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Poor Hillary, just good enough for Africa
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shakes hands with Somalia’s President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed during their meeting at the US embassy in Nairobi on August 6. For Mrs Clinton to be relegated, as it were, to this sort-out-the-Africans role when more pressing hotspots are flaring around the world hinted she is not as entirely in command of America’s foreign policy apparatus as her status would suggest. Picture: Reuters
Posted Monday, August 17 2009 at 00:00
For the Middle East, which has been a perennial, albeit self-induced headache for successive US administrations, Obama picked a distinguished retired senator, George Mitchell. Mitchell had previously mediated the Northern Ireland-British conflict during the Bill Clinton administration, with considerable success.
Mitchell’s stature in Washington is such that he might find deferring to the White House more natural than doing the same to the less experienced Mrs Clinton.
Iran is the other problem for the administration owing to its ongoing nuclear energy programme, which the US wants stopped.
So far, the Iranian authorities have spurned Obama’s overtures, but if they were to take them up, it is more or less a given that the White House would take charge of any deal-making on that front.
Neither has Mrs Clinton asserted herself on the other nuclear proliferation problem nagging the US — in North Korea. Again, the White House has assigned a special envoy for the task of coaxing that state to de-nuclearise.
The job involves getting Russia, China, Japan and South Korea together with the US into a united front, but so far Mrs Clinton’s footprint on this has not been very evident.
As if that were not enough, her husband, Bill Clinton, momentarily stole the US headlines from her Africa trip when he landed in North Korea and met the country’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong Il.
The stated purpose of the trip was to spring from jail two purported US journalists who had been imprisoned for illegally entering the country. The White House sought to describe the trip as “a purely private initiative.”
All said and done, there is a certain dynamic in the US at work which Mrs Clinton’s Africa trip underscored.
The fact that Obama is of African ancestry is not lost on his Cabinet officers. Any official engagement with these roots as the Secretary of State has just done is certainly not going to be shrugged off casually in present-day Washington DC.
But in the boiler-room of DC politics, Africa is probably not the corner where Mrs Clinton wants to be confined.
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