TW: One does not hear an extraordinary amount about Hillary Clinton. She is in the news about as often as most secretaries of state but not as much as an almost POTUS nominee and a controversial former First Lady might be. The same thing happened when she became a first-term Senator from NY, she quietly went about her business in an effective manner.
Merely restoring the State Department to its traditional role as the primary diplomatic in place of the Pentagon is a huge and positive step. It is very early but so far she and Obama have made a pretty strong team.
From Economist:
"...Mischief-makers have been trying to discover tensions between the two former rivals ever since Mrs Clinton moved to Foggy Bottom in January. So far they have been frustrated...
Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton have hewed to the same line over the current uproar in Iran—expressing worries about the violence but avoiding raising the spectre of “American interference”. Mrs Clinton has followed Mr Obama’s lead in holding out a welcoming hand to assorted anti-American strongmen. “President Obama won the election. He beat me in a primary in which he put forth a different approach,” was her sharp response to a Republican congressman who reminded her of her former hawkishness when Mr Obama shook Hugo Chávez’s hand. Mrs Clinton now enjoys the highest popularity rating of any of Mr Obama’s cabinet; she also enjoys the admiration of some Republicans...
Mrs Clinton’s success has partly been a matter of good fortune. The State Department is delighted to see the arrival of an administration that does not regard Foggy Bottom as enemy-occupied territory. It also has better relations with the Pentagon than it has had for years. If Donald Rumsfeld went out of his way to antagonise State, Robert Gates, who replaced him in 2006, has bent over backwards to woo it, publicly agonising over the “creeping militarisation” of foreign policy and calling for a “dramatic increase” in the “civilian instruments” of national security, such as diplomacy and foreign aid.
...She has struck a balance between deploying her star power and deferring to the president. She is routinely greeted as a rock star wherever she goes, and has enjoyed mixing with ordinary people: holding a spirited discussion with the teenage audience of an Indonesian television show, “Awesome”, for example. But she has always known when to defer to Mr Obama or other cabinet secretaries, such as Tim Geithner.
...Mrs Clinton has also seemed content to delegate the day-to-day management of some of the world’s most volatile regions to special envoys: the Afghanistan-Pakistan region to Mr Holbrooke; the Middle East peace process to George Mitchell...But in general Mrs Clinton has disentangled herself enough from the daily demands of these regions to focus on strategic questions that are too often given short shrift: overhauling the management of foreign aid, improving the United States’ relations with Latin America and managing the rise of Asia, which is arguably the most important strategic issue facing the country..."
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13856297
No comments:
Post a Comment