Whatever happened to Hillary?

What’s become of Hillary Clinton? At times of international crisis — and boy, do we have a few — it is customary for the American Secretary of State to take centre stage and work the phones until the early hours sorting out the latest threat to global security.

Remember the legwork that James Baker put in to build a multinational coalition to boot out Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1990? Or the air miles Madame Secretary Albright clocked up in her attempts to bring the tiresome Serb dictator Slobodan Milosevic to heel during the Bosnian civil war? Even Condoleezza Rice managed to maintain a high-profile international presence during President George W. Bush’s second term at a time when most world leaders were turning their backs on what they regarded as the hectoring arrogance of the Bush White House.

Given the generally warm reception President Barack Obama has received since his election, this should be a golden age for any competent Secretary of State. Even the Russians appear to have taken a step back from the bellicose nationalism that characterised their dealings with Washington during the final years of the Bush administration.

But wherever you look today on the world stage, there is one noticeable absentee. When Mr Obama last month made his controversial decision to cancel the missile defence shield in Eastern Europe, where was Hillary? It was Mrs Clinton, after all, who had laid the foundations of Washington’s outreach policy to Moscow in the spring when she staged her clumsy ‘reset’ stunt in Geneva with Sergei Lavrov, her opposite number.

But when it came to making one of the most symbolic gestures of the Obama administration to date, Mrs Clinton was nowhere to be seen. We heard lots from Mr Obama about the high expectations he had for closer co-operation with Moscow on pressing global security issues.