Madame Sec

HRC!

Admit it - when she"s on - she"s on

"Why extremists always focus on women is a mystery to me. But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in. They want to control women. They want to control how we dress, they want to control how we act, they want to control everything about us.”

Who could forget her LOLing backhanded B slap smack during her 2nd Land of the Pure Tour?

 Great Satan"s 3rd ever Lady Grrl Madame Sec o"State winds up 4 years of diplopolitiary statecraft 

Great Satan will no longer have this relentlessly globe-trotting former presidential rival in the game. As the frazzled aides and reporters who travel regularly in the back of her converted Boeing 757 attest, the job is punishing, especially the way she has chosen to do it.

 Trekking nearly a million miles to 95 nation states, cramming in as many as a dozen meetings in a single day 

Evaluating her record is a complicated business. The job of a secretary of state has at least three parts: implementing foreign policy, acting as America’s global ambassador and running the behemoth that is the State Department.In the first and most visible of these—foreign policy—it is the president who takes the lead.

See, during wartime, Great Satan"s centre of grav slants way more to White House and Pentagon and away from the State Dept. A true zero sum something something

With the victorious presidential campaign team ensconced in the White House and a defeated one at State, she needed to quell any lingering suspicions between the rival teams by showing a perfect loyalty. Not once in three years has she quarrelled in public with 44, and only once—during the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt—did the wires between the State Department and the White House become seriously crossed.

Sam Pow prob gets some cred for keeping the 'monster' on her A game. Just saying.

Anywrought,

She says she has had no difficulty meeting the president on “anything, any time”. By the end of 2011, by the State Department’s count, she had taken part in nearly 600 meetings at the White House. But on some hot issues she has stood on the margins or run things at arm’s length. Mr Obama gave Joe Biden, his vice-president, the lead in Iraq. “Af-Pak” strategy was delegated to her friend, the late indefatigable Richard Holbrooke; and a special envoy, George Mitchell, was given charge of reviving "Forever Quest" negotiations between Little Satan and the Palestinians. 

Certainly no previous secretary has enjoyed Mrs Clinton’s advantages in the second part of her job, as America’s ambassador. Already a celebrity, she knew many of the world’s leaders before starting out.

 It may help, too, that she is not a lawyer, general or professor, like previous secretaries of state, but a politician who has seen at first hand the high politics of the White House and the low politics of the Senate and the campaign trail. At a time when people everywhere are demanding a say in how they are governed, she thinks it is an advantage to be able to say to nervous leaders in fledgling democracies: “Mr President, I’ve won elections and I’ve lost elections; I do know how you feel.”

 Aside from her Pentagonesque QDDR Strategic Reveiw, HRC also pushed for economic staecrafting - to co-ordinate everything from pushing China on its exchange rate, to promoting free trade, to defending intellectual property, to luring inward investment and helping American firms find markets and opportunities overseas. She has appointed the department’s first chief economist. These, however, are areas where the Treasury, Commerce Department and White House are already active—and likely to stay dominant.

Her diplopolititary accomplishments are the chiz that historians will scrutinise most.

For sure, she will not be leaving behind her a world set suddenly to rights. Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan could easily fall into chaos. America has tightened the screws on Iran, but not yet stopped its nuclear programme—and, many say, failed at a crucial moment in 2009 to give moral support to the country’s democracy activists. America has tried to put itself on the right side of the Arab spring, but after nudging out Mr Mubarak and helping to rid Libya of Muammar Qaddafi there has been no military intervention to stop the slaughter in Syria. 

Elsewhere in the Middle East, longstanding alliances with Egypt and Saudi Arabia are now looking dangerously fragile.

Mrs Clinton has her critics. Some say that the globe-trotting has come at the expense of strategic imagination, that talking aloud about a “pivot” to Asia sent the wrong messages to allies elsewhere and that the exit from 43’s wars has been botched. “Being liked is not the same as doing shit,” says one veteran (Republican) policymaker who thinks Mrs Clinton brought to State too many of the image-building habits of her presidential campaign.

Divine daemoneoconic avatar Paul Wolfowitz, says HRC"s  rep as a good manager was earned by making few waves—except for what he calls her biggest accomplishment, saving America from what would have been a “disastrous” hands-off policy in Libya.  The quiz is,  he adds, is whether her record will be stained by a victory for Bashar Assad in Syria. 

Pic - "On every indicator one can measure — the economy, GDP growth, on education, on democratisation, the suppression of women, their marginalization — their denial of basic rights means that the society as a whole fails to modernize, fails to progress."