Hillary Clinton’s Iron Discipline as a Team Player

Hillary Clinton fiercely abides to the fixed weekly meetings every Thursday afternoon at the White House. Whenever schedules allow, she tries to get a one-on-one meeting with the president. Even when her husband, Bill, was admitted to a New York hospital a few months ago, suffering from heart problems, she was loath to cancel the ritual, which has an ascetic ambiance. Colleagues describe the discussions of the one-time rivals in the Oval Office thusly: while Barack Obama munches on an apple, Hillary sips from her glass of water.

Since the election campaign and the surprise nomination of the former first lady and senator, a trusting relationship has developed. At first, Joe Biden functioned as the go-to man. When Obama heard of the Clintons’ daughter Chelsea’s wedding, he offered the White House as a venue for the ceremony. It will now take place over the summer in the long-time holiday refuge of the Clintons’ — as well as that of the Obamas’— on Martha’s Vineyard on the east coast of Massachusetts.

“Hillary Land”

From the time of the election campaign, the nicknames for the players remain: the “Cardinals” for the Obama team and “Hillary Land” for the Department of State. The embittered feelings have died down, and the wounds received on both sides have healed. Hillary Clinton’s reputation as an excellent team player has been shown to be true; loyalty is one of her greatest strengths — to which Bill Clinton can certainly testify. Some have seen him as a source of concern, but this is ungrounded. The ex-president has put himself forward as a mediator in explosive situations, as special envoy to Haiti and as election campaign crowd-puller.

In an election year when the President is predominantly concerned with domestic policies, the maneuvering room for the secretary of state has increased. If Hillary Clinton’s first year in office was characterized by Obama’s foreign policy initiatives, which automatically put her in the back seat, she has recently brought her profile much more into focus. Because she maintains the best relationship of all leading Washington figures with Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, who has had a bad reputation of late, it was expected of her to take him on a private walk around Georgetown.

Driving Power in Iranian Politics

While Brazil and Turkey strove to reach a compromise on Iran’s nuclear policies, the secretary of state, as a tour de force, set up a coup. In explanatory talks, which lasted months, and in a last minute telephone conversation with her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, she managed to break through Russia and China’s veto against more severe sanctions. In contrast to Obama, she is always an advocate of stronger policies towards Tehran. Now she has brought the president over to her side.

On her Asian tour, which she broke off in January due to the earthquake disaster in Haiti, another tricky mission awaits her. In the inter-Korean conflict concerning the torpedoing of a warship, she has to prevent the situation from escalating and remind North Korea of its borders. She has to disperse resentment in Japan over the military base in Okinawa, and she has to strike a balance in talks in China with the ambitious superpower.

After stumbling at the stalls, Clinton has caught up. At the beginning of the year, critics gloomily asked, “Where is Hillary?” The journalist Tina Brown sniped that she should take off her burqa. The numerous special envoys have limited her scope. She has to cope with many male super-egos. Richard Holbrooke, who would have gladly become secretary of state under President Hillary Clinton, is struggling away with Afghanistan and Pakistan, as George Mitchell is with the Middle East conflict.

Apprenticeship Year

She showed only her ignorance concerning Israel, as she swung away from Obama’s stance of stopping new settlements and caused a lot of confusion. She later ironed out the kink in a quickly carried out conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

She viewed the first year in the Senate as an apprenticeship year, an ex-colleague reported. Moreover, the Department of State forfeited both aura and influence, as the Pentagon had — rightly so in times of war — superseded the Department of State. Defense Minister Robert Gates, a Republican appointed by George W. Bush, advanced to become Obama’s most important war advisor alongside Biden. Contrary to the traditional rivalry of the two key positions, harking back to the times of Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, Clinton and Gates radiate harmony. She relies completely on his expertise concerning the expansion of the Afghanistan deployment.

Meanwhile, traveling diplomacy calls for its tribute. The 62-year-old shared her tiredness of office in an interview and ruled out a new presidency candidacy. But only a few want to believe that the full-blooded politician known for her self-discipline, who has star appeal all over the world, will prematurely retire.