All You Need Is Diplomacy

It was Clinton’s way of telegraphing that she is willing to take chances to ensure good relations. She has tried, during her first two months on the job, to send the same signal to America’s allies and adversaries abroad.

It was a jam-packed trip. In a fashion more befitting Des Moines and Lancaster than Tokyo and Seoul, Clinton’s staff stacked her days with a half dozen or more events, scheduled over 12 hours’ time and often sandwiched between grueling seven-hour flights. Thus an early morning appearance on a bizarre Malaysian MTV-style program becomes a roundtable of foreign journalists, where the questions also prove a bit whacky and disarming (“How do you feel if you lost everything right now?”). It’s followed, after a hair-raising motorcade zigzaging through crowded streets, by a tour of a sweltering Jakarta slum and its American-funded sewage projects. There’s little time to spare before a news conference with the foreign minister, 90-minutes of closed-door talks with the minister and his aides, a “town hall” attended by 2,000 university students, another roundtable–this time with female Chinese activists, say, pioneers who defied the Communist overlords in Beijing by opening the first battered-women clinic in the country, and who remember the secretary from 12 years earlier, and–and . . .

It’s all too much, as The Beatles would say. Speaking of whom, the secretary was also happy to discuss the Fab Four and their surprisingly significant impact on her weltanschauung, in detail and with only minimal prodding, in a way that would have been unthinkable for Madeleine Albright or James Baker. Toward the end of an interview focused on North Korea’s nuclear threat and the anemic level of troop contributions to the Afghan war effort by America’s NATO allies, I asked Clinton–in the wake of her declaration of love for the Beatles on Indonesia’s MTV-style show–whether she is “more partial to the irrepressible melodies and hand-clapping of the ‘Please Please Me’ era or to the world-weary drug fueled existentialism of their later work.” “Well,” she replied, not skipping a beat, “like so many Beatles fans, it depends both on mood and stage of life. . . . [T]he hand-clapping mode was what I first was captured by. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was an anthem.”

In short, a week of sustained exposure to Hillary Clinton, on and off the record, revealed her to be smarter, sharper, funnier, more energetic and sympathetic, more engaging–more human–than her time on the world stage had heretofore conveyed. She was undeniably a rock star in the town halls, where Asian students greeted her with something bordering on adulation (“It is glorious to meet you!”), and she parried even the most far-flung questions with ease (“How did you know you were in love with your husband?” “I feel more like an advice columnist than Secretary of State today.”). And Clinton’s longstanding interest in women’s empowerment was manifest in the fact that she spent more time debriefing the female lawyers and doctors in China than she did in closed talks with the country’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi.

That’s not to say, of course, that Clinton’s first foray into foreign travel was without bumpy patches. She raised eyebrows on the Asia trip’s very first leg, briefing reporters aboard her plane en route to a refueling stop in Alaska, when she acknowledged that “there is a debate within the intelligence community as to exactly the extent of” North Korea’s highly enriched uranium program; normally, top officials don’t discuss publicly the internal disputes raging among U.S. intelligence analysts. In our interview, she went further still, suggesting–contrary to the public pronouncements of some top American intelligence officials–that Pyongyang might never have had an enriched uranium program. “No one can point to any specific location nor can they point to any specific outcome of whatever might have gone on, if anything did,” she said. All this prompted one Bush administration official, familiar with the intelligence, to exult privately that the secretary was “digging her own grave” on the subject.

Flying from Jakarta to Seoul, Clinton again sparked controversy by speaking, with unusual frankness, about the preparations the United States and its allies are making for the post-Kim Jong Il era in North Korea. She said bluntly that “the whole leadership situation is somewhat unclear” and that the difficulties of dealing with the Stalinist regime of Kim–who is believed to have suffered a stroke last year–have been compounded by “the uncertainties that come from questions about potential succession.” Such comments are just the kind of thing to drive the batty Dear Leader (farther) up the wall and to some unfathomably rash action. By the time she took the podium alongside South Korea’s foreign minister, Yu Myung-hwan, Clinton was openly dodging the Los Angeles Times‘ Paul Richter, who asked whether “the topic that you candidly raised yesterday might provoke a negative reaction from the North.” Not until CBS’s Wyatt Andrews pointedly raised the issue again (“I’m going to repeat Paul’s question”) did Clinton address the mini-furor her remarks had stirred. “The open press is filled with such conversations,” she said, a tad defensively. “This is not some kind of a classified matter that is not being discussed in many circles.”

There would be even more awkward moments on Clinton’s next trip, to the Middle East and Europe, most especially her butchering of the surname of Russia’s president–could she really have arrived in Geneva unprepared to say “Medvedev”?–and her ill-starred presentation of a mislabeled “reset” button to Moscow’s famously acerbic foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov (“You got it wrong,” he deadpanned).

But Clinton was mostly winning on her early trips to the mound, with her chief assets her extraordinary energy and an innate lawyerly tendency in speaking. A press appearance at the international donors conference for the Palestinians in Sharm-el-Sheikh this month showed the secretary at her nimblest. Asked why the United States isn’t offering to Hamas the same open hand Washington is extending to Iran, Clinton led off strong, saying: “Hamas is not a country. It is–” and then, suddenly, she was . . . stuck . . . not wanting to call Hamas what it is, in the eyes of the U.S. government–terrorist organization–but not wanting, either, to appear to be soft-pedaling that fact. So she struggled for a moment, looking for some way out, and then, her wits about her, she lawyered through it: “–an entity–” yes! perfect! just the unassailable noun she needed! “–that has to understand what the principles for any engagement are, not just from the United States [but from] the Quartet . . .”

Aided by her celebrity status and politician’s knack for working a crowd, Secretary Clinton demonstrated a common touch that suggests she may be able to bring pressure to bear on her foreign counterparts, especially the authoritarian ones, from the ground up, a capability they should rightly fear. And as the Fab Four would say, you know that can’t be bad.

James Rosen covers the State Department for Fox News and is the author of The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (Doubleday).