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Tag: Clinton

  • On Clinton’s Travels, a Duality in Style

    On Clinton’s Travels, a Duality in Style

    Unlike Straight Talk in Asia Trip, Caution Rules Mideast and Europe Visits

    The Washington Post Company

    By Glenn Kessler


    Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, flanked by hosts Pinar Kur, at far left, Mujde Ar, second from left, and Cigdem Anad, second from right, attends a talk show in Ankara, Turkey. (Pool Photo By Osman Orsal Via Associated Press)

    ANKARA, Turkey, March 7 — When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton meets with foreign officials, the initial welcome is formal, as in “Greetings, Madame Secretary.” But invariably, the officials slip into calling her “Hillary” — a global brand name on par with “Diana” or “Tiger.”

    Clinton’s celebrity status — and her skill at exploiting it — were again apparent during her first visit as secretary to the Middle East and Europe this past week.

    At a private dinner with European foreign ministers in Brussels on Wednesday, she was the center of attention, patiently answering questions from her counterparts — who took the unusual step of bursting into applause after the meal.

    When she spoke to hundreds of young political activists at the European Parliament on Friday, President Hans-Gert Poettering gushed that there is “enormous goodwill toward you” in Europe. He later paid her what he probably considered the ultimate compliment — that her answers “mostly could have been said by Europeans.”

    But compared with her visit to Asia last month, this trip had a different diplomat on display.

    In Asia, Clinton generated headlines with frank remarks, such as when she questioned the efficacy of sanctions against the repressive junta in Burma, spoke openly about a possible succession crisis in North Korea and said she expected to make little progress on human rights in China.

    This week, she was more cautious, especially in the Middle East. She was often careful to hew to talking points, and her answers to reporters’ questions were more opaque. She also was less available for sustained give-and-take with the reporters traveling with her. Not counting short news conferences, she conducted one briefing for reporters on her plane in seven days of travel.

    In Israel, she never publicly mentioned long-standing U.S. concerns about settlement expansion in Palestinian territories. When questioned about settlements in Ramallah, on the West Bank, she avoided uttering a word that might have upset Israeli leaders: Instead of “settlements,” she referred to “that issue.”

    Clinton conducted no interviews with Israeli media, even though secretaries of state generally take time to meet with Israeli reporters. Nor did she meet with Palestinian reporters; instead, she met with a group of high school students, who asked her mostly personal questions.

    But, in contrast to the “listening tour” of Asia, Clinton was much more diplomatically active. Throughout the week, she engineered an effort to reach out to nations, especially adversaries, that the Bush administration had spurned.

    She dispatched two senior U.S. diplomats to meet with top Syrian officials on Saturday; she extended an invitation to Iran to be part of an international gathering on Afghanistan; and she tried to “reset” relations with Russia by winning NATO approval to restore high-level meetings and by having dinner with her Russian counterpart.

    In each case, Clinton said she would look for areas in which the countries could work with the United States, while acknowledging and confronting topics of disagreement.

    “We are being extremely vigorous in our outreach because we are testing the waters, we are determining what is possible, we’re turning new pages and resetting buttons, and we are doing all kinds of efforts to try to create more partners and fewer adversaries,” she said on National Public Radio.

    Clinton also had to soothe allies unnerved by some of these moves. Arab and Israeli leaders are worried about the outreach to Iran, while Eastern and Central European countries are wary of potential deal-making with Russia on missile defense.

    By week’s end, Clinton could claim progress, at least in terms of process. In Syria, Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem and other officials met for about four hours with Acting Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman and White House official Dan Shapiro. “We found a lot of common ground today,” Feltman told reporters in a conference call from Damascus. “It is my view that Syria can play an important and constructive role in the region.” But he added, “The differences between our two countries will require more work.”

    At a news conference Saturday in the Turkish capital, where she held talks with Turkish officials, Clinton said it was too soon to say whether the United States would send an ambassador to Syria for the first time since 2005.

    But she emphasized that the administration will press for peace talks between Israel and Syria, saying that the “importance of this track cannot be overstated.” Turkey last year brokered indirect talks between Israel and Syria, but the Bush administration stayed aloof from that effort.

    n Saturday, Iran responded positively to Clinton’s plans to invite it to the conference on Afghanistan, an overture that could bring the secretary face to face with her Iranian counterpart by the end of the month. “The U.S. and global powers have realized that the issues in Afghanistan cannot be solved without the presence of the Islamic republic,” Gholam Hossein Elham, a spokesman for the Iranian government, told reporters in Tehran.

    The dinner meeting in Geneva on Friday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yielded no breakthroughs on arms control, missile defense or other thorny issues. But the atmospherics were strikingly different than Lavrov’s often-stormy sessions with Clinton’s predecessor, Condoleezza Rice.

    “I hope Hillary will agree with me,” said Lavrov after the two diplomats emerged from the dinner. “I venture to say we have a wonderful personal relationship.”

  • CLINTON SIGNALS A SMART RETREAT FROM DEMOCRATISATION

    CLINTON SIGNALS A SMART RETREAT FROM DEMOCRATISATION

    By Gideon Rachman

    Published: February 5 2009 20:39 | Financial Times

    Taking questions from staff at the state department this week, Hillary Clinton highlighted the hard-headed approach she hopes to take to the US’s relations with the rest of the world, write Daniel Dombey and Demetri Sevastopulo. “When we talk about the three pillars of American foreign policy – defence, diplomacy, development – they’re not just words to the president and me,” the new secretary of state (below) declared, repeating a formula she has spelled out several times in the days since she took office.

    Singularly absent from her outline of the struts of US foreign policy is a fourth “D” – democracy promotion – a goal that served as one of the guiding themes of the Bush administration.

    The Obama administration has gone out of its way to signal a pragmatic, non-ideological approach. It is a modus operandi that stresses continuity with policy under George W. Bush in terms of the tools it uses while setting out arguably more “realistic” goals.

    “This team is very deliberate and what you’ll see is them taking a long look at what they’ve inherited to see what of that works,” says a US official. “They have learnt the lesson from the beginning of the Bush administration, which threw everything out that had to do with [former president Bill] Clinton.”

    Mrs Clinton’s “three D’s” mantra uses a vocabulary of the possible rather than charting grand objectives. It suggests that the US will continue to assert its military might while emphasising the kind of diplomatic outreach many US allies called for during Mr Bush’s presidency. The secretary of state also wants to use US aid to put pressure on countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and to win control of assistance currently dispensed by the US military so that it can be more easily put to the service of political goals.

    In a phrase Mrs Clinton has borrowed from Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor, and Richard Armitage, a former Bush administration state department official, she labels such an alliance of “hard” and “soft” power as “smart power”. Her stance is bolstered by similar positions struck by President Barack Obama and Robert Gates, defence secretary – a veteran champion of “realism” in the long-running Washington debate with liberal interventionist “idealists”.

    Not for nothing did Mr Obama promise to work with authoritarian states in his inaugural address. While Mr Bush used his second inauguration to set out “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world”, Mr Obama told undemocratic states that “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist” – an offer he later explicitly addressed to Iran.

    Indeed, just days before taking office, the then president-elect took care to avoid Mr Bush’s emphasis on free elections. “Elections aren’t democracy, as we understand it,” Mr Obama told The Washington Post, stressing priorities such as freedom from arbitrary arrest and fighting corruption. “They are one facet of a liberal order.”

    Mr Obama’s emphasis on stabilising Afghanistan to reduce the threat of terrorism rather than on establishing a US-style “Jeffersonian democracy” follows this train of thought, as did his pre-election suggestion to General David Petraeus, then the commander of forces in Iraq, that the US should be content with a “messy, sloppy status quo” in that country.

    Ahead of Mr Obama’s expected approval of the deployment of 12,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan, Mr Gates has also suggested that the US scale back its ambitions, cautioning that any attempt to create “some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there” would inevitably fail.

    Yet while the goals set out by the Obama administration may differ from – or sometimes be more pragmatic than – those endorsed by the Bush administration – the tools it employs are often the same. Last week Mr Gates signalled that the US would continue to launch missile strikes against suspected terrorists inside Pakistan. Less than three days after Mr Obama moved into the White House, the CIA carried out such a strike, an attack that almost certainly was approved by the new president.

    Other instruments established by Mr Bush and set to continue include the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear programme, which Mrs Clinton has labelled “essential”, and similar discussions on Iran. “Where continuity is appropriate, we are committed to doing that,” Mrs Clinton said, also instructing Todd Stern, her climate change envoy, to take part in both “United Nations negotiations and processes involving a smaller set of countries” – an apparent reference to Mr Bush’s controversial “major emitters” grouping.

    “From Iran to the plans for an early meeting with [Russian president Dmitry] Medvedev to recent statements on Afghanistan, there is a strong realist strain appearing, although whether that will hold sway at the end of the day remains to be seen,” says Cliff Kupchan, a Washington-based analyst and former Clinton administration official.

    While the debate between realists and idealists that rocked the Bush administration continues, Mr Kupchan observes that now “the portions of meat and vegetables are different”.

    Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009