But maybe, I think, the US has less scope for grand strategy than it did in the past couple of decades, when the country seemed to bestride the world colossus-style. Clinton herself suggests that so formidable are the tasks confronting the US that the administration has little scope to enter into internecine fights but needs instead to focus on the challenges to hand. Whatever the reason for her stance, it seems to be a smart decision – by all accounts she's overcome many of the suspicions the White House retinue had towards her.
“It's fair to say that she was not born into the administration's inner circle but slowly but surely, for the most consequential decisions, she now has a prime seat at the table,” says one official. Praising what he calls her “Terminator-quality durability and determination,” he adds: “She's done an amazing amount of work, judging that the way to build a strategic vision is bottom up, by mastering the details.”
Indeed, Clinton's ability to master the most arcane foreign policy briefs is the marvel of her building. She has dropped into obscure working groups and shown an unnerving knowledge of their details. At her confirmation hearings last year she exchanged facts about the arctic with an Alaskan senator; at the meeting in São Paulo she becomes enthused about freight transport policy both in Brazil and the US. She herself acknowledges that finding her feet on foreign policy was something of a struggle, despite her campaign claims of expertise in the field. “It was so intellectually challenging, just to get our arms around all of these issues,” she says. During her first year, she was criticised for apparent gaffes – including the way she called for Israel to halt all building of settlements on occupied territory only to hail a partial freeze a few months later as unprecedented. On an election campaign, she says, “you may be in a different city four times a day but you have a message you're trying to deliver that is repetitive and aimed at your audience. But here you might deal with 10 different countries' problems, six different regional or global challenges in the course of a day.”