Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks no foreign languages, but has visited 90 countries. She has never negotiated an agreement between two warring sides, but a speech she delivered in Beijing in 1995 is still quoted by women’s rights advocates around the world. As President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton carries a resume that is in many ways thinner than her predecessors. She does not bring the decades of academic and policy expertise that Condoleezza Rice brought to the job, nor does she have Colin L. Powell’s military know-how, or even Warren Christopher’s past experience as a deputy secretary of state. Nor does she have James A. Baker III’s chummy relationship with her boss. Or the street credibility of a Madeleine K. Albright or Henry A. Kissinger, whose very birthplaces — Prague and Bavaria — gave them an aura of worldliness that added sheen to their diplomatic credentials.
Une légitimité à inventer
And yet, Mrs. Clinton’s selection has electrified a diplomatic world where officials can now anticipate the prospect of sitting across a conference table from a former American first lady and presidential candidate, with all of the drama that is attached to the Clinton story. "When she arrives in a capital city, that city will be riveted," said George Friedman, chief executive of Stratfor, a geopolitical risk analysis company. "The one thing she will have is the undivided attention of any foreign leader she is in a room with."
Beyond mere star power, Mrs. Clinton’s backers say that her unorthodox background masks diplomatic skills that many of her predecessors in the job did not have. And they dismiss the notion that her inability to order a meal in French means she cannot cajole the European Union to send more troops into Afghanistan. "Look, there are lots of fabulously successful career foreign service officers out there, but first and foremost a secretary of state has to be a person who understands the complexity of the world," said Liz Schrayer, director of the Center for U.S. Global Engagement. "In today’s world, the old school of criteria for the job of secretary of state doesn’t make the same sense to me as it might have a decade ago."
Mrs. Clinton does not, at the moment, have the kind of close working relationship with Mr. Obama that two of the most highly regarded American secretaries of state, Dean Acheson and George Marshall, had with President Harry S. Truman. But neither Acheson nor Marshall began his tenure as Truman’s close friend. "They developed close professional relationships with Truman," said Richard C. Holbrooke, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, "but they were not his drinking buddies, or part of that poker-playing crowd that sat around at the Sequoia."
With the campaign behind them, advisers to Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton now say the Obama camp exaggerated Mrs. Clinton’s lack of foreign policy experience.
Le discours de Pékin
She pushed to attend a United Nations conference on women in Beijing in 1995, when many Washington critics, within and outside the Clinton administration, argued that her attendance would send the wrong signal, offering China a reward of sorts for improper behavior in the detention of human rights activists. (President Bill Clinton did not visit China until 1998.) At the conference, Mrs. Clinton said : "If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all." More than a decade later, women’s rights advocates still refer to those words.
Mrs. Clinton has an extensive network of foreign contacts from her time on the Senate Armed Services Committee, through which she traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan three times, and through her husband. In the Senate, she sometimes used the foreign contacts she developed while at the White House, including picking up the phone to ask Tony Blair, then the British prime minister, to put in a plug at the White House for a defense contract that would benefit New York.
The biggest question mark on Mrs. Clinton’s resume may be whether she can actually negotiate a peace deal — a requirement for any good secretary of state. Mrs. Clinton has not had to lock warring foreign leaders in a room and bully them into submission, or shuttle between world capitals to prod officials to sign a piece of paper. Mrs. Clinton has praised Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the former NATO commander, and Mr. Holbrooke, an envoy to the Balkans in the Clinton administration, for their conduct of diplomacy, in which both men socialized and drank with Serbia’s wartime leader, Slobodan Milosevic, to gauge his strengths. "You don’t learn something from him by pointing at him across the ocean," she told The New York Times in an interview this year.
Rapports de force dans les coulisses du pouvoir
Even before taking office, Hillary Rodham Clinton is seeking to build a more powerful State Department, with a bigger budget, high-profile special envoys to trouble spots and an expanded role in dealing with global economic issues at a time of crisis. Clinton is recruiting Jacob Lew, the budget director under President Bill Clinton, as one of two deputies, according to people close to the Obama transition team. Lew’s focus, they said, would be on increasing the share of financing that goes to the diplomatic corps. He and James Steinberg, a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration, are to be Hillary Clinton’s chief lieutenants.
The steps seem intended to strengthen the role of diplomacy after a long stretch, particularly under Secretary of State Colin Powell, in which the Pentagon, the vice president’s office and even the intelligence agencies held considerable sway over U.S. foreign policy. Given Hillary Clinton’s prominence, expanding the department’s portfolio could bring on conflict with other powerful cabinet members. For years, some Pentagon officials have complained that jobs like the economic reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq have been added to the military’s burden when they could have been handled by a robust foreign service. "The Pentagon would like to turn functionality over to civilian resources, but the resources are not there," the official said. "We’re looking to have a State Department that has what it needs."
Clinton’s push for a more vigorous economic team, one of her advisers said, stems from her conviction that the State Department needs to play a part in the recovery from the global financial crisis. Economic issues also underpin some of the most important diplomatic relationships, notably with China. In recent years, the Treasury Department, led by Henry Paulson Jr., has dominated policy toward China. Paulson leads a "strategic economic dialogue" with China that involves several agencies. It is not yet clear who will pick up that role in the Obama administration, although Vice President-elect Joseph Biden Jr. is frequently mentioned as a possibility.
