What Hillary did next

“WHY extremists always focus on women is a mystery to me. But they all seem to. It doesn't matter what country they're in. They want to control women. They want to control how we dress, they want to control how we act, they want to control everything about us.” So said Hillary Clinton last month to a young Arab woman who had asked her at a public meeting about wearing the hijab. This encounter was in Tunis, where Mrs Clinton had just taken part in an international summit on Syria. She had come straight from London, where she attended a meeting on Somalia, and went on to Algeria and Morocco before making the nine-hour hop back to Washington, DC.

If Barack Obama is re-elected in November, one big thing is going to be different in his second term. He will no longer have his relentlessly globe-trotting former presidential rival at his side. As the frazzled aides and reporters who travel regularly in the back of her converted Boeing 757 attest, the job is punishing, especially the way she has chosen to do it.

Since taking office, Mrs Clinton has visited 95 countries (see map) and logged some 730,000 miles, sometimes cramming more than a dozen meetings into a single day. This marathon came hard after the titanic Democratic presidential campaign of 2008. “I've had an extraordinary 20 years. I've been really at the highest levels of American political life,” she told The Economist in a recent interview, “I need a little time to reflect, step off the fast track I've been on.”

Evaluating her record is a complicated business. The job of a secretary of state has at least three parts: implementing foreign policy, acting as America's global ambassador and running the behemoth that is the State Department. But in the first and most visible of these—foreign policy—it is the president who takes the lead.

That has been especially true of this administration. By some accounts, Mr Obama has been the most hands-on foreign-policy president since Richard Nixon (see article). When America is at war, Washington's centre of gravity tilts even further towards the White House and the Pentagon and away from the State Department in Foggy Bottom.

Moreover Mrs Clinton started her job in unusual circumstances. With the victorious presidential campaign team ensconced in the White House and a defeated one at State, she needed to quell any lingering suspicions between the rival teams by showing a perfect loyalty. Not once in three years has she quarrelled in public with Mr Obama, and only once—during the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt—did the wires between the State Department and the White House become seriously crossed.

That is commendable, but compounds the difficulty of assigning credit and blame for foreign policy. She says she has had no difficulty meeting the president on “anything, any time”. By the end of 2011, by the State Department's count, she had taken part in nearly 600 meetings at the White House. But on some hot issues she has stood on the margins or run things at arm's length. Mr Obama gave Joe Biden, his vice-president, the lead in Iraq. “Af-Pak” strategy was delegated to her friend, the late indefatigable Richard Holbrooke; and a special envoy, George Mitchell, was given charge of reviving negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

Not until the archives are opened will historians know reliably what big issues, if any, she and Mr Obama fought over. But on most big decisions there has been little cause to fight. She and the president had a shared view of America's global predicament after George W. Bush left office. She says now that it was “painful” when she started to make her phone calls to hear how much perceptions of America had changed. There is self interest in this: her husband preceded Mr Bush. But in Asia in particular allies were anxious about the superpower's willingness to stay engaged. It was time to bring some “old-fashioned balance into our relationships”.

That is why Mrs Clinton became the first secretary of state since Dean Rusk in 1961 to make her first overseas visit to Asia. The so-called “pivot to Asia” was as much an invention of the White House as State's, but it is Mrs Clinton who has put in the long hours to revitalise neglected alliances and plug America back into the heart of Asia's multilateral organisations.

This was not all glamorous work. She admits knowing nothing of the Association of South-East Asian Nations' Treaty of Amity and Co-operation before planning a trip to Jakarta to signal America's intention to accede. “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.”

On that first of more than half a dozen Asian trips, Jeffrey Bader, the White House's director for East Asia until leaving last year, was struck by the shrieks of approval Mrs Clinton elicited along her motorcade route or in hotel lobbies. At a university in South Korea, he says, thousands of star-struck girls greeted her as “the ultimate woman's role model”.

Certainly no previous secretary has enjoyed Mrs Clinton's advantages in the second part of her job, as America's ambassador. Already a celebrity, she knew many of the world's leaders before starting out. It may help, too, that she is not a lawyer, general or professor, like previous secretaries of state, but a politician who has seen at first hand the high politics of the White House and the low politics of the Senate and the campaign trail. At a time when people everywhere are demanding a say in how they are governed, she thinks it is an advantage to be able to say to nervous leaders in fledgling democracies: “Mr President, I've won elections and I've lost elections; I do know how you feel.”

Some fresh air in Foggy Bottom

As for running the State Department, no woman who came within a whisker of being president was likely to leave the behemoth at Foggy Bottom unreformed. Borrowing an idea from the Pentagon, she launched its first quadrennial strategy review. The aim, she said in an article for Foreign Affairs, was to develop “a more holistic approach to civilian power”.

America's ambassadors were instructed that diplomacy was no longer a matter of talking only to other governments: they were to see themselves as CEOs of multi-agency missions, reaching out to the whole of society. In the 21st century, she said, “a diplomat is as likely to meet with a tribal elder in a rural village as a counterpart in a foreign ministry, and is as likely to wear cargo pants as a pinstriped suit.” In umpteen meetings with “civil society” around the world, she has led by example.

Also new is an emphasis on “economic statecraft”, an attempt to co-ordinate everything from pushing China on its exchange rate, to promoting free trade, to defending intellectual property, to luring inward investment and helping American firms find markets and opportunities overseas. She has appointed the department's first chief economist. These, however, are areas where the Treasury, Commerce Department and White House are already active—and likely to stay dominant.

Running the department has also given Mrs Clinton an instrument to promote the welfare of women, a cause she made her own as first lady in 1995 when a speech on women's rights at a conference in Beijing made a global splash. She has installed Melanne Verveer, her former White House chief of staff, as ambassador for women, reporting directly to her, and another longtime aide, Kris Balderston, “special representative for global partnerships”. One of his projects has been to create a coalition of governments, corporations and non-profits to develop cheap, hygienic cooking stoves for the millions of women around the world who have to forage for fuel to feed their families.

It is, however, her diplomacy that historians will scrutinise most. For sure, she will not be leaving behind her a world set suddenly to rights. Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan could easily fall into chaos. America has tightened the screws on Iran, but not yet stopped its nuclear programme—and, many say, failed at a crucial moment in 2009 to give moral support to the country's democracy activists. America has tried to put itself on the right side of the Arab spring, but after nudging out Mr Mubarak and helping to rid Libya of Muammar Qaddafi there has been no military intervention to stop the slaughter in Syria. Elsewhere in the Middle East, longstanding alliances with Egypt and Saudi Arabia are now looking dangerously fragile.

The starkest failure was peacemaking in Palestine, which Mr Obama made a priority but where American peacemaking had in effect collapsed by 2011. Mrs Clinton points out gamely in her interview that there were some tactical successes along the way. Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, did at last “sort of” accept the two-state solution; and America got him to accept a ten-month settlement freeze, which for all its loopholes did slow Israeli construction in the West Bank. But this is putting a brave face on what everyone knows was an abject failure. In the end Mr Obama antagonised both Mr Netanyahu and Israel's supporters in America, but failed to prevail over him, and by failing lost prestige among the Arabs as well.

It is presidents who make the final decisions on Arab-Israeli peacemaking. But since by her own testimony Mrs Clinton has had a voice in all the big calls, she shares responsibility for the failures and half-failures as well as for the successes and half-successes.

Mrs Clinton has her critics. Some say that the globe-trotting has come at the expense of strategic imagination, that talking aloud about a “pivot” to Asia sent the wrong messages to allies elsewhere and that the exit from Mr Bush's wars has been botched. “Being liked is not the same as doing shit,” says one veteran (Republican) policymaker who thinks Mrs Clinton brought to State too many of the image-building habits of her presidential campaign. Another, Paul Wolfowitz, says that her reputation as a good manager was earned by making few waves—except for what he calls her biggest accomplishment, saving America from what would have been a “disastrous” hands-off policy in Libya. The question now, he adds, is whether her record will be stained by a victory for Bashar Assad in Syria.

Still, even her critics pay tribute to her high intelligence and astonishing work rate. At the end of 2011, almost 70% of Americans approved of how she was doing. Barring some mishap, she looks set to leave with her reputation enhanced.

For Mr Obama, offering her State was a bet that paid off. He gained an adviser and ambassador of presidential calibre, while removing from the Senate a powerful Democratic rival who might have formed a nucleus of disaffection. Her own decision to accept the job was harder. She is said to have come round only after friends and advisers listed the political benefits of adding achievements on the world stage to her existing accomplishments in the Senate and before.

Whether she will run for the presidency again, nobody outside her inner circle can know. Her early departure is inconclusive: no secretary of state since the 1960s has served out two terms. But when the election of 2016 arrives she will be 69; no older, she can tell herself, than Ronald Reagan at the start of his presidency. In the meantime, says one of her supporters, the “Clinton network” remains in existence, ready to be activated. The temptation to reach again for the top prize in politics will be hard to resist.

A transcript of our interview with Mrs Clinton is available here