Clinton's smart power brings global influence

For a brief moment, you imagined that history had taken a different course.

There was Hillary Clinton, stepping up to the rostrum in the White House press room to expound on the virtues of the new nuclear arms limitation treaty between the US and Russia.

She performed with her customary authority, command of the facts, and the sense of humour, often overlooked, that is another of her trademarks.

Might there be problems over ratification in the Duma, the Moscow Parliament, a reporter asked.

Well, she replied with a giggle, the US had offered to send White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel over to use his legendary (and foul-mouthed) powers of persuasion on recalcitrant Russian legislators.

"If President Medvedev wants to take us up on it, we're ready."

Hillary, in other words, looked a president. But as we all know, she wasn't one.

Rahm Emanuel was not her man, he was Barack Obama's. Hers was no more than a supporting act, filling in the details after the man who defeated her in that epic battle for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination had made the big announcement himself.

Yet in a way, it was remarkable she was there at all.

If Barack Obama had not come along and rewritten history, the passage of Hillary Clinton from brilliant lawyer to controversial First Lady to admired United States senator to the woman who went on to win the White House, would have been the most astonishing story of modern American politics.

No less remarkable is her current incarnation as America's 67th Secretary of State, an office first held by Thomas Jefferson between 1790 and 1793.

The surprise is not, by common consent, she's doing the job pretty well. The astounding thing, when you remember the length, intensity and ferocity of that 2008 primary struggle, was that Obama offered it to her in the first place.

It was Obama after all who had condescendingly and crushingly remarked during one primary debate that, "you're likeable enough, Hillary", sneering that her sole foreign policy experience consisted of tea parties with the wives of foreign heads of state.

And Hillary had given as good as she got, accusing her opponent of being criminally naive in his offer of unconditional talks with the likes of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Hugo Chavez, and suggesting his only claim to expertise lay in his having spent a few childhood years in Indonesia.

What was going on, everyone wondered, when word of the appointment first surfaced.

Was Obama trying to recreate the "Team of Rivals" whom his idol Abraham Lincoln had put in his cabinet almost 150 years earlier? What about the national psychodrama of the Clinton marriage, and what about Bill, with the ego of a man who had been president and a reputation as a loose cannon?

Surely a new president would not let a former one near the wheel room. And how could Hillary's pride allow her to subordinate herself to the man who had bested her?

In reality, the calculations on both sides were more complicated. In fact, the really hard feelings were held by their staff, not the candidates.

With Hillary, Obama was enlisting one of the world's most famous and popular women to promote the tarnished Brand America. At the same time, he was neutralising a potential re-election threat, should the lady plan to pick up in 2012 where she left off in 2008.

For Hillary too, the change made sense. She was already 61, but would have had to wait years, maybe decades, before one of the plum Senate posts opened up. The most prestigious post in the Cabinet was therefore not one to be turned down lightly.

Most striking, perhaps, has been the harmony within the Obama national security team - a sea change from the administration of George W. Bush, when the dour Dick Cheney became the most powerful vice-president in US history and, during its first term especially, public feuds between Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon and Colin Powell's State Department made constant headlines.

Some feared a variation on the theme under Obama, with the Clintons stirring the pot. Nor was Hillary's presidential campaign a good omen, handicapped by clashes of egos, by less than helpful intrusions by her husband, and the Praetorian Guard of loyal retainers known as "Hillaryland", that kept the most well-intentioned outsider at arm's length. But it hasn't worked out that way.

Apart from his trip to North Korea to bring home two jailed American reporters, Bill has scarcely been a factor.

The walls of Hillaryland are less forbidding these days.

She has set out to rebuild the State Department from within, boosting its budget and expanding its staff in an effort to recapture the clout lost to the Pentagon under George W. Bush.

In fact, Hillary has been the model team player, in a team bristling with foreign policy heavyweights.

These "competitors" include Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before becoming Vice-President, and his successor as chairman, John Kerry, the Democrats' 2004 White House candidate, not to mention the Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, a top national security adviser to the first President Bush and the sole holdover from the administration of the second.

Many wondered how much influence Hillary wielded, especially during her first six months, when she kept a low profile. Where Bill was the improviser who left everything to the last minute, she has always been formidably prepared - the lawyer who wanted to master her brief before holding forth in court.

Now she is visibly more assertive, but few signs of infighting have emerged. As anyone who has seen them testify together on Capitol Hill can confirm, she and Gates get on splendidly, while Biden is an old friend from Senate days.

Most important of all are Hillary's relations with her boss. Plainly, they get on well, if only from a mutual respect born of the trial of the 2008 campaign.

In public, Hillary is always deferential. Privately, the 44th President and his Secretary of State meet once a week for 45 minutes, every Thursday afternoon. So important is the session for her that when her plane ran into mechanical problems during a February visit to Saudi Arabia, she abandoned her travelling entourage and hitched a ride home with General David Petraeus, who had also been in Riyadh, in order to keep her White House date.

And whatever her power, her popularity is indisputable - her approval ratings are better than Obama's.

One reason, of course, is her job keeps her at a safe distance from the President's bitterly contested domestic agenda, and from a polarised, staggeringly unpopular Congress. Another is Democrats and Republicans are basically agreed on key foreign policy issues. Take it from none other than Chavez, Venezuela's President and a constant thorn in Washington's flesh, who recently described Hillary as "a blonde Condoleezza Rice".

If he were still in the Oval Office, George W. Bush would now probably be running things much as Obama: extricating troops from Iraq, ramping up the war in Afghanistan, trying unsuccessfully to shut the prison at Guantanamo Bay and to prod Israelis and Palestinians in the direction of peace.

Indeed, apart from diehard neo-cons, the loudest critics of the administration are from the left, complaining that foreign policy is not liberal enough.

That, too, may be thanks in part to Hillary. Candidate Clinton was more hawkish than Obama; as President, he has moved in her direction. On Afghanistan most notably, Obama took her advice rather than Biden's, going for an across-the-board troop increase, rather than narrowing the US mission to purely anti-terrorist operations, as the Vice-President recommended.

If her first year was a crash course in global affairs, Hillary has stepped up the pace during her second year. In 2009, she made 15 foreign trips, visiting 44 countries.

This year she has travelled to 19 countries and spent 30 days on the road. What this gruelling schedule has achieved is open to debate. The most frequent criticism is, in her ubiquity, she has made no issue recognisably her own.

Iran has ignored every overture and every warning from Washington, pressing ahead with its nuclear programme regardless. As for China, divisions have if anything grown, on issues ranging from trade and currency policy to human rights and nuclear proliferation - though blame can hardly be laid at Hillary's door.

Where she did make a gaffe was in the Middle East. Progress towards peace was the tallest of orders, given the intransigence of Benjamin Netanyahu and the weakness of the Palestinian leadership.

But she and the President allowed the Israeli Prime Minister to call their bluff over US demands for an outright settlements freeze, then Hillary compounded the error by describing Netanyahu's vague promise to suspend construction as "unprecedented" - a remark that enraged the Arab world.

Her most concrete achievement has been the "resetting" of relations with Moscow, culminating in the new Start treaty, cutting the countries' nuclear arsenals.

Ultimately though, the success or failure of America's foreign policy is ascribed to a president. Only rarely does a secretary of state leave a lasting individual mark: Henry Kissinger, certainly, in the 70s and before that George Marshall and Dean Acheson under Harry Truman. Hillary, moreover, must toil in the shadow of the biggest global superstar in the White House since John F. Kennedy.

But she too is not short of star wattage. She may be a diplomat now, but remains a politician too - a very accomplished one.

She is the ideal exponent of "smart power", of the US leading by the example of what is most attractive about that country, not because of its military might.

The fight against poverty, the struggle for human rights and in particular women's rights, are Hillary issues. Her fame and gender put her in an extraordinarily strong position to promote these issues, which may prove her most enduring legacy.

- INDEPENDENT

THE MEASURE OF SUCCESS

One day, of course, Hillary will no longer be Secretary of State. So what then? The surprising answer may be: not a great deal. Political disclaimers should normally be taken with a generous pinch of salt.

But in Hillary's case there is no reason to disbelieve her when she insists she will not run for president again - and when she says she does not see herself sticking in her present job beyond the end Obama's first term.

Naturally those words have been taken by the irredeemably conspiracy-minded as leaving the door open to a challenge to Obama in 2012, should his presidency unravel. But that now looks a good deal less likely, after his victory over healthcare and the arms treaty with Moscow.

And Hillary, the student of presidential politics, knows that a primary challenge to a sitting president results in two things: the defeat of the challenger in the primaries, and the subsequent electoral defeat of his or her party.

By the time election day 2016 rolls around, she will be 69; only Ronald Reagan was as old when he took office. She maintains that she plans a future of writing and teaching. Enoch Powell once said all political careers end in failure.

But in Hillary Clinton's case the observation is true only in that she failed to crack America's ultimate glass ceiling. As for the rest: high-powered lawyer, First Lady, senator, Secretary of State - if that's failure, who needs success?