WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidates are heaping praise on U.S. military forces who pulled off the weekend raid that left Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dead. But they’ve made clear that commendation doesn’t extend to President Donald Trump.

“This victory was not due to Donald Trump’s leadership,” former Vice President Joe Biden said Monday. “It happened despite his ineptitude.”

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said the successful mission was “accomplished with information supplied by the Kurds” Trump abandoned when he recently announced plans to withdraw most U.S. troops from Syria. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar told CBS that al-Baghdadi’s killing doesn’t mean Trump’s “foreign policy overall has not been a disaster.”

Nearly one year before Election Day, the raid is a reminder of how developments overseas can quickly influence the presidential campaign. Trump is eager to turn al-Baghdadi’s death into a defining moment of his administration. And Democrats must now decry Trump’s foreign policy without appearing to disparage U.S. forces.

It’s a balance that could be tough to pull off.

“You have to give credit where credit is due. He is the commander in chief and this is a significant victory for the U.S. military and intelligence and there shouldn’t be a caveat to that. Period, full stop,” said Democratic strategist Mustafa Tameez. “The next question is, what is our strategy in Syria ... Certainly all of us understand that al-Baghdadi was a vicious killer but (Islamic State) doesn’t end with him.”

The roles were reversed when U.S. forces under President Barack Obama killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. Democrats made that mission along with government bailouts that bolstered U.S. automakers a centerpiece of Obama’s successful 2012 campaign.

Biden happily reveled in one of the Democrats’ favorite slogans that year: “Bin Laden is dead. GM is alive.” And it was Trump who was among the Republicans discouraging too much credit going to the commander in chief.

“Stop congratulating Obama for killing Bin Laden,” Trump tweeted. “The Navy Seals killed Bin Laden.”

So far, foreign policy hasn’t been a leading issue in the Democratic presidential primary, which has instead focused on top domestic issues and a broader philosophical debate over whether the party is moving too far to the left. As a veteran lawmaker and two-term vice president, Biden could be the biggest beneficiary if foreign policy moved to the forefront of the campaign.

Trump has “made it less likely we will be able to successfully replicate a mission like this in the future,” Biden said in a statement. “The operation leveraged a limited presence of U.S. counterterrorism capabilities in the region, which he keeps trying to dismantle.”