while Trump disagreed.

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The Republican nominee, who has long talked about the importance of “taking the oil” in the Middle East, said of Iraq: “We would leave a certain group behind and they would take the various sections where they have the oil.”

The forum, which featured the two candidates speaking separately but back-to-back, came just hours after Trump laid into Clinton as “trigger happy”. During an address on defense spending in Philadelphia earlier in the day, Trump suggested there wasn’t a country in the Middle East that Clinton did not want to invade – an assertion he repeated on Wednesday evening.