Hillary Clinton’s stature continues to rise

Secretary Clinton meets with Crown Prince of Bahrain Sheikh Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa, at the Department of State. State Department photo by Michael Gross

It’s still out there in the blogosphere: diehard Hillary haters regurgitating the Obama campaign’s stale  attacks on her character in ’08 after Axelrod, et al realized their candidate couldn’t defeat her in legitimate policy debates. Much to the dismay of her detractors, however, Hillary's stature continues to rise.

As secretary of state,  Hillary's brilliance in foreign policy matters is evidenced in her article on smart power published yesterday, July 18, 2012, in the New Statesman:

As the balance of world power shifts, the US is developing a novel range of diplomatic, social, economic, political and security tools to fix the world’s complex new geopolitical problems.

I touched down in Beijing in May for the fourth round of the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue with a jam-packed agenda, but the world’s attention was focused instead on the fate of a blind human rights dissident who had sought refuge in the American embassy. Suddenly, an already delicate trip had become an outsized test of the US-China relationship.

Throughout history, the rise of new powers usually has played out in zero-sum terms. So it is not surprising that the emergence of countries such as China, India and Brazil has raised questions about the future of the global order that the United States, the United Kingdom and our allies have helped build and defend. Against this backdrop, those few days in May took on even greater significance: could the US and China write a new answer to the old question of what happens when an established power and rising power meet?

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