If you were contemplating running for President of the United States, a national book tour would be a handy pointer to what lies ahead: towns that blur into one, set speeches with the same jokes over and over, the combined shampoo-conditioner concoction found only in hotels and a diet largely cobbled together from vending machines. Not that Hillary Clinton needs a reminder of the price a presidential bid exacts; she writes in her new memoir, Hard Choices, that the exercise is ‘intellectually demanding, emotionally draining and physically taxing’. At least after a book tour, you can expect to pocket some cash if people buy what you’re selling. A presidential campaign most often ends in debt and disappointment.

A post-administration book deal is ubiquitous in Washington these days, from presidents themselves to bit players. Yet even in a market flooded with insider tell-alls, Hillary Clinton’s memoir has been hotly anticipated, chiefly because it is universally interpreted as a platform for her second tilt at the Democratic presidential nomination. Clinton writes that she hasn’t decided yet whether to run in 2016 and last week told an American interviewer that she didn’t see herself making a decision before the end of this year. But Clinton has spent almost her entire adult life ‘in the arena’, as Theodore Roosevelt put it. Given the GOP identity crisis and her dominance of the potential Democrat field, would she really pass up her final opportunity to seize history as America’s first female President? Observers of American politics don’t need Hard Choices to help them connect the dots. The book is more useful in providing an insight into what sort of foreign policy President Hillary Clinton might be. This should be of particular interest to an Australian reader, although mentions of Australia in the book are few and far between.

Any review of a Clinton autobiography is complicated by the need to determine in which genre it most comfortably sits. Is it a celebrity memoir? A feminist tome? A political tell-all? A defence of a record? An attempt to define a legacy? This book is all of those things but Hard Choices is by and large a highly detailed discussion of foreign policy — and if that sounds a touch dull, it will be to all but devotees of the field. It exhaustively catalogues almost every global issue Clinton touched during her term as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013: from the mire of Afghanistan to the rise of social media as a tool of civil dissent to Vladimir Putin’s intransigence.

The book lacks the essential ingredients of the very best memoirs: scandalous candour and the absence of self-consciousness. It reads much as Hillary Clinton herself appears: impressive in its command of detail, highly intelligent, cautious and somewhat opaque. One of the few sections of the book that is genuinely personally revealing covers her transition from defeated Democrat candidate to Secretary of State and the slow defrosting of her relationship with Barack Obama after their brutal primaries contest. She writes of events crisply (‘I had lost and he had won’) and says she agreed to serve because he persuaded her they could be a highly effective team and even, eventually, friends. She became such a trusted advisor and confidante that Obama wanted her to stay on for his second term. One of the memoir’s more delicious morsels is her admission that she kept plans for the Navy Seal raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in 2011 a secret even from her husband. When Obama rang all the former US presidents to brief them, Bill Clinton was taken by surprise and told Obama that Hillary had not said a word.

Hillary Clinton’s writing on the failure of her presidential bid and how she came to terms with it offers a window into perhaps her most defining quality: resilience. Clinton decided that accepting the loss in a very public way would be a handy tool in her arsenal as Secretary of State. She writes that ‘Losing would… give me the chance to talk to leaders of other nations about how to accept difficult verdicts at home and move forward for the good of one’s country.’ In our society, obsessed as it is with success and its rewards, it is notable to see one of the world’s most admired people put value on failure. Clinton’s resilience is perhaps why she has such a following among women around the world, particularly in places of hardship. Her challenges have been vastly different to theirs and of course very privileged by comparison, but women find inspiration in her ability to keep bouncing back.

Any Australian readers hoping for insight into the US–Australia alliance or gossip about local politicians will be disappointed. Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd and Stephen Smith are the three Australian politicians mentioned in the book and each only in passing. Although local media has highlighted Hillary Clinton’s reference to the ‘outrageous sexism’ faced by Gillard, this is only one sentence in the book. Clinton touches on misogyny in a brief manner, noting once again that women face ‘a persistent double standard’ in politics, around their ‘hair, body type and clothes’. Clinton has made women’s rights a major part of her public life for decades and she scarcely needs to make the point once again that women face disadvantage. This memoir is simply the experience of a Secretary of State, not an exploration of how she was treated as a female Secretary of State. Clinton of course attracted sexist behaviour during her term (remember the tongue-lashing she dished out to a Congolese student who asked what her husband thought?) but those who tried it did so at their own risk, given her position of strength within the administration and in the opinion polls. It is an intriguing question: is Clinton now such a powerful woman that sexism is no longer a useful weapon against her?

Australia itself gets only two glancing mentions. It is a reminder yet again that Australia is a middle-ranking power in world affairs not a major player. Furthermore, although Australia may view the US as its closest friend in the world, the US views Australia as one useful partner among many. It is the sun and Australia is one of the planets in its orbit — and not a big planet at that. Better to accept it pragmatically than feel defensive.

Nonetheless, for an Australian audience Hard Choices provides some useful clues about how any future Clinton administration may approach foreign policy in our region. Clinton situates Asia in the first section of the book, ahead of even the traditional US preoccupations of Russia and the Middle East. She unpacks the thinking behind ‘the pivot’, Washington’s renewed focus on engagement with Asia. Clinton describes the major goal of the strategy as promoting ‘political reform as well as economic growth’ and reasserting America as a Pacific power without unnecessarily antagonising China. She considers the US–China relationship ‘isn’t one that fits neatly into categories like friend or rival and it may never’. Clinton’s view of China is much influenced by her strong views on human rights and the ‘faith in action’ approach she developed as part of her Methodist upbringing. She declares the US should not sacrifice its values or traditional allies to win better terms with China.

The US regularly denies that it sees multilateral arrangements in Asia as a way of countering the rise of China. Clinton advocates stronger regional multilateral ties but insists they are to promote open democracies and economies, in line with US values and interests. Yet Clinton also notes that China prefers to resolve territorial disputes with its neighbours bilaterally because in those situations its relative power is greater. It is therefore hard to reach any conclusion other than that the US prefers to build multilateral groupings in order to decrease China’s sway. In this approach, where the power of many becomes the power of one, the US will continue to expect Australia, South Korea and Japan to be its most reliable regional partners.

Climate change would be a key area of philosophical difference between any future Clinton administration and a second-term Abbott government, if the Liberal party is re-elected. Clinton devotes an entire chapter to the subject and calls it an urgent challenge, given the ‘mountain of overwhelming scientific data’. She describes it as a national security threat and a test of US leadership. Clinton writes that those who talk about climate change in terms of the economy versus the environment posit a false choice. Compare that to the recent language of Prime Minister Tony Abbott who says he will not take action on climate change that ‘clobbers our economy’, nor does he view it as the most important problem facing the world. Given Clinton’s preference for strong multilateral infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific and her emphasis on climate change as a leadership test, at some stage a Clinton administration would be likely to seek the support of an Abbott government to tackle this problem at a regional level, potentially posing a challenge. Yet it is immature to overstate differences of opinion on climate change as potentially damaging to the alliance, as some have done. The US-Australia alliance has endured through all sorts of polite disagreements.

Hard Choices contains few statements of regret or admissions of error. The exception is Iraq, on which Clinton writes that she regrets voting in 2002 to authorise the use of force. She is most defensive in her chapter about the terror attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 which embroiled her in congressional hearings and scuttlebutt. She stops short of declaring a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ but does accuse politicians and sections of the media of misinformation and deception. She writes that the Benghazi events occurred in the fog of war and that we may never know the full details of what occurred.

More broadly, Hard Choices shows that Clinton remains an advocate of ‘smart power’, a combination of the traditional hard and soft tools of diplomacy. She sees women’s rights as central, not peripheral; she is generally hawkish when it comes to international intervention; she believes in the power of technology to speak directly to people around the world, bypassing governments and traditional media; and she rejects any suggestion that the US is a power in terminal decline. Her rebuttal to this view is that the US has a history of overcoming adversity and many advantages compared to the rest of the world. She does not address in detail critics who say America is squandering its global dominance through mounting debt, eroding moral authority and imperial overreach.

When Clinton lost her bid for the Democratic nomination in 2008, she encouraged her supporters to rally behind Obama in her famous ‘glass ceiling’ speech: ‘Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it. And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.’ With Hard Choices, Clinton is dipping a toe back in the campaign rapids. Should she decide the water feels fine, she will learn come 2016 if her words about it being ‘easier next time’ were prescient or wishful.