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TIME: You said a minute earlier that in a period like the cold war, where the foreign policy framework was pretty much there from President to President, you could hire smart people and leave it to them to run. Did you think you could do that early on?
Clinton: I don't know that you could leave it to them to run. I think you could hire smart people, and the American people would understand the framework in which you are operating. But when you don't have a conventional wisdom at all ((about foreign policy)), I think it's just harder to build it up. I think the burden was on me, more than I appreciated in 1993, to try to keep explaining this post-cold war world.
TIME: Do you think your Administration has sometimes suffered from a problem with the projection of forcefulness?
Clinton: The longer you're around, you understand the difference between what you do and how you're perceived. And I think that, again, people who have never been in this situation before can easily underestimate how important the latter is. Frankly, I had some things to learn on that score.
We're not the world's policeman, but we do have certain responsibilities. We will be more respected if it's clear that we're making every attempt to blend force with diplomacy. You may actually lose some political mileage if there is no actual force: if the bombs aren't dropped, and people aren't shot, and no one dies. I understand that. But I also believe that that is a form of strength when you know the power is there. It seems to me that restraint is, in itself, a policy instrument, which reinforces our good intentions.
You may sacrifice a little short-term emotional satisfaction in our own country and a little bump in the polls, but over the long run the image we're trying to build of America in the world is stronger because we went the extra mile in Haiti and because we acted so quickly in the gulf that we didn't have to use force.
TIME: There's a line of criticism that there are elements of appeasement in each of these successes. You were asked today about paying rent on the houses in Haiti. The North Koreans could still back out.
Clinton: I think, on balance, that no one with a straight face could say that there was significant appeasement in Haiti; it was strength, and it was honor. And many of the people who say that little old thing was appeasement weren't for what I was doing in the first place.
TIME: In Korea?
Clinton: In Korea, I just disagree. We wanted them to freeze and then get rid of their nuclear program. So now they said we'll freeze this, we'll get rid of it, we won't have any nuclear weapons, and we will ship out our spent fuel. So I think we've got a huge advance here. It seems to me this is a very good thing for the U.S. I do not consider it appeasement. So I just disagree with that.
TIME: I wonder if you feel that maybe you don't get as much credit as you might otherwise because you are perceived as conciliatory by nature.
Clinton: Well, that had nothing to do with this. We could not have been any quicker, any more forceful, any more decisive than we were in Iraq. And we were there lickety-split. We said, "You have to withdraw." And they began to withdraw. Now arguably you could say, Well, politically you shouldn't even have given them a chance; you should have just bombed them.