WASHINGTON – In a sense, after all the tribulations of her rather erratic 2016 presidential campaign kickoff, Hillary Clinton went back to square the other day. After much verbal bobbing and weaving, she finally came right out and said she had made a mistake using a private Internet server as secretary of state that had raised suspicions about her secrecy and trustworthiness.

She abandoned a somewhat churlish and even flippant manner toward the whole business and pivoted smartly to fulsome exposition of her support for President Obama’s nuclear disarmament deal with Iran, discussing how as president she would implement it.

She offered a modification of Ronald Reagan’s formula of “trust, but verify,” to read “distrust, and verify.”

She tipped her hat to Democratic hawks, acknowledging that Iran rulers had proved in the past that they were capable of deception, and flatly labeled Iran as “a ruthless, brutal regime.”

She categorically observed that as president she would “not hesitate to take military action” to assure that it never obtains a nuclear weapon.

While defending Obama’s trademark determination to use diplomacy as his prime response to armed conflict, Clinton observed that “diplomacy is not the pursuit of perfection” but rather “the balancing of risk” that she would prudently weigh.

In mild criticism of her former boss, she put some distance between herself and Obama on dealing with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his land grabs in Crimea and Ukraine, and she took note of reports of Russian presences in Syria.

She told her audience at the Brookings Institution that “we need a concerted effort to up the costs on Russia and Putin” for such adventures, adding the reminder that “I am in the camp that we have not done enough,” and that “I don’t think we can dance around it much longer.”

Clinton also took care to re-emphasize her long commitment to Israel, by drawing a contrast with Obama’s snub of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he came to Washington and called on Congress directly to reject the nuclear deal with Iran. She said that as president she would invite Netanyahu to the Oval Office in her first month there, adding that “Israel had every reason to be alarmed by a regime that both denies its existence and seeks its destruction.”

In all this, Obama’s first secretary of state seemed to be acknowledging her early role in getting the Iran talks under way. She gave skeptical listeners assurances that as president she would be a harsh taskmaster in holding the Iranians to account for fulfilling their obligations under the deal and in all other dealings with them in the Middle East.

Politically at home and in her own party, Clinton still bears the scars of having been on the wrong side in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Her support of President George W. Bush’s 2002 authorization for use of force, which she later said was mistaken, was stoutly opposed by then-Rep. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, her tenacious challenger for the 2016 presidential nomination.

Her present endorsement of the Iran nuclear deal maintains an uneasy relationship with the president and administration she formerly served, and offers an immediate diversion into the realm of serious policy discussion from her recent personal distractions. Beyond the appeal of her candidacy to women who are committed to making her the first female president, Clinton needs to offer more substance to her contention that she is as ready to assume the governance of the country as her fervent supporters are ready to give her the awesome job she’s after.

In winning New York’s Senate seat in 2000, she undertook a rigorous listening tour of the state that paid off. She has been taking the same route in key primary states this year, but with little opposition until Sanders caught fire, at times threatening to outshine her.

In 2008, she similarly was outshone by Barack Obama in Iowa until she found footing New Hampshire, shed appearances of a coronation, and made a fight of it. She is facing the same situation now, and seems on the strength of her Brookings foreign-policy speech to be gearing up to address the challenge more directly than before.

Editor’s note: Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books.