The following is a
transcript of Hillary Clinton’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic,
August 10, 2014.
* * *
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It seems that you’ve shifted your position
on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. By [chief U.S. negotiator] Wendy Sherman’s definition
of maximalism, you’ve taken a fairly maximalist position—little or no
enrichment for Iran. Are you taking a harder line than your former colleagues
in the Obama administration are taking on this matter?
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: It’s a consistent line. I’ve always
been in the camp that held that they did not have a right to enrichment.
Contrary to their claim, there is no such thing as a right to enrich. This is
absolutely unfounded. There is no such right. I am well aware that I am not at
the negotiating table anymore, but I think it’s important to send a signal to
everybody who is there that there cannot be a deal unless there is a clear set
of restrictions on Iran. The preference would be no enrichment. The potential
fallback position would be such little enrichment that they could not break
out. So, little or no enrichment has always been my position.
JG: Am I wrong in saying that the Obama administration’s
negotiators have a more flexible understanding of this issue at the moment?
HRC: I don’t want to speak for them, but I would argue that
Iran, through the voice of the supreme leader, has taken a very maximalist
position—he wants 190,000 centrifuges and the right to enrich. And some in our
Congress, and some of our best friends, have taken the opposite
position—absolutely no enrichment. I think in a negotiation you need to be very
clear about what it is going to take to move the other side. I think at the
moment there is a big debate going on in Tehran about what they can or should
do in order to get relief from the sanctions. It’s my understanding that we
still have a united P5+1 position, which is intensive inspections, very clear
limits on what they can do in their facilities that they would permitted to
operate, and then how they handle this question of enrichment, whether it’s
done from the outside, or whether it can truly be constrained to meet what I
think our standard should be of little-to-no enrichment. That’s what this
negotiation is about.
JG: But there is no sign that the Iranians are willing to
pull back—freezing in place is the farthest they seem to be willing to go. Am I
wrong?
HRC: We don’t know. I think there’s a political debate. I
think you had the position staked out by the supreme leader that they’re going
to get to do what they want to do, and that they don’t have any intention of
having a nuclear weapon but they nevertheless want 190,000 centrifuges
(laughs). I think the political, non-clerical side of the equation is basically
saying, “Look, you know, getting relief from these sanctions is economically
and politically important to us. We have our hands full in Syria and Iraq, just
to name two places, maybe increasingly in Lebanon, and who knows what’s going
to happen with us and Hamas. So what harm does it do to have a very strict
regime that we can live under until we determine that maybe we won’t have to
any longer?” That, I think, is the other side of the argument.
JG: Would you be content with an Iran that is perpetually a
year away from being able to reach nuclear-breakout capability?
HRC: I would like it to be more than a year. I think it
should be more than a year. No enrichment at all would make everyone breathe
easier. If, however, they want a little bit for the Tehran research reactor, or
a little bit for this scientific researcher, but they’ll never go above 5
percent enrichment—
JG: So, a few thousand centrifuges?
HRC: We know what “no” means. If we’re talking a little,
we’re talking about a discrete, constantly inspected number of centrifuges.
“No” is my preference.
JG: Would you define what “a little” means?
HRC: No.
JG: So what the Gulf states want, and what the Israelis
want, which is to say no enrichment at all, is not a militant, unrealistic
position?
HRC: It’s not an unrealistic position. I think it’s
important that they stake out that position.
JG: So, Gaza. As you write in your book, you negotiated the
last long-term ceasefire in 2012. Are you surprised at all that it didn’t hold?
HRC: I’m surprised that it held as long as it did. But given
the changes in the region, the fall of [former Egyptian President Mohamed]
Morsi, his replacement by [Abdel Fattah] al-Sisi, the corner that Hamas felt
itself in, I’m not surprised that Hamas provoked another attack.
JG: The Israeli response, was it disproportionate?
HRC: Israel was attacked by rockets from Gaza. Israel has a
right to defend itself. The steps Hamas has taken to embed rockets and
command-and-control facilities and tunnel entrances in civilian areas, this
makes a response by Israel difficult. Of course Israel, just like the United
States, or any other democratic country, should do everything they can possibly
do to limit civilian casualties.
JG: Do you think Israel did enough to limit civilian
casualties?
HRC: It’s unclear. I think Israel did what it had to do to
respond to the rockets. And there is the surprising number and complexity of
the tunnels, and Hamas has consistently, not just in this conflict, but in the
past, been less than protective of their civilians.
JG: Before we continue talking endlessly about Gaza, can I
ask you if you think we spend too much time on Gaza and on Israel-Palestine
generally? I ask because over the past year or so your successor spent a
tremendous amount of time on the Israel-Palestinian file and in the same period
of time an al Qaeda-inspired organization took over half of Syria and Iraq.
HRC: Right, right.
JG: I understand that secretaries of state can do more than
one thing at a time. But what is the cause of this preoccupation?
HRC: I’ve thought a lot about this, because you do have a
number of conflicts going on right now. As the U.S., as a U.S. official, you
have to pay attention to anything that threatens Israel directly, or anything
in the larger Middle East that arises out of the Palestinian-Israeli situation.
That’s just a given.
It is striking, however, that you have more than 170,000
people dead in Syria. You have the vacuum that has been created by the
relentless assault by Assad on his own population, an assault that has bred
these extremist groups, the most well-known of which, ISIS—or ISIL—is now
literally expanding its territory inside Syria and inside Iraq. You have Russia
massing battalions—Russia, that actually annexed and is occupying part of a UN
member state—and I fear that it will do even more to prevent the incremental
success of the Ukrainian government to take back its own territory, other than
Crimea. More than 1,000 people have been killed in Ukraine on both sides, not
counting the [Malaysia Airlines] plane, and yet we do see this enormous
international reaction against Israel, and Israel’s right to defend itself, and
the way Israel has to defend itself. This reaction is uncalled for and unfair.
JG: What do you think causes this reaction?
HRC: There are a number of factors going into it. You can’t
ever discount anti-Semitism, especially with what’s going on in Europe today.
There are more demonstrations against Israel by an exponential amount than
there are against Russia seizing part of Ukraine and shooting down a civilian
airliner. So there’s something else at work here than what you see on TV.
And what you see on TV is so effectively stage-managed by
Hamas, and always has been. What you see is largely what Hamas invites and
permits Western journalists to report on from Gaza. It’s the old PR problem
that Israel has. Yes, there are substantive, deep levels of antagonism or
anti-Semitism towards Israel, because it’s a powerful state, a really effective
military. And Hamas paints itself as the defender of the rights of the
Palestinians to have their own state. So the PR battle is one that is historically
tilted against Israel.
JG: Nevertheless there are hundreds of children—
HRC: Absolutely, and it’s dreadful.
JG: Who do you hold responsible for those deaths? How do you
parcel out blame?
HRC: I’m not sure it’s possible to parcel out blame because
it’s impossible to know what happens in the fog of war. Some reports say, maybe
it wasn’t the exact UN school that was bombed, but it was the annex to the
school next door where they were firing the rockets. And I do think oftentimes
that the anguish you are privy to because of the coverage, and the women and
the children and all the rest of that, makes it very difficult to sort through
to get to the truth.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this
conflict and wanted to do so in order to leverage its position, having been
shut out by the Egyptians post-Morsi, having been shunned by the Gulf, having
been pulled into a technocratic government with Fatah and the Palestinian
Authority that might have caused better governance and a greater willingness on
the part of the people of Gaza to move away from tolerating Hamas in their
midst. So the ultimate responsibility has to rest on Hamas and the decisions it
made.
That doesn’t mean that, just as we try to do in the United
States and be as careful as possible in going after targets to avoid civilians,
that there aren’t mistakes that are made. We’ve made them. I don’t know a
nation, no matter what its values are—and I think that democratic nations have
demonstrably better values in a conflict position—that hasn’t made errors, but
ultimately the responsibility rests with Hamas.
JG: Several years ago, when you were in the Senate, we had a
conversation about what would move Israeli leaders to make compromises for
peace. You’ve had a lot of arguments with Netanyahu. What is your thinking on
Netanyahu now?
HRC: Let’s step back. First of all, [former Israeli Prime
Minister] Yitzhak Rabin was prepared to do so much and he was murdered for that
belief. And then [former Israeli Prime Minister] Ehud Barak offered everything
you could imagine being given under any realistic scenario to the Palestinians
for their state, and [former Palestinian leader Yasir] Arafat walked away. I
don’t care about the revisionist history. I know that Arafat walked away, okay?
Everybody says, “American needs to say something.” Well, we said it, it was the
Clinton parameters, we put it out there, and Bill Clinton is adored in Israel,
as you know. He got Netanyahu to give up territory, which Netanyahu believes
lost him the prime ministership [in his first term], but he moved in that direction,
as hard as it was.
Bush pretty much ignored what was going on and they made a
terrible error in the Palestinian elections [in which Hamas came to power in
Gaza], but he did come with the Roadmap [to Peace] and the Roadmap was credible
and it talked about what needed to be done, and this is one area where I give
the Palestinians credit. Under [former Palestinian Prime Minister] Salam
Fayyad, they made a lot of progress.
I had the last face-to-face negotiations between Abbas and
Netanyahu. [Secretary of State John] Kerry never got there. I had them in the
room three times with [former Middle East negotiator] George Mitchell and me,
and that was it. And I saw Netanyahu move from being against the two-state
solution to announcing his support for it, to considering all kinds of
Barak-like options, way far from what he is, and what he is comfortable with.
Now I put Jerusalem in a different category. That is the
hardest issue, Again, based on my experience—and you know, I got Netanyahu to
agree to the unprecedented settlement
freeze, it did not cover East Jerusalem, but it did cover the West Bank and it
was actually legitimate and it did stop new housing starts for 10 months. It
took me nine months to get Abbas into the negotiations even after we delivered
on the settlement freeze, he had a million reasons, some of them legitimate,
some of them the same old, same old.
So what I tell people is, yeah, if I were the prime minister
of Israel, you’re damn right I would expect to have control over security [on the
West Bank], because even if I’m dealing with Abbas, who is 79 years old, and
other members of Fatah, who are enjoying a better lifestyle and making money on
all kinds of things, that does not protect Israel from the influx of Hamas or
cross-border attacks from anywhere else. With Syria and Iraq, it is all one big
threat. So Netanyahu could not do this in good conscience. If this were Rabin
or Barak in his place—and I’ve talked to Ehud about this—they would have to
demand a level of security that would be provided by the [Israel Defense
Forces] for a period of time. And in my meetings with them I got Abbas to about
six, seven, eight years on continued IDF presence. Now he’s fallen back to
three, but he was with me at six, seven, eight. I got Netanyahu to go from
forever to 2025. That’s a negotiation, okay? So I know. Dealing with Bibi is
not easy, so people get frustrated and they lose sight of what we’re trying to
achieve here.
JG: You go out of your way in Hard Choices to praise Robert
Ford, who recently quit as U.S. ambassador to Syria, as an excellent diplomat.
Ford quit in protest and has recently written strongly about what he sees as
the inadequacies of Obama administration policy. Do you agree with Ford that we
are at fault for not doing enough to build up a credible Syrian opposition when
we could have?
HRC: I have the highest regard for Robert. I’m the one who
convinced the administration to send an ambassador to Syria. You know, this is
why I called the chapter on Syria “A Wicked Problem.” I can’t sit here today
and say that if we had done what I recommended, and what Robert Ford
recommended, that we’d be in a demonstrably different place.
JG: That’s the president’s argument, that we wouldn’t be in
a different place.
HRC: Well, I did believe, which is why I advocated this,
that if we were to carefully vet, train, and equip early on a core group of the
developing Free Syrian Army, we would, number one, have some better insight
into what was going on on the ground. Two, we would have been helped in
standing up a credible political opposition, which would prove to be very
difficult, because there was this constant struggle between what was largely an
exile group outside of Syria trying to claim to be the political opposition,
and the people on the ground, primarily those doing the fighting and dying, who
rejected that, and we were never able to bridge that, despite a lot of efforts
that Robert and others made.
So I did think that eventually, and I said this at the time,
in a conflict like this, the hard men with the guns are going to be the more
likely actors in any political transition than those on the outside just
talking. And therefore we needed to figure out how we could support them on the
ground, better equip them, and we didn’t have to go all the way, and I totally
understand the cautions that we had to contend with, but we’ll never know. And
I don’t think we can claim to know.
JG: You do have a suspicion, though.
HRC: Obviously. I advocated for a position.
JG: Do you think we’d be where we are with ISIS right now if
the U.S. had done more three years ago to build up a moderate Syrian
opposition?
HRC: Well, I don’t know the answer to that. I know that the
failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the
originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were
secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a
big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.
They were often armed in an indiscriminate way by other
forces and we had no skin in the game that really enabled us to prevent this
indiscriminate arming.
JG: Is there a chance that President Obama overlearned the
lessons of the previous administration? In other words, if the story of the
Bush administration is one of overreach, is the story of the Obama
administration one of underreach?
HRC: You know, I don’t think you can draw that conclusion.
It’s a very key question. How do you calibrate, that’s the key issue. I think
we have learned a lot during this period, but then how to apply it going
forward will still take a lot of calibration and balancing. But you know, we
helped overthrow [Libyan leader Muammar] Qaddafi.
JG: But we didn’t stick around for the aftermath.
HRC: Well, we did stick around. We stuck around with offers
of money and technical assistance, on everything from getting rid of some of
the nasty stuff he left behind, to border security, to training. It wasn’t just
us, it was the Europeans as well. Some of the Gulf countries had their
particular favorites. They certainly stuck around and backed their favorite
militias. It is not yet clear how the Libyans themselves will overcome the lack
of security, which they inherited from Qaddafi. Remember, they’ve had two good
elections. They’ve elected moderates and secularists and a limited number of
Islamists, so you talk about democracy in action—the Libyans have done it
twice—but they can’t control the ground. But how can you help when you have so
many different players who looted the stuffed warehouses of every kind of
weapon from the Qaddafi regime, some of which they’re using in Libya, some of
which they’re passing out around the region?
So you can go back and argue either, we should we have
helped the people of Libya try to overthrow a dictator who, remember, killed
Americans and did a lot of other bad stuff, or we should have been on the
sidelines. In this case we helped, but that didn’t make the road any easier in
Syria, where we said, “It’s messy, it’s complicated, we’re not sure what the
outcome will be.” So what I’m hoping for is that we sort out what we have
learned, because we’ve tried a bunch of different approaches. Egypt is a
perfect example. The revolution in Tahrir Square was not a Muslim Brotherhood
revolution. It was not led by Islamists. They came very late to the party.
Mubarak falls and I’m in Cairo a short time after, meeting the leaders of this
movement, and I’m saying, “Okay, who’s going to run for office? Who’s going to
form a political party?” and they’re saying, “We don’t do that, that’s not who
we are.”
And I said that there are only two organized groups in this
country, the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, and what we have here is an
old lesson that you can’t beat somebody with nobody. There was a real
opportunity here to, if a group had arisen out of the revolution, to create a
democratic Egyptian alternative. Didn’t
happen. What do we have to think about? In order to do that better, I
see a lot of questions that we have to be answering. I don’t think we can draw
judgments yet. I think we can draw a judgment about the Bush administration in
terms of overreach, but I don’t know that we can reach a conclusion about
underreach.
JG: There is this moment in your book, in which Morsi tells
you not to worry about jihadists in the Sinai—he says in essence that now that
a Muslim Brotherhood government is in charge, jihadists won’t feel the need to
continue their campaign. You write that this was either shockingly sinister or
shockingly naïve. Which one do you think it was?
HRC: I think Morsi was naïve. I’m just talking about Morsi,
not necessarily anyone else in the Muslim Brotherhood. I think he genuinely
believed that with the legitimacy of an elected Islamist government, that the
jihadists would see that there was a different route to power and influence and
would be part of the political process. He had every hope, in fact, that the credible
election of a Muslim Brotherhood government would mean the end of jihadist
activities within Egypt, and also exemplify that there’s a different way to
power.
The debate is between the bin Ladens of the world and the
Muslim Brotherhood. The bin Ladens believe you can’t overthrow the infidels or
the impure through politics. It has to be through violent resistance. So when I
made the case to Morsi that we were picking up a lot of intelligence about
jihadist groups creating safe havens inside Sinai, and that this would be a
threat not only to Israel but to Egypt, he just dismissed this out of hand, and
then shortly thereafter a large group of Egyptian soldiers were murdered.
JG: In an interview in 2011, I asked you if we should fear
the Muslim Brotherhood—this is well before they came into power—and you said,
‘The jury is out.” Is the jury still out for you today?
HRC: I think the jury would come back with a lesser included
offense, and that is a failure to govern in a democratic, inclusive manner
while holding power in Cairo. The Muslim Brotherhood had the most extraordinary
opportunity to demonstrate the potential for an Islamist movement to take
responsibility for governance, and they were ill-prepared and unable to make
the transition from movement to responsibility. We will see how they respond to
the crackdown they’re under in Egypt, but the Muslim Brotherhood itself,
although it had close ties with Hamas, for example, had not evidenced, because
they were kept under tight control by Mubarak, the willingness to engage in
violent conflict to achieve their goals. So the jury is in on their failure to
govern in a way that would win the confidence of the entire Egyptian
electorate. The jury is out as to whether they morph into a violent jihadist
resistance group.
JG: There’s a critique you hear of the Obama administration
in the Gulf, in Jordan, in Israel, that it is a sign of naiveté to believe that
there are Islamists you can work with, and that Hamas might even be a group
that you could work with. Is there a role for political Islam in these
countries? Can we ever find a way to work with them?
HRC: I think it’s too soon to tell. I would not put Hamas in
the category of people we could work with. I don’t think that is realistic
because its whole reason for being is resistance against Israel, destruction of
Israel, and it is married to very nasty tactics and ideologies, including
virulent anti-Semitism. I do not think they should be in any way treated as a
legitimate interlocutor, especially because if you do that, it redounds to the
disadvantage of the Palestinian Authority, which has a lot of problems, but
historically has changed its charter, moved away from the kind of guerrilla
resistance movement of previous decades.
I think you have to ask yourself, could different leaders
have made a difference in the Muslim Brotherhood’s governance of Egypt? We
won’t know and we can’t know the answer to that question. We know that Morsi
was ill-equipped to be president of Egypt. He had no political experience. He
was an engineer, he was wedded to the ideology of top-down control.
JG: But you’re open to the idea that there are sophisticated
Islamists out there?
HRC: I think you’ve seen a level of sophistication in
Tunisia. It’s a very different environment than Egypt, much smaller, but you’ve
seen the Ennahda Party evolve from being quite demanding that their position be
accepted as the national position but then being willing to step back in the
face of very strong political opposition from secularists, from moderate
Muslims, etc. So Tunisia might not be the tail that wags the dog, but it’s an
interesting tail. If you look at Morocco, where the king had a major role in
organizing the electoral change, you have a head of state who is a monarch who
is descended from Muhammad, you have a government that is largely but not
completely representative of the Muslim party of Morocco. So I think that there
are not a lot of analogies, but when you look around the world, there’s a Hindu
nationalist party now, back in power in India. The big question for Prime
Minister Modi is how inclusive he will be as leader because of questions raised
concerning his governance of Gujurat [the state he governed, which was the
scene of anti-Muslim riots in 2002]. There were certainly Christian parties in
Europe, pre- and post-World War II. They had very strong values that they
wanted to see their society follow, but they were steeped in democracy, so they
were good political actors.
JG: So, it’s not an impossibility.
HRC: It’s not an impossibility. So far, it doesn’t seem
likely. We have to say that. Because for whatever reason, whatever combination
of reasons, there hasn’t been the soil necessary to nurture the political side
of the experience, for people whose primary self-definition is as Islamists.
JG: Are we so egocentric, so Washington-centric, that we
think that our decisions are dispositive? As secretary, did you learn more
about the possibilities of American power or the limitations of American power?
HRC: Both, but it’s not just about American power. It’s
American values that also happen to be universal values. If you have no
political—small “p”—experience, it is really hard to go from a dictatorship to
anything resembling what you and I would call democracy. That’s the lesson of
Egypt. We didn’t invade Egypt. They did it themselves, and once they did it
they looked around and didn’t know what they were supposed to do next.
I think we’ve learned about the limits of our power to
spread freedom and democracy. That’s one of the big lessons out of Iraq. But
we’ve also learned about the importance of our power, our influence, and our
values appropriately deployed and explained. If you’re looking at what we could
have done that would have been more effective, would have been more accepted by
the Egyptians on the political front, what could we have done that would have
been more effective in Libya, where they did their elections really well under
incredibly difficult circumstances but they looked around and they had no
levers to pull because they had these militias out there. My passion is, let’s do
some after-action reviews, let’s learn these lessons, let’s figure out how
we’re going to have different and better responses going forward.
JG: Is the lesson for you, like it is for President Obama,
“Don’t do stupid shit”?
HRC: That’s a good lesson but it’s more complicated than
that. Because your stupid may not be mine, and vice versa. I don’t think it was
stupid for the United States to do everything we could to remove Qaddafi
because that came from the bottom up. That was people asking us to help. It was
stupid to do what we did in Iraq and to have no plan about what to do after we
did it. That was really stupid. I don’t think you can quickly jump to
conclusions about what falls into the stupid and non-stupid categories. That’s
what I’m arguing.
JG: Do you think the next administration, whoever it is, can
find some harmony between muscular intervention—“We must do something”—vs.
let’s just not do something stupid, let’s stay away from problems like Syria
because it’s a wicked problem and not something we want to tackle?
HRC: I think part of the challenge is that our government
too often has a tendency to swing between these extremes. The pendulum swings
back and then the pendulum swings the other way. What I’m arguing for is to
take a hard look at what tools we have. Are they sufficient for the complex
situations we’re going to face, or not? And what can we do to have better
tools? I do think that is an important debate.
One of the reasons why I worry about what’s happening in the
Middle East right now is because of the breakout capacity of jihadist groups
that can affect Europe, can affect the United States. Jihadist groups are
governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to
expand. Their raison d'être is to be against the West, against the Crusaders,
against the fill-in-the-blank—and we all fit into one of these categories. How
do we try to contain that? I’m thinking a lot about containment, deterrence,
and defeat. You know, we did a good job in containing the Soviet Union, but we
made a lot of mistakes, we supported really nasty guys, we did some things that
we are not particularly proud of, from Latin America to Southeast Asia, but we
did have a kind of overarching framework about what we were trying to do that
did lead to the defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism. That
was our objective. We achieved it.
Now the big mistake was thinking that, okay, the end of
history has come upon us, after the fall of the Soviet Union. That was never
true, history never stops and nationalisms were going to assert themselves, and
then other variations on ideologies were going to claim their space. Obviously, jihadi Islam is the
prime example, but not the only example—the effort by Putin to restore his
vision of Russian greatness is another. In the world in which we are living
right now, vacuums get filled by some pretty unsavory players.
JG: There doesn’t seem to be a domestic constituency for the
type of engagement you might symbolize.
HRC: Well, that’s because most Americans think of engagement
and go immediately to military engagement. That’s why I use the phrase “smart
power.” I did it deliberately because I thought we had to have another way of
talking about American engagement, other than unilateralism and the so-called
boots on the ground.
You know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are
hunkering down and pulling back, you’re not going to make any better decisions
than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward. One
issue is that we don’t even tell our own story very well these days.
JG: I think that defeating fascism and communism is a pretty
big deal.
HRC: That’s how I feel! Maybe this is old-fashioned. Okay, I
feel that this might be an old-fashioned idea—but I’m about to find out, in
more ways than one.
Great nations need organizing principles, and “Don’t do
stupid stuff” is not an organizing principle. It may be a necessary brake on
the actions you might take in order to promote a vision.
JG: So why do you think the president went out of his way to
suggest recently that that this is his foreign policy in a nutshell?
HRC: I think he was trying to communicate to the American
people that he’s not going to do something crazy. I’ve sat in too many rooms
with the president. He’s thoughtful, he’s incredibly smart, and able to analyze
a lot of different factors that are all moving at the same time. I think he is
cautious because he knows what he inherited, both the two wars and the economic
front, and he has expended a lot of capital and energy trying to pull us out of
the hole we’re in.
So I think that that’s a political message. It’s not his
worldview, if that makes sense to you.
JG: There is an idea in some quarters that the
administration shows signs of believing that we, the U.S., aren’t so great, so
we shouldn’t be telling people what to do.
HRC: I know that that is an opinion held by a certain group
of Americans, I get all that. It’s not where I’m at.
JG: What is your organizing principle, then?
HRC: Peace, progress, and prosperity. This worked for a very
long time. Take prosperity. That’s a huge domestic challenge for us. If we
don’t restore the American dream for Americans, then you can forget about any
kind of continuing leadership in the world. Americans deserve to feel secure in
their own lives, in their own middle-class aspirations, before you go to them
and say, “We’re going to have to enforce navigable sea lanes in the South China
Sea.” You’ve got to take care of your home first. That’s another part of the
political messaging that you have to engage in right now. People are not only
turned off about being engaged in the world, they’re pretty discouraged about
what’s happening here at home.
I think people want—and this is a generalization I will go
ahead and make—people want to make sure our economic situation improves and
that our political decision-making improves. Whether they articulate it this
way or not, I think people feel like we’re facing really important challenges
here at home: The economy is not growing, the middle class is not feeling like
they are secure, and we are living in a time of gridlock and dysfunction that
is just frustrating and outraging.
People assume that we’re going to have to do what we do so
long as it’s not stupid, but what people want us to focus on are problems here
at home. If you were to scratch below the surface on that—and I haven’t looked
at the research or the polling—but I think people would say, first things
first. Let’s make sure we are taking care of our people and we’re doing it in a
way that will bring rewards to those of us who work hard, play by the rules,
and yeah, we don’t want to see the world go to hell in a handbasket, and they
don’t want to see a resurgence of aggression by anybody.
JG: Do you think they understand your idea about
expansionist jihadism following us home?
HRC: I don’t know that people are thinking about it. People
are thinking about what is wrong with people in Washington that they can’t make
decisions, and they want the economy to grow again. People are feeling a little
bit that there’s a little bit happening that is making them feel better about
the economy, but it’s not nearly enough where it should be.
JG: Have you been able to embed your women’s agenda at the
core of what the federal government does?
HRC: Yes, we did. We had the first-ever ambassador for
global women’s issues. That’s permanent now, and that’s a big deal because that
is the beachhead.
Secretary Kerry to his credit has issued directions to
embassies and diplomats about this continuing to be a priority for our
government. There is also a much greater basis in research now that proves you
cannot have peace and security without the participation of women. You can’t
grow your GDP without opening the doors to full participation of women and
girls in the formal economy.
JG: There’s a link between misogyny and stagnation in the
Middle East, which in many ways is the world’s most dysfunctional region.
HRC: It’s now very provable, when you look at the data from the
IMF and the World Bank and what opening the formal economy would mean to a
country’s GDP. You have Prime Minister [Shinzo] Abe in Japan who was elected to
fix the economy after so many years of dysfunction in Japan, and one of the
major elements in his plan is to get women into the workforce. If you do that,
if I remember correctly, the GDP for Japan would go up nine percent. Well, it
would go up 34 percent in Egypt. So it’s self-evident and provable.
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