Madame secretary shines

One of US President Barack Obama's riskiest decisions, on winning the presidential election, was to choose Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state.

The Obama-Clinton duel was among the most vicious in Democratic Party history, and some of the sharpest clashes were over foreign policy.

The Obama camp accused Clinton of Bush-like support for invading Iraq and shaking up rogue states (at one point she even threatened to "obliterate" Iran if it attacked Israel).

The Clinton camp retorted that Obama was a soft-hearted neophyte who was too eager to talk to dangerous strongmen, such as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

These ideological tensions were reinforced by personal animosities. Richard Holbrooke has had a running feud with Anthony Lake, one of Obama's closest foreign-policy advisers. Samantha Power, another Obama adviser, described Clinton as a "monster" and was fired for it.

Mischief-makers have been trying to discover tensions between the two former rivals ever since Clinton moved to Foggy Bottom in January.

So far they have been frustrated, despite the fact that the issues that once divided them have been at the heart of foreign policy, and many of the same egos are still at work (Power is now ensconced in the National Security Council and Holbrooke is special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.)

Obama and 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". Clinton has followed 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 Obama shook Hugo Chávez's hand.

Clinton now enjoys the highest popularity rating of any of Obama's Cabinet; she also enjoys the admiration of some Republicans, such as Mark Kirk, a member of the congressional subcommittee that overseas the State Department, who calls her "the superstar of the Cabinet".

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 former secretary of defence 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.

But Clinton has also made the best of her opportunities. 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 Obama or other Cabinet secretaries, such as Tim Geithner.

Clinton has also brought a tough-minded professionalism to her job. She has inevitably encountered resistance, given the number of fingers in the foreign-policy pie - including those of Vice President Joe Biden, who has a long-standing interest in foreign affairs.

The State Department bureaucracy is critical of her habit of surrounding herself with loyalists such as Cheryl Mills, a former White House lawyer who was one of her most important aides during the final days of her presidential campaign.

Human-rights activists are also furious about her reluctance to lecture foreign governments, particularly China, on that subject.

But she has won more battles than she has lost - notably with Biden, over whether America should send 21,000 troops to Afghanistan.

And America's foreign-policy machinery is now working as well as it has in years. One of her shrewdest moves was to divide the job of deputy secretary into two, with James Steinberg focusing on policy and Jack Lew on management. Steinberg is respected on both sides of the former Clinton-Obama divide. Lew, a former White House budget director, helped Clinton win a 10 per cent budget increase for the department.

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 Holbrooke; the Middle East peace process to George Mitchell; and the Gulf and south-west Asia to Dennis Ross.
(That last appointment, though, has gone awry: Ross is apparently being moved to the White House.)

But in general Clinton has disentangled herself enough from the daily demands of these regions to focus on strategic questions that are too often given short shrift.

The only disappointment, from her point of view, is that she did not bring the same skills to fighting Obama, a year ago, that she is now bringing to serving him. If she had, Obama might have been the one learning how to play second fiddle.