WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 (UPI) -- This week Hillary Clinton embarks on her first foreign tour as secretary of state, visiting Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China. And the first question on the minds of her various hosts will be whether she is the true face of American diplomacy or just a hollow symbol.
Given the force of her personality, her record in the Senate and the votes she stacked up in the primaries last year, it sounds bizarre to question her authority. But consider Hillary's curious position from the point of view of a Chinese or Japanese foreign minister.
The first big foreign policy statement by the Obama administration was delivered last weekend in Munich by Vice President Joe Biden. As former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden sees himself as the administration's real expert on the world.
His speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy announced "a change of tone" to an America that again would listen to its NATO allies, along with a more conciliatory approach ("press the reset button") toward Russia and a pragmatic readiness to seek a deal with Iran. Even before being sworn in, Biden used his lame duck status as committee chairman to make a fact-finding trip in January to the three hot spots of Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Biden is clearly determined to be an important foreign policy player, and also to be the big ideas man of the administration. In a little-noticed speech during the campaign, Biden said the biggest error of the Bush administration was its failure "to face the biggest forces shaping this century: the emergence of Russia, China and India as great powers. The Obama-Biden administration will repair those criminal mistakes. Barack and I will end that neglect."
Note that "Barack and I." The speech was delivered before Hillary was named to the State Department, but Biden didn't seem to leave much room for a secretary of state, whoever it might be.
Biden is determined to continue the way Al Gore and Dick Cheney have sharply raised the power and profile of the vice presidency, and says Obama agrees. "The agreement he and I have is that I would be available for every single major decision that he makes. I'd have all the paper, all the material, all the meetings," he told ABC's "This Week." "I'm the last person in the room with every important decision he makes."
Biden is not Hillary's only problem. Every key region of the world now seems to be getting its own presidential envoy, someone who arrives empowered to speak for President Obama, although that is supposed to be Hillary's job. The Middle East has former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, and it is rumored that Middle East veteran Dennis Ross will get the job of special envoy for Iran.
Pakistan-Afghanistan gets former U.N. Ambassador Dick Holbrooke. (Holbrooke would have had India added to his portfolio, until New Delhi lobbied hard against any such suggestion that a rising superpower like India should be lumped together with two failing states like Pakistan and Afghanistan.)
All this means that Hillary will be wondering what's left for her to do, now that former Marine Gen. James Jones has taken over the National Security Council at the White House. He is talking grandly of ambitious plans to give the NSC its biggest overhaul in a generation, expanding its reach to embrace trade, homeland security, cyber-warfare, energy and climate change.
Doubtless Hillary will get a prominent seat at the table, but it hardly leaves her as the key figure in American foreign policymaking. And then there is Bob Gates at the Pentagon, who has the real executive power over the U.S. role in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a very powerful voice over policy toward Iran.
And then there is the delicate issue of the Strategic Economic Dialogue with China that was launched and carefully nurtured by George W. Bush's treasury secretary, Hank Paulson. These days, those financial contacts with Beijing may be more important than the usual diplomatic routine over North Korea and Taiwan. And busy as new Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will be, he and his staff do not want to give up the China connection.
Hillary is not just a highly intelligent woman with a host of top-level international contacts, she is also a veteran Washington insider who knows the bureaucracy and the rules of the Potomac power games. She always knew, as every recent secretary of state has had to learn, that the president is his own top diplomat, the guy who does the summits and the Group of Seven and the Group of 20 meetings.
But Hillary can hardly have been prepared for the erosion of her role that seems inevitable from the energetic travel schedule of Biden, the bureaucratic empire-building of the NSC and those new special envoys. This seems to leave Hillary with real authority over not much more than Africa, Latin America and Japan. It is hard to imagine that this is what she expected when she took over the State Department.
More to the point, it leaves the foreign ministers of other countries wondering just how far she really speaks for the United States when she travels. Or should they also check with the Pentagon, the NSC, the Treasury, the relevant special envoy and the office of the vice president?
