CNT: Did it mean something special to you to be educated abroad?

Clinton: Oh, it made a big difference, sure. I had a lot of advantages even though I grew up in Arkansas in the middle of the country. But when I was a young man, I was really influenced by the fact that my senator, Bill Fulbright, was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Before I'd ever been abroad, I enrolled in the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, never intending to be a Foreign Service officer but thinking that in my lifetime foreign affairs would assume a bigger and bigger part of our nation's life. Which it has. And then I had a chance to go study in England and travel the world from there as a student, which was invaluable and had an enormous impact on the whole rest of my life.

CNT: Both American and international thinkers are concerned that American fear of terrorism has contributed to a kind of xenophobia, which is helping shut down precisely the kind of international exchange of ideas that would be of the greatest benefit to both the U.S. and the world. The U.S. has lost a substantial percentage of the foreign students it used to attract, with a significant diminishing among Saudi students: Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian author of best-selling graphic novels, was harassed at immigration while entering the U.S. for a book tour; Tariq Ramadan, a champion of progressive Islam, was refused a U.S. visa, though he had a faculty appointment from Notre Dame and had already packed up his family's possessions, which were waiting for them to arrive at the university. Is the U.S. in danger of becoming a kind of intellectual ghetto?

Clinton: I don't think so. I agree that we made a mistake after 9/11, at least in my view, in making it too difficult for foreign students to continue to come here and study. Might one of them have learned something that they'd go home and put to a destructive use? Yes. But the cost of what we did far outweighed any benefits that national security could have accrued, and since we're not out of our own population presently educating enough scientists and technologists and engineers, just in those fields alone, there's an economic price to pay too, quite apart from the cultural and political price. So I agree that we had some errors. But I think some of it was due more to the philosophy [of those] that were in government positions at the time, rather than the population as a whole. And some of it was due to an understandable tendency to overreact in the aftermath of 9/11.

That is, it only takes one bad decision to make 99 good ones go away. So the people who were making these decisions, these visa decisions and the airport-inspection decisions, student-quota decisions, and all of those decisions after we went through the trauma of 9/11 felt, understandably, that they would never get in trouble for saying no, because of what we'd been through. And I just ask for the rest of the world to give us a little bit of understanding. It took us a couple of years to regain our bearings, and I think we have now. And I think you'll see America reaching out more. I noticed that after this last election, the Bush administration did something that didn't get a lot of publicity, but I thought it was very important: They restored cooperation, military cooperation, with the Latin American countries with which they had suspended that cooperation because those countries refused to let us out of the International Criminal Court. And I didn't agree with the decision to try to get out of the court, because our soldiers were protected from political prosecution. And I didn't agree with the decision to suspend cooperation, but that's what happened in the aftermath of 9/11, that sort of decision. Well, earlier this year they reversed that decision. As I said, it may seem like a very small thing here, but it was a very big deal to the Latin American countries that wondered why we were withdrawing from them, our best allies, just because we had a difference of opinion over Iraq and over the ICC. So I think that we're getting our balance back.

CNT: In March, the Pew Research Center presented its most recent findings on the United States' image in the world to Congress, concluding from its polls that the U.S. image had declined not just in the Middle East or Europe but worldwide. Peter Goldmark, former president of the Rockefeller Foundation and, of course, a participant in the Clinton Global Initiative, has written recently, "Those seeking to establish global cooperation on the environment and on weapons of mass destruction, and to extend the international rule of respect for individual liberties, and a level playing field—values which the U.S. government in its domestic political rhetoric swears it will defend to the death—often find that in the international arena, the United States is their biggest opponent." What can the U.S. do to regain the trust and respect of the world, not just in image but in action?

Clinton: Well, first of all, Goldmark's quote and your question reveal a very important point that I think all Americans need to be aware of. Our standing in the world has suffered from more than Iraq. This is not just about Iraq. If it were, the whole world could say okay, America made a mistake, but we get why they made it. Because since Saddam was deposed the United Nations' position has been that we should all try to figure out a way to make this work. We're just debating what's the best way to try to help the country stay together and not become a hotbed of exportable terrorism and, you know, reward those courageous 70-plus percent of people who did vote. But this is about way more than Iraq. It's about withdrawing from nonproliferation efforts; it's about withdrawing from Kyoto climate change; it's about withdrawing from the International Criminal Court. It's about a sense that, you know, we would be unilateral whenever we could and cooperate only when we had to. And before, I think, when I was there, in the words of my secretary of state, Madeline Albright, people thought we would cooperate whenever we could and act alone only when we were forced to. It's a very important difference, this sense that people get that you value other people's opinions, that you're willing to abide by international norms, that you realize that the United States is in a very unusual position right now and may on occasion have to do something the rest of the world disagrees with, but you need to act like when you do it you really don't like doing it, and you would far prefer to be in cooperative arrangements and you're not ashamed to hold this country accountable to international rules. So I think that we could recover our position fairly quickly if we sent that message to the world. In other words, the world hasn't necessarily given up on America; they just disagree with our policies. And I think that we have to change those policies. I think, for example, President Bush may have—he may or may not be able to recover the position of America, because people are already fixed in their views of him. But if you just look at—he has done three things that I think the world generally approved of: restoring cooperation with the Latin American countries, making a diplomatic agreement with North Korea instead of continuing to have a frigid standoff, and sending Americans to the conference to discuss the future of Iraq with the Iranians and the Syrians. Those are, all three, things that signify that we're trying to do better in the world. There's a fourth thing he's doing for which he doesn't even have enough support in my own party yet—but I'm for it—which is to change the way America distributes its food aid. You know, today, with certain rare exceptions , all of our food aid to starving people around the world has to be food grown in America and delivered on American flag ships. He wants to say 25 percent of the aid can be given by food bought in the next nearest country, which helps farmers in Africa and elsewhere where there's hunger, and you get more food and you get it delivered more quickly. It's not a big thing, maybe, compared to Iraq, but it shows that we're pushing. I think the fact that he's pushing really, really hard through the diplomatic channels on Darfur is a plus. People see that we're pushing harder than some of the other countries are to try to get an acceptable UN force in there that will save more lives. So if we could send a signal that that was the dominant thread of American foreign policy, that we were interested in diplomacy, we were interested in cooperation, that we never wanted to use force except as a last resort, and we certainly didn't want to have to do it alone, I think the image of America would change rather quickly.

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