HILLARY CLINTON has announced that she will not continue in her job for a second term. In the print edition this week we take a preliminary look at her record as secretary of state. Our Washington bureau chief (and Lexington columnist) sat down with her on March 16th to discuss her approach to running the State Department. LEXINGTON: You're doing a great job, so why have you decided to stop? MRS CLINTON: Well, thank you for that kind comment, but the job's not over. I'm one of these very focused people when it comes to day-to-day work, and I'm trying not to think about what comes next so that I can stay very focused on what I'm doing now. I have had an extraordinary 20 years. I've been really at the highest levels of American political life. And these last years as secretary of state, coming at a fraught time for our country—economically, politically, strategically—has been the honour of a lifetime. But I do think I need to take a little time to reflect, step off the very fast track I've been on.

It was a very hard decision, but I made it last year, and told the president and others that I would work to the very end, and obviously be as involved as I am in all of the work of the National Security Council and our whole inter-agency process here at State and USAID, working with the Congress to try to solidify this foundational shift that I have tried to lead here at the State Department in how we do foreign policy in the 21st century.

LEXINGTON: You've talked about a big change, what you call “a holistic approach to the use of civilian power”. Do you have a favourite example or two of how that's actually helped to promote American interests?

MRS CLINTON: Well, I think there are several ways of looking at it. Let me dial back to January of 2009.

President Obama took office at a time when there were a lot of questions about America's leadership. The economic crisis threw up additional challenges to our system. So there were many difficult decisions we had to make early on about how we reasserted America's standing and position in the world. We had been heavily involved in the use of military power in Iraq and Afghanistan. For ten years it really dominated the discussion. And I had been at the centre of those debates, having been a senator from New York at the time of the attack.

So we needed to bring back some old-fashioned balance into our relationships. That meant elevating diplomacy and development, which had become not marginalised but certainly less prominent in the discussions about how America asserts power. I come at this from the position that when it's all stripped away, it's American values. It's who we are as Americans. It's the aspirations that we help instill in people. It's the dreams that people have about what America means to them no matter where they are.

There was also a lot of scepticism in many quarters, particularly in Asia, that we had abandoned our involvement, let alone our leadership. When I came in and looked broadly across the world—and I knew a lot of the leaders, I had had by that time 16 years of working with a lot of the people who were just out of power or in power, and I began making my calls—there was so much anxiety.

What is America going to do? What are you going to do about your own economy? If your economy goes down, how many more are you going to take down? What do you stand for anymore? Who are you? It was an extraordinary, and in some respects, quite painful experience because of what was the perception of who we had become.

The work that I tried to do was intense and personal because I saw no other way around getting out there, not only interacting with governments but wading into popular culture, people to people, because I also had been absorbing data about what just average people thought about the United States. The world had gotten so much younger, and those huge numbers of young people often had either negative views or no views. They didn't have the memories of World War II or the Cold War or American generosity and responding to a natural disaster that had happened to their parents. So it was a great effort to get back out there, going to Asia first, making it clear that we were a Pacific power, which is something I've built this whole strategy around in the last three years, but also reaching out broadly. I think it's fair to say that diplomacy today requires much more of that if you're the United States of America than it did 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. I've had wonderful discussions with a lot of my predecessors. I kid my good friend, Henry Kissinger. Can you imagine, in a world of Twitter, being able to sneak out of Pakistan and fly to China and do secret negotiations? It's just an entirely different 24/7 public environment that you are living in. And even if you're of a lower profile than I am, everyone around you has the technology now to report a sighting, to overhear a conversation, to snap a photo. It is an incredibly complex set of conditions that you now have to operate in at the highest levels of diplomacy anywhere. So my goal was to reassert American leadership, to work with the president to somewhat redefine it, post the previous eight years, and then to roll up our sleeves and get about working to strengthen our alliances, to expand our relationships, anchor them in multilateral institutional regional organisations so that they would be there for the long run. One funny story is when I went to Asia that very first trip and visited Japan, Korea and China, I also went to Indonesia. Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world. It's developing democratic traditions. It's also the home of ASEAN. Now, the Association of South-East Asian Nations is not on the lips of every American. And rarely, if ever, has it been in the headlines. But when you look at the future of the Pacific we do more trade with those nations than we do with China. We also have a lot of strategic interests with them because many of them will continue to grow: they'll build middle classes, they'll expand their economic and political reach. So I went to the ASEAN headquarters in Jakarta and signed our intent to accede to the Treaty of Amity and Co-operation, which I have to confess I had never heard of—(laughter)—before preparation for the trip.

But it was a way of saying, look, we know we're the biggest, most influential power still in the world, and intend to remain so. But we also know that we have to begin networking more effectively with a lot of other people and institutions.

In every country today, there is politics. It may be authoritarian politics, but there is politics. Leaders have to stay in touch with what their people are thinking. If people were not thinking about the United States, we needed to start them thinking. If they were thinking negatively, we needed to try to disabuse them. When I traveled extensively as first lady—this may be an overstatement, but not far from it—and I would go to countries with authoritarian leaders, I don't remember them talking about what the people thought or wanted very much. Now, even if it's just a rationalisation or an excuse, it's in the vocabulary. So leaders have to learn better how to respond and manage public opinion. It doesn't in any way undermine the necessity of actually leading. Some of these leaders become almost captive—well, I can't do this because I heard from ten people—but it does mean they have to listen.

LEXINGTON: While you were doing this ambitious job of rebalancing American energies and reconnecting with bits of the world that had been neglected during the trauma after 9/11, history didn't oblige you by standing still. Lots of unexpected events came up. One of them was the Arab Spring. Is the United States going to end up on the right side of that? And what do you have to do to make the best shot of being on the right side?

MRS CLINTON: Well, it's interesting, because no one did predict it, but about two weeks after the vegetable vendor in Tunisia set himself on fire, and it hadn't yet erupted across the region, I gave a speech in Doha where I confronted Arab leaders and said that these regimes were sinking into the sand and they had to be more responsive, they had to move toward democracy and accountability. So I do think we are on the right side of history, aligning ourselves with people's aspirations for freedom, democracy, universal human rights. But I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be. There will be a lot of difficult decisions for the people themselves and their newly elected leaders to make, and there will be a lot of very hard choices for the United States and Europe and others to have to make. I just came back from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. I think focusing on how to assist these new governments that are starting fresh without a lot of guidance or understanding of how to manage a modern economy, how to build a modern political system, that are heavily dominated by Islamist parties, is very much in America's interests. But it's prickly, so we have to navigate through it. LEXINGTON: In the Middle East, a case can be made that many of the traditional pillars of American power there are looking very shaky. The strategic alliances with Egypt and with Saudi Arabia, the Israeli-Egyptian peace, Israel's relations with Turkey, a whole network of relationships and institutions that had propped up American influence in the region are looking extremely delicate.

MRS CLINTON: Well, it's a new world, and we all have to figure out how best to adjust to it. But take the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement. I've had intense conversations with Egyptian leaders and Israeli leaders. They are both committed to maintaining it because it happens to be in both of their interests. It's clearly in the interest of regional stability.

Part of our challenge now is to get to know the new Egyptian civilian leadership. There's no substitute for good old-fashioned shoe leather. It's ironic, in a way, that we live in this cyber virtual reality. It's almost as though people demand to see more of you than they did before because they want to make sure you're not taking them for granted, that you really will listen to them, that you'll see things from their perspective. So we've invested a lot in beginning to build relationships.

We're not going to agree on everything; there's no doubt about that. But we think it is important to have the opportunity to make the case about why this peace agreement is as much in Egypt's interests as it is in Israel's or the United States's. If you look at what's happening in so much of the Middle East and North Africa, there are different assessments that can be made. Egypt had free, fair elections. A year ago, nobody would have thought that was possible. They're actually starting to do politics, which is messy, like sausage being made, and is never going to be a totally satisfactory experience for the people in it or out of it. But I bring my political experience to that. And having had political experience at this moment when politics is breaking out across the world gives me a level of empathy and understanding. I've had to talk to a lot of leaders at great length about winning and losing elections. I spent hours on the phone with [President Hamid] Karzai after his presidential election, and the fact that I could say, “Mr. President, I've won elections and I've lost elections; I do know how you feel,” was an opening that most traditional diplomats just wouldn't have had the experience to be able to say. So we look at Egypt. What we know is that the leadership of the parliament is still really searching for economic policies that will actually work, and they're being tugged from all directions, from the old Nasserite nationalistic economic statism to a more open economy which is very hard for them to fully appreciate because the openings in Egypt led to the enrichment of a lot of the Mubarak cronies. Libya—the prime minister of the transitional government was just here. We are working very closely with them on a range of issues. I spent a lot of time leading up to our actions in Libya and now after them working to help them have a successful transition. They say all the right things, but it is difficult for them to know how to translate that. They will have the advantage of oil resources, but that's also the curse. So we're talking through a lot of different ways to help them be sure to capture those revenues for building a stable state.

In Tunisia they're trying really hard and I'm trying hard to help them. Algeria: intense conversations about how Algeria needs to open up, open its border, open its political system, be part of the Maghreb. It's necessary for security, counter-terrorism. We have a lot of business with them in those two categories. But it's also good for the economy. Just opening the border with Morocco would benefit both countries.

LEXINGTON: Does this new agenda in the Arab world mean that you are not beaten over the head with the Palestine issue as much as some of your predecessors were, or is that still the burning issue in the back of the minds of people in the Arab world?

MRS CLINTON: I would never understate the importance of the issue to the people of the Arab world. But if you go back and you look at the demonstrations in Tunis, in Tripoli, in Tahrir Square, you don't see any posters about that. You don't see even any anti-Israeli, anti-American posters, because the overwhelming need was to free themselves.

Now, it's on the top of every list of priorities in my dealings with all of these countries, but people are being empowered through the political process, which means that they now have a stake in a much more direct way in the decisions that are made in their own countries.

The Palestinian issue is one I care deeply about. I was the first American official to call for a two-state solution back in the late '90s. It's been a part of what I've worked on continuously and still do. But to a great extent, the treatment of the Palestinians, the denial of their aspirations, was not only deeply felt in the Arab world, but a proxy for the lack of freedom and opportunity for people in other countries as well. And depending upon the leader, it was used from time to time to divert attention to prevent political movements. It's going to remain a point of contention because it's a piece of unfinished business from the 20th century.

LEXINGTON: You've spent much of your career promoting the cause of women. And one of the boons of what happened in Afghanistan has been the change in the status of women. Where are you going to draw red lines if we move to a negotiated settlement there?

MRS CLINTON: I have certainly made my views clear publicly and privately that certain conditions have to be set on any negotiations. The conditions I laid out in my speech on February 18th at the Asia Society, were they have to renounce violence, have to renounce al-Qaeda, have to agree to abide by the constitution laws of Afghanistan. That's not a guarantee that constitution laws, which now provide much more protection to women than did before, will be fully complied with, but it is a start of a conversation with the Taliban and others. It's not only the Taliban that hold these deeply traditional views about women's role in society in Afghanistan or, frankly, elsewhere in the world. One of the reasons that I've made it a centerpiece of American foreign policy is that on every indicator one can measure—the economy, GDP growth, on education, on democratisation, the suppression of women, their marginalisation—their denial of basic rights means that the society as a whole fails to modernise, fails to progress. I gave a speech about women and the economy in San Francisco in September. I worked with the World Bank to highlight a lot of their statistics about what it would mean to GDP growth everywhere in the world if the barriers to women's participation were knocked down. In a time when we are facing economic challenges, the fact that many countries still refuse to unleash the economic potential of women is a problem. If you do, you'll create more consumers, you'll create more producers, you'll raise the GDP. So going back to Afghanistan, I feel both personally and on behalf of the administration, very committed to continue to raise these issues. I will raise them until the day I leave this office; I will continue to raise them next week. On [March 20th], we're having a very important event here that Laura Bush and I will co-chair. We're sending a strong message, that we certainly—and we think a lot of Americans—cannot be part of blessing any deal that turns the clock back on women in Afghanistan.

LEXINGTON: In the end, doesn't your ability to stand by those red lines depend on hard power, which at some point is going to be withdrawn, just as you have withdrawn your hard power from Iraq, for example?

MRS CLINTON: There's a difference between Iraq and Afghanistan. The circumstances under which we withdrew from Iraq on the military side had been set in motion in the prior administration. There was an opportunity to negotiate an extension, but there wasn't the political will on the Iraqi side because of their difficult internal political calculations. They did not believe that they could provide the kind of Status of Forces Agreement that was required for us to keep military forces in Iraq.

You have a different situation in Afghanistan. The Afghans very clearly want a continuing presence, yet to be defined, of both the American military and NATO-ISAF going forward after 2014. How we negotiate the terms of that, what the missions are, is what I spend a lot of my time doing right now. But we're making progress toward the Chicago summit, which will reaffirm the commitment made in Lisbon that there will be an enduring presence. And I think that the recognition by the Afghans that they - for their own stability, some might even say survivability - require that presence is a big difference with Iraq.

LEXINGTON: Many people in this town say that President Obama has been the most hands-on foreign policy president since probably Nixon. How has that affected the way you've done your job at the State Department? Do you agree with the premise?

MRS CLINTON: The three presidents that I know the best from my time in the White House, the Senate and certainly this administration would all consider themselves very hands on. There might have been different approaches and styles, but each president finds himself, no matter what he starts out doing or thinking he will be focusing on, drawn into foreign policy. It's just the way the world works, whether it's Bosnia, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or whatever it might be. So I don't know whether that's an accurate historical perception. I don't even know how you would count it—hours spent, briefings read? But what I can say is that President Obama is a very thoughtful and involved decision-maker. He really likes to peel the onion back. He not only accepts but invites a process that tries to hammer out the tough decisions. I spend an enormous amount of time in the Situation Room in the White House doing just that. And I can attest to the fact that the process we have is well run, well organised. I certainly feel my views and contributions are important and valued. I don't have any problems in reaching the president, talking to the president, meeting with the president on anything, anytime, because I know that he is very eager to hear what all of us in the kind of inner security cabinet through the NSC think. The painstaking work we did on the decision leading up to the raid on Bin Laden, the very careful work we've done on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran: whatever the issue has been, [the work] has teed up good decisions, decisions that were well backed up, defensible, that really could only be disagreed with on partisan political terms.

I was involved in every step of the president's decision on Libya—even though it was somewhat unprecedented and gave some grounds for people to wonder what we were doing. I spent a lot of time out there evaluating the Libyans and assessing their seriousness of purpose, giving them tasks that they had to perform in order to demonstrate to us that they were in a position where our military support could be definitive. The way our allies and the Arabs came together and produced their own military personnel and actions was essential to the result that we got and the way that we did it.

LEXINGTON: One subject that is treated in this town as failure that was avoidable was the Middle East peace process. What accounted for the failure of this initiative, which after all, was taken very early in the administration?

MRS CLINTON: Well, it was. And again, I came at it from my own experience. We had two tragic missed opportunities in the 90s—the assassin of Rabin knew exactly what he was doing, and then the Camp David Accords, when [Ehud] Barak laid on the table the most far-reaching Israeli settlement offer that I think is, even today, imaginable. That was rejected by [Yasser] Arafat who then, some months after my husband left office, called him and said I'm ready to take the deal now.

So when one is ready, the other is not. When the other is ready, the one is not. We inherited a very difficult political terrain. [Ehud] Olmert had been negotiating using Tzipi Livni, who had substantive conversations with the Palestinian team. No deals, but at least the Palestinians and the Israelis were looking at maps, were looking at a lot of the tough decisions that had to be made. And Olmert, if he were sitting here, would say, look, I made an offer to [Mahmoud] Abbas. And Abbas would say, well, yeah, sort of, but he was so politically weak it wasn't sustainable. We inherited that, and then we inherited Gaza. We inherited an Israeli election. We inherited a several months' delay in putting a government together because Netanyahu was deep into negotiations trying to figure out whether Likud and Kadima could govern together. We inherited the rivalry between Netanyahu and Tzipi Livni.

We showed our determination from the very beginning, but we had a really difficult start. And then when we finally had a government, Netanyahu did, to his credit, sort of accept the two-state solution, which he had not done up until then in such an explicit manner. George Mitchell and I and others were working very hard to try to get positioned for when the Netanyahu government was finally up and going and he made his decision about where he stood on the peace process. Because let's be fair: he felt that even the concessions he made back in the Wye River Accords caused the fall of this government. He came to this both ideologically and politically sceptical. But he did move. He did get ready. And we began to work on trying to bring the parties back to the table. Now, the Palestinians understandably said, “Well, we were negotiating with the Israeli government, Olmert was the fully authorised prime minister, so we want to take up where we left off.” And Netanyahu understandably said, “Hey, wait a minute. I'm now the prime minister. We have to go back to the very beginning.” That was a difficult environment in which to work. Eventually we were successful in negotiating a settlement freeze. I know all of the arguments that it wasn't really a freeze—but it was much more than people expected a Netanyahu government ever to do. It did, based on our statistics, certainly slow down the rate of construction. And I fully embrace it because we had negotiated it and pushed it, because I thought from Netanyahu it was such a concession that the Palestinians, the Europeans, and others would realise that this isn't Olmert, this is not Barak, this is not Rabin, and look at what he's willing to do to try to get back into talks. So it was for ten months, and I flew to Jerusalem, really embraced it. Flew to Cairo, defended it. And then the Goldstone report [on the war in Gaza] happens. The Israelis had not co-operated with Goldstone, and as a result the report was more one-sided, which Goldstone himself later admitted. But the fact is they didn't co-operate, so their side wasn't in it, and it was quite critical. Because the Palestinians were willing to get back into talks, they were not enthusiastically pushing some big condemnation of Israel. This then brought the wrath of Al-Jazeera and the Arabs down on the head of Abbas. So he's then paralysed, because he is being accused of being a traitor. Meanwhile, Netanyahu is saying, “You know, I did this. I did this and nothing's happening.” So it was, just again, one thing right after another.

LEXINGTON: When your husband's effort failed, he came out with the "Clinton parameters". And I know there's been a debate inside this administration about whether, given the sort of narrative that you've just outlined, the idea of leaving it to the two parties to sort it out between them, with the United States and the world just giving their stamp of approval, is wrong. Isn't there a strong case for the United States to give its own parameters, plan, blueprint, and more or less impose it, or at least impose it as the solution that the world would accept?

MRS CLINTON: If you read the president's speeches—both the speech he gave here and then the follow-up speech and his UN speech—even though they are very clearly in support of Israel's security, which is a bedrock American commitment, it was a very unequivocal statement about borders. Borders and security are the two threshold issues. You can't get to anything else unless you get through those two. President Obama's made it very clear what the United States believes has to be the result of a negotiation.

I also think, though, if you continue the litany of unexpected events, the fall of Mubarak, who had been one of Abbas's mainstays, was quite unsettling, because both the Israelis and the Palestinians looked to Mubarak to break logjams and resolve problems between the two of them on all kinds of issues.

And then you have the fast-forward into the broader Arab Spring and the fact that there's not the level of pressure [for a peace settlement] right now. It will resume; I have no doubt about that. With the very courageous effort by King Abdullah of Jordan and his foreign minister, Nasser Judeh, which we have been closely involved in, there are still discussions going on. It has not at all ended. But the Jordanians are just as worried about Syria, and so are the Israelis and the Palestinians.

There's a very strong understanding we have to get back to it. I've been working with the Israelis on taking some actions that will certainly help to stabilise the situation in the West Bank. It didn't help that some splinter Islamist group started firing rockets into southern Israel again.

LEXINGTON: Strange, though, how little attention that got in the world media, and just generally in the Arab world as well.

MRS CLINTON: But that's because everybody is preoccupied. Abba Eban was absolutely right, right? “They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” We thought with the Jordanian leadership we were on the way back to serious discussions. And then the whole reconciliation issue with Hamas came up and people aren't sure what that means. So there are still lots of issues to be sorted out. But we remain absolutely committed to this.

LEXINGTON: At some point soon, you'll be meeting your successor and giving some parting advice. What's going to be the main bit?

MRS CLINTON: Oh, well, I will probably revise this numerous times between now and then, but when I met with all my predecessors (Madeleine Albright hosted a wonderful dinner for me, but I'd been talking to each of them on the phone, and I knew some of them better than others) the general advice was, look, it's always been a hard job; it's even harder now. You could either try to spend all your time focused on the big issues or you could try to manage the department so it's more effective, but you can't do both. That's just a not a possible conclusion you can draw today, because while I'm flying off to Tunis, I'm also working with Cathy Ashton to try to get Serbia and Kosovo to agree, and I'm calling Tadic and Thaci because we have to keep an eye on the Balkans; or I'm dealing with our friends in Latin America because we had an upsurge in terrible violence with the prison burning in Honduras, and we've got to be much smarter about how we're helping them, learning from Plan Colombia, which has been such a big success; or I'm on the phone with or meeting with Goodluck Jonathan, trying to figure out what we're going to do to help on Boko Haram. It used to be fair to say that [although we cared] about what went on in other parts of the world, we didn't have to be as focused on nearly every part as we are now. I mean, when the Iranians are trying to kill the Saudi ambassador using what they think of as a drug runner, and you know Hizbullah has operatives all throughout Latin America, all throughout West Africa, when you see Boko Haram morphing into a threat beyond a few places in the north of Nigeria, when you are making progress against al-Shabaab in Somalia but al-Qaeda's on the march in southern Yemen—I have to have almost a 360 degree view. And I work 24-7 because I can't take my eyes off of one part of the world thinking, okay, I don't need to worry about that, let my assistant secretary or somebody else worry about it. When you're fighting for your budget with the Congress and you have to make a case as to why any of this should be of vital concern to the American public, you have to be sure that you're managing the State Department and USAID as well as you can so that you are able to credibly request the funding. We've done well, because I've spent a lot of time with members of Congress making that case. So we're always dealing with the urgent; we are also always dealing with the long-term, and they're now much more interconnected than I think they ever have been. It's why I launched this internet freedom campaign, because we stand up and say we're for all these universal values, they're consonant with American values, but freedom of expression now is not just in Hyde Park, it's in cyberspace. It's why I believe in economic statecraft, which is our way of focusing my thousand economic officers on cutting through red tape, taking on corruption, dealing with intellectual property theft. Then when I go to Congress I can say we are fighting for American jobs.

So it's not just about when are we going to get the Middle East process done, because people might there in Congress say, “Well, you know, people have been working on that for decades.” So...

LEXINGTON: Sounds to me as if you have to give your advice once [your successor] has already accepted the job.

MRS CLINTON: Yeah, I'm not going to tell them beforehand. (Laughter.) Because I'm afraid the president won't be able to recruit anybody. (Laughter.)

But it's a thrilling time to be doing this job, absolutely thrilling. And I have relished the opportunity to be out there representing this president and this country at this point in history.

LEXINGTON: There will be a next, I presume?

MRS CLINTON: I have no idea. I have no idea. Well...

(Photos credit: AFP)