On her first trip as U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton showed how she intends to carry out President Barack Obama's foreign policy: talk openly about the toughest problems and enlist global partners to help solve them, Bloomberg reported.
In Beijing, she urged China to keep buying U.S. Treasury bonds to help finance Obama's stimulus plan to revive economic growth, saying "we are truly going to rise or fall together."
During the weeklong trip that also included stops in Japan, Indonesia and South Korea, Clinton made clear that the U.S. wants input on everything from stabilizing Afghanistan to strategies for how best to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon and to push North Korea to eliminate arms work.
"It is our goal in the Obama administration to reach out to the rest of the world using every tool at our disposal," especially diplomacy and development aid, she told a Chinese news anchor yesterday before departing for Washington. That means trying to "understand each other better," she added.
U.S. partners around the world and particularly in Asia have been saying for years that they want the secretary of state "to show up more, and she did that in a very public and engaged way," said Richard Bush, director of the Northeast Asia Policy Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "One aspect of our reemerging in Asia is being more candid about what we think about issues and listening, which she's very good at."
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