After saying she would not - a general demurral she has given many times in settings like this overseas - she added an unusually explicit follow-up. Clinton planned to run for president again, she offered a noteworthy response. Clinton was questioned about the cables by journalists and later by students at a town-hall-style meeting, and she offered the same mix of regret and resolve. But, as on a previous stop in Kazakhstan, Mrs. News coverage of the revelations has been more limited in the Arab world than in the West. Clinton’s comments came on the last day of a four-country swing through Central Asia and the Persian Gulf, which gave her a firsthand taste of the fallout from the WikiLeaks disclosures. “But the concern is the same, and we hope that Iran will respond in kind to that concern.”

“Obviously, if you’re the neighbor of a country that is pursuing nuclear weapons, that is viewed in a much more threatening way than if you’re a concerned country many thousands of miles away,” she said. But she insisted that the leaks had not damaged America’s relations with other countries, and said there was no debate in the Middle East or elsewhere about the need to confront Iran to prevent it from obtaining a bomb. Clinton repeated her regret at the disclosure of the cables and said that many of the comments in them had been taken out of context. Iran’s current enrichment activities are condemned by the United States and others because of suspicions that Iran is manufacturing fuel for a bomb. Clinton said that if Iran won back the confidence of the world, it would eventually be allowed to enrich uranium to fuel civilian nuclear power plants - the first time that a senior Obama administration official has explicitly said that. Clinton said at the conference, sponsored by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.Įven the parts of her speech on other topics - the stability of Lebanon, freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf, and the need for an independent Iraq - seemed targeted at Iran, which wields growing influence in all these areas.Įarlier, in an interview with BBC, Mrs. “We continue to make this offer of engagement with respect for your sovereignty and with regard for your interests - but also with an ironclad commitment to defending global security,” Mrs.

Paying tribute to Iran as one of the world’s great civilizations, she said President Obama remained open to diplomacy, but she challenged the Iranians to restore confidence by opening up about their nuclear activities and adhering to nuclear nonproliferation obligations. Clinton directly addressed Iran’s representatives, who sat in the audience, to come to the negotiations in good faith.

In a wide-ranging speech to a security conference here, Mrs. The show of solidarity came three days before Iran is to meet the United States and other countries in Geneva, for the first time in more than a year, to discuss its nuclear program.

Hillary leaked nuclear time in debate