On her first trip as US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton showed how she intends to carry out President Barack Obama’s foreign policy: Talk openly about the toughest problems and enlist global partners to help solve them.
In Beijing, she urged China to keep buying US Treasury bonds to help finance Obama’s stimulus plan to revive economic growth, saying “we are truly going to rise or fall together.”
During the weeklong trip that also included stops in Japan, Indonesia and South Korea, Clinton made clear that the US wants input on everything from stabilizing Afghanistan to strategies for how best to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon and to push North Korea to eliminate arms work.
“It is our goal in the Obama administration to reach out to the rest of the world using every tool at our disposal,” especially diplomacy and development aid, she told a Chinese news anchor yesterday before departing for Washington. That means trying to “understand each other better,” she added.
US partners around the world and particularly in Asia have been saying for years that they want the secretary of state “to show up more, and she did that in a very public and engaged way,” said Richard Bush, director of the Northeast Asia Policy Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
“One aspect of our reemerging in Asia is being more candid about what we think about issues and listening, which she’s very good at.”
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China Discussions
Among the few formal agreements of the trip was bringing the secretary of state into joint dialogues with the Treasury secretary and their Chinese counterparts on economic and security issues, a treaty to move 8,000 US Marines to Guam from Japan and a pledge to increase US involvement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
What drew more attention was Clinton’s willingness to speak with a politician’s directness that is rare for a senior diplomat. She talked publicly about the problem of succession in secretive, Stalinist North Korea and the impracticality of letting human rights concerns hinder cooperation with China at a time of economic peril and worries about global warming, terrorism and nuclear proliferation.
“Maybe this is unusual because you’re supposed to be so careful that you spend hours avoiding stating the obvious, but you know, that’s just not productive in my view,” Clinton, 61, told reporters accompanying her. “I think that it’s worth being perhaps more straightforward and trying to engage other countries on the basis of the reality that exists.”
Political Veteran
The candor flows from Clinton’s long experience in the public arena. She travelled to 80 nations for her husband President Bill Clinton, and later became a US senator who almost won the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
Clinton’s celebrity and her profile as a rival who later was a dedicated campaigner for Obama invests her with unique authority as his top diplomat.
Bush, a former member of the National Intelligence Council, said he was unsurprised that Clinton laid out her thinking without using coded language, “because this is how members of Congress operate.”
“There’s a balance between talking publicly and not upsetting the apple cart, but this is early days and I think it’s refreshing,” Bush added.
Balbina Hwang, a North Korea expert at Georgetown University in Washington, said she appreciates that Clinton said what any Korea observer knows: that uncertainty over who will replace North Korean leader Kim Jong Il may be fueling possible plans for a missile test and North Korea’s unwillingness to move forward with nuclear disarmament. Kim, 68, is recovering from a stroke, according to US intelligence officials.
‘So Sensitive’
“The future of North Korea is so sensitive that no government is willing to have a dialogue about it. This must change, and soon,” Hwang said. “She just spoke her mind and, frankly, it was a sensible observation.”
Throughout the trip, Clinton spent as much time taking questions from students and local media, meeting community activists and visiting neighborhoods as she spent with government officials.
David Lampton, director of Chinese Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, said human rights groups that criticised her China comments should take note of how she promoted the work of activists during her tour.
Clinton’s life-long connection to rights concerns means “she is one of the few people who could credibly move this issue into a more productive domain,” he said.
Indonesia Outreach
Her schedule reflected an outreach to a world disillusioned by US policies viewed as unilateralist under President George W Bush. Indonesia, as the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, was a logical place for her to try to re-brand the US image and send a message to the larger Muslim world.
The dozens of civil society activists whom she met over dinner in Jakarta said that Indonesia is “going to turn into a real battleground for the future of democracy and Islam and women’s rights,” Clinton told reporters. “And we need to be there.”
Her economic message in China pointed to deep shared interests. The US is the single largest buyer of the exports that drive growth in China, the world’s third-largest economy. China in turn invests its trade surplus from goods such as toys, clothing and steel primarily in Treasury securities, making it the world’s largest foreign holder of US government debt at the end of last year, with $696.2 billion.
Climate Change
Clinton and her special envoy for climate change, Todd Stern, visited the year-old Taiyanggong power plant in China, a gas-fired, low-emission facility powered by General Electric Co generators and turbines. The tour highlighted opportunities for the world’s two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases to cooperate on clean energy.
In Beijing, many ordinary people said they were impressed by Clinton’s first appearance in her new job.
Liu Yating, 27, who was inspired to buy a Chinese translation of Clinton’s autobiography on Sunday, said she was reassured that the secretary would represent a change from “the hectoring style that typifies Western politicians when they talk down to China. She’s a very, very charming person. Her charisma can be very useful.”