Spencer Ackerman has a good summary in the Washington Independent of Senator Clinton's testimony today at her nomination hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that suggests a hopeful prognosis for her tenure at the State Department (hint: no threats to "annihilate" anybody or other forms of grandiosity.) Key grafs:
Taking a high-altitude overview of her approach to statecraft, Clinton pledged to be principled but not ideological. She reasserted progressive shibboleths familiar to students of her Senate tenure and presidential campaign: the strengthening of American alliances and a move to a world of “more partners and fewer adversaries.” She embraced the term “Smart Power” as a catchphrase for the Obama administration, referring to an approach integrating military, economic, diplomatic and cultural solutions in a pragmatic fashion.
Much of Clinton’s testimony reflected a recognition that the ongoing world financial crises and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would constrain the Obama administration in ways that neither the Bush or Clinton administrations had to contend with. The rhetoric employed by Clinton was far less triumphalist than that of her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, who described a diplomatic approach that “seeks to change the world itself” and even her husband’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who called America “the indispensable nation.” More fulsomely than either, Clinton tethered America’s fortunes to the world’s, saying, “America cannot solve the most pressing problems [of the world] on our own, and the world cannot solve them without America.” Nor did she use the phrase “war on terrorism” during her testimony, preferring to talk more specifically about combatting “Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.”
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