Hillary Clinton’s Interview At Doha Forum 2025 (Transcript)

And we also, though, have to recognize that along with the economic competition, there’s a strategic competition with China in the region. And the build up of the Chinese military assets are, you know, ones that pose a direct threat, first and foremost to our allies in the region, but then also to the United States.

So, you know, when you look at diplomacy of any kind, whether it’s trying to end a war or trying to prevent a war, deter your adversaries, there has to be so much follow up. And there is an aversion within the administration to, you know, the kind of work that is done by foreign service officers, diplomats, others who are on the front lines trying to fulfill these national security objectives.

And there’s a very small group around the president who he trusts to do all of this. And I think in many ways that is just not adequate for the complexity of the problems we face.

RAVI AGRAWAL: You know, but part of the criticism that the Trump administration has often had, say for example, of the Obama administration or even the Biden administration, was that there was too much of all of that stuff. And so they claim that they right sized the China strategy, which was a direct critique of the Obama years. And in a sense, there’s bipartisan agreement in the United States. I’m not saying that’s right. But there is that. We needed a different approach to China.

The Hard Work of Diplomacy

HILLARY CLINTON: Look, I think that there’s a lot to critique in any presidential administration, but I think that there’s also a lot to learn from any presidential administration about what works and what doesn’t work.

For example, I recently saw an analysis of peace agreements, which ones actually stick and how you get to them. And you know, obviously in the 90s, there was the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland, there was the Dayton agreement in the Balkans. And so I know how much effort went into actually getting those agreements made. And in the case of Northern Ireland and in the case of the Balkans, what it took to demilitarize, decommission the weapons of the combatants, all of that, that is the boring, hard work of actually achieving diplomatic success.

And I think there’s a lot to be said for the kind of dramatic and bold action that we see from this president. But that standing alone is not sufficient. It may be necessary to get the world’s attention, get the party’s attention, get something done in the immediate effort to show progress. But then you’ve got to do all of that hard work.

So it’s not either or, you know, when I think about the kinds of diplomacy that I saw, you know, in the 90s that I saw when I was in the Senate, that I was part of in the Obama administration. There are a lot of tools in the toolkit, and among those tools are soft power development, which we have unfortunately decided is not going to be a prominent tool in how we try to, you know, influence people, persuade them. China’s filling that gap, particularly in Africa.

So it’s, you know, to me, you don’t get into office and say everything that was ever done going back to the founding of the country was wrong. And we’re going to, you know, do it differently. You say, hey, I’ve got a different style, I’ve got some different ideas. I’m going to learn from the past. I’m going to apply what works, and then we’re going to go from there. That just makes sense to me. And I worry that we are, you know, shutting a lot of doors, cutting off a lot of our allies and not learning some of those lessons right now.

Young Americans, Social Media, and the Israel-Gaza Conflict

RAVI AGRAWAL: So I’m going to come back to Trump and also the future of the Democratic Party. I want to talk about you now. You’ve been in the news this past week for some comments you made at an event in New York organized by the newspaper Israel Hayom. And I’m going to paraphrase here, but you said that smart, well educated young Americans are getting their news from social media and from TikTok.

And you went on to say that this is how they’re learning about what happened on October 7th and then what happened in Gaza in the months that followed. And it appears that this was a broader lament on your part about declining support among Americans for Israel.

That comment has generated a lot of controversy and it’s led Congressman Ro Khanna, for example, to point out that “I don’t think the answer is to disparage the intelligence of young people.” It’s been a few days now since you’ve said that. How are you reflecting on your words and the controversy around it?

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, I think it is a provable fact that most Americans and an even bigger percentage of young Americans get their news from social media. If that is controversial, then people are not paying attention to how—

RAVI AGRAWAL: Is that a bad thing?

HILLARY CLINTON: I don’t know if it’s a bad thing, but I think it’s an incomplete—

RAVI AGRAWAL: Well, let me rephrase this.

HILLARY CLINTON: They should be listening to you, Ravi.

RAVI AGRAWAL: I mean, obviously people do listen to me, for what it’s worth. And I am also on Instagram and TikTok. But I guess the broader point here is that if Americans are shifting in their views about Israel and poll after poll shows that that is the case, that is based on some information that they’re getting not just from social media, but also from very reputable journalists operating in the region, also Palestinian journalists in Gaza. Why is that not accurate?

The Importance of Historical Context

HILLARY CLINTON: I’m not saying it’s not accurate. I am saying that in, you know, I teach at Columbia University and I teach a course called Inside the Situation Room. And so it’s a very large course. I co-teach it with the dean of the School of International Public Affairs. And so I’ve had many, many conversations with very smart young people, not just Americans, but literally from around the world.

RAVI AGRAWAL: It’s worth pointing out that Columbia, of course, has been a center of some protest and action and it was on this issue.

HILLARY CLINTON: And I talked to students there, I’ve talked to students elsewhere. And in talking with them about their views, they were certainly entitled to those views based on whatever information they had. But they did not always know why they were saying what they said.

And all I’m asking for is that people have a historical context both for what has happened to the Palestinians and what has happened to the Israelis. Because we are not going to implement the 20 point peace plan or any other peace plan unless people come with some sense of historical perspective and empathy about how we’re going to move people toward what I still believe is the only realistic outcome, a two state solution.

And we’re not going to get there if people, you know, when they say “from the river to the sea” and you say “what river and what sea” and they don’t know, which has personally happened in conversations that I’ve had, I just, you know, but this is a larger issue because even on other matters in this class that I teach, we are not doing a good job teaching history. We’re not giving young people the kind of context that I think they need to be decision makers.

RAVI AGRAWAL: With all due respect, and I can’t gauge how well young people grapple with history, but what I can speak to is they’re grappling with the here and now and they are witnessing images that are live streamed that are coming out every day. And yes, there is misinformation and disinformation, but a lot of it is real. And I think there’s a genuine anger in the United States and around the world that some of that anger is deflected.

The Cost of Conflict and America’s Role

HILLARY CLINTON: But Ravi, I’m angry about all of the human rights abuses. I’m angry about all of the excessive use of force. I’m angry about what happened on October 7th in Israel and what happened in Gaza. I’m angry about what Russia is doing in Ukraine. I’m angry about Sudan. I’m angry about the eastern Congo.

I mean, I think we should be all looking at the tragedies and the conflicts that are bringing about so much suffering and be dealing with them. That’s why the national security strategy is not to my liking because I think the United States has an important role in trying to resolve these conflicts and alleviate the suffering and give people a chance to have peaceful, prosperous lives. That should be our goal. That is in America’s interest. I don’t care where in the world you are.

So of course the suffering in Gaza is horrific. Full stop. Suffering everywhere is horrific. So let’s look at what we can do to try to resolve what is being done to people in so many different settings right now. And I think that the emphasis on one terrible conflict sort of doesn’t do justice to the challenges that we are confronting.

And I don’t want to see my country basically say, “You know what, those other presidents, they tried to resolve conflicts, they tried to stand for democracy and freedom, they stood up for human rights. What a waste of time.” That is to me, an abdication of leadership. And I want to see us involved everywhere trying to stop the kind of horrible abuses that are going on.

RAVI AGRAWAL: I’m with you in all of that. I think the argument we often hear, of course, is that America has a different role in the Middle East. Of course it supports Israel and therefore is complicit to a degree.

But I want to draw a line from all of this to 9/11 and America’s misadventures after 9/11 and the war in Iraq, the war on terror. And one could make the case that at some level America has been unable to maybe curb Israel in this particular case or even impose its will and talk about the values and rules and norms and conflicts around the world, in part because it too has skirted rules and norms in several instances in its history. Is it your sense now that we’re entering a world where the rules and norms don’t matter as much, and what can the United States do?

Trauma, Decision-Making, and International Norms

HILLARY CLINTON: Look, I think it’s an interesting analogy because when a country is attacked, and as you know, I was a senator from New York on 9/11, so I was deeply involved in dealing with families who had lost loved ones, dealing with the people who had been grievously injured, dealing with the horrible cleanup and everything we had to do in lower Manhattan, that is a traumatic event.

And people don’t always make the best decisions post traumatic events. You have to understand that. And I’m not sure that was well understood after 9/11 in American decision making. And I think you can see other examples of that.

Obviously that’s part of the reason why we established all of these norms and laws after The Second World War, when you talk about how the rule of law, how the expectations of militaries in combat are supposed to be judged, all of that was an effort to try to construct a system that could rein in bad leaders like Vladimir Putin who wants to dominate and destroy his neighbors, leaders who are traumatized by horrific events and therefore lash out and may not be restrained in acting the way that they should. That’s part of why we constructed this whole system.

To move away from norms and laws in the international system will only benefit the worst actors in the international system, whether they are heads of state or criminal cartels or whoever. So I really believe it’s a mistake for the United States not to be upholding all those rules. Does that mean we’re always going to follow them perfectly? No. Nobody ever has.

But we need not just to give lip service to them, but to try our best to set examples to be a nation of laws, not men, as the saying goes. And it will be, the world will be much worse off if the United States retreats from that position. You know, we have a big dispute going on right now over the bombing of these fishing boats off—

RAVI AGRAWAL: The coast of Venezuela.

HILLARY CLINTON: Yeah. In the Caribbean and the Pacific. And there has not been an adequate showing. You know, I was on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Bush administration, which I did not always agree with, we would require them to come up and explain things and provide information. In the Obama administration, even in the most secret negotiation in the Situation Room I was ever involved in, the decision to go after Osama bin Laden, the leaders of Congress were briefed on that.

So there were norms, there were rules. There were both legal and kind of moral expectations.

Congressional Accountability and Constitutional Checks

RAVI AGRAWAL: I’m sure you get asked this all the time, where is Congress today?

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, the Congress has abdicated its responsibility. And it’s very sad to me because no president likes to be questioned by the Congress. I don’t care what party you are. But that’s part of the way our system was set up. Under our Constitution, the Congress is supposed to serve as a check on the executive power.

And I think it’s unfortunate that they have failed to do that. And basically, it’s the Republican Party that doesn’t want to in any way hold the administration accountable. That is not in keeping with our Constitution. And it is not smart, because presidents need to be held accountable.

It’s a heady feeling being in the Oval Office and part of the way our founders, and we’re about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, understood human nature was to say, “Hey, look, there have to be separation of powers. There have to be checks and balances.” The first article sets up the Congress, the second, the executive, the third, the judiciary. And there’s supposed to be all of this tension so that nobody goes too far and leads the country astray.

So I think the Congress has abdicated that responsibility.

RAVI AGRAWAL: What about that? Could Democrats be doing more? Are you advising them in any capacity to try and come up with a better strategy?

Democratic Strategy and Opposition

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, look, I think the Democrats actually came out of that shutdown in a strong position because they put affordability, particularly the affordability of health care, front and center on the domestic agenda. It was very hard to get any kind of smart political strategy in the beginning because the Democrats had so few tools.

But I think that there is a growing awareness that the Democrats are being more effective in their opposition to the president. And I think the recent elections prove that voters are beginning to ask a lot of questions. Obviously, you look at polling and favorability ratings and all of that.

But what bothers me is that I was in the Senate for eight years. I know a number of the Republicans who are still in the Senate. I don’t recognize them because they were more than happy to criticize and question Bush and certainly Obama and certainly Biden. And they are either intimidated or in agreement, whatever the reason might be, that they’re not doing the same now.

RAVI AGRAWAL: When you look at why Democrats lost to Trump, what do you think in general, they’re missing about where the country is at? What have they gotten wrong? What are they misreading?

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, look, I think that we are about to see political changes come and go, as you know so well. And I think that there were a lot of missed signals in the Biden administration. Obviously, Democrats lost the presidential election. I think there was a lot of uncertainty about how best to take on the president in the initial months of this term.

But I think they have found their footing. And I think the candidates who are running, whether it’s the new mayor elect in New York who made affordability the center of his campaign, or the newly elected governors in New Jersey and Virginia who also made affordability the key message of their campaigns, that is beginning to resonate because it reflects the reality of Americans’ daily lives.

You know, President Trump ran on affordability in large measure. “I’m going to get the prices down, you’re going to have a better economic future.” That hasn’t happened. And so you can only tell people something for so long before they say, “Wait a minute,” because that’s what happened with Biden. He kept saying, “The economic indicators are really good.” And people are saying, “Yeah, I’m looking at my grocery list and I can’t afford half the items on it. I’m looking at my electricity rates, I’m looking at my health care costs.”

And so they turned on Biden, even though he had tried very hard to lay the groundwork for new jobs and all the rest of it. Now you see people turning on the president, you see his favorabilities in the 30s in some polls. Why? Because their lived reality does not reflect the messages that are being put out from the White House. And I think there are concerns about what some of the other actions are.

You know, one of the things that really broke through to people was demolishing the east wing of the White House. And look, you can have an argument the White House needs a big space for people to gather. That’s fine. But it was just such an abrupt decision and the pictures were so incredibly disturbing. So people all of a sudden started saying, “Wait a minute, what’s going on? That’s the White House.”

So there’s a lot that is beginning to penetrate, not just among Democrats, but Independents as well, about, “Wait a minute, maybe this is not exactly what I voted for.”

Women’s Rights and Global Reversals

RAVI AGRAWAL: Last question. Thirty years ago, you went to Beijing and you gave this iconic speech in which you said “women’s rights are human rights.” And in many senses, I mean, that opened so many doors around the world and was formative in creating a feminist foreign policy. There have been some reversals of all the gains in the last three decades to the last few years. They’re disappointing. I know you’re not despondent, though. What gives you hope on this?

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, specifically on this issue, you know, 30 years ago, I did make a speech. But what was more significant is that 189 countries reached consensus on something called the Platform for Action, which was the most historic effort to lay out all the ways in which women were not being treated equally and fairly in societies around the globe.

And we made a lot of progress. For example, domestic violence was not considered a crime. It was a norm. It was like, “Oh, well, that’s what happens in families.” And that was changed. And all of a sudden, countries began to pass laws against domestic violence and train judges and law enforcement people to deal with it.

Child marriage was seen as a norm that really cut into a young woman’s potential for her own life, her education and her health and so much else. So on so many grounds, we were making all this progress, and women across the globe were advancing toward a greater sense of opportunity.

And there has been a reversal started in COVID with real intention, in part because economically, a lot of families found themselves in terrible trouble. And so child marriage started going up. Domestic violence started going up again. And what I’m seeing now is that even in countries that are advanced economies, there are a lot of doors shutting. I mean—

The Pushback Against Women’s Rights

HILLARY CLINTON: It’s a very sad commentary that there is now a lot of corporations that are saying, “Well, wait a minute, I don’t want to get in trouble if I put a woman on the board,” even though I’d like to hear from a woman. You know, I ended up on the Walmart board because Sam Walton called me and said, “I think I need a woman on the board because, you know, most of my customers are women, and we don’t have any women. And I want to know what women think when they go into my store.”

Well, that was common sense. That was not revolutionary. That wasn’t DEI. That was like, we have a big market out there. We want to sell to everybody, and that includes women and people of color and everybody else.

So I just see that there’s a very real pushback in ways that are endangering women’s lives, cutting back on health care, child marriage once again being, you know, an economic necessity. What the Taliban is doing, you know, the continuing campaign against women with forced hijab in Iran, but also in Hungary, in Russia, in Turkey, turning back laws that were meant to protect women.

Xi Jinping saying, “I wish more women would go back into the home because we need more children.” Well, they need more children because they had the one child policy, and they have a 30 million male surplus because they didn’t keep their baby girls alive because they could only have one child.

I mean, all of these decisions have consequences. And authoritarianism often picks on women first because they’re more vulnerable. And they can be pointed to as the problems in society are because of what women are doing or failing to do.

So there has been pushback and there are reversals, but I am optimistic because I think that is out of step with reality. And I still believe that women’s rights are human rights and that women’s equality is the unfinished business of the 21st century. And every nation will do better the more they give opportunities for women to make their own decisions.

RAVI AGRAWAL: That’s a great place to end. Secretary Clinton, thanks for joining us.

HILLARY CLINTON: Thank you.

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