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Chennai speech was the real highlight of Ms Clinton's visit
Business Standard / New Delhi July 26, 2011.
Diplomacy attaches great significance to words. While words are no substitute for deeds in international relations and what you do is more important than what you say, there are times when what is said can be significant if it presages what is likely to be done. Beat reporters may have been disappointed by United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit because it did not produce any headlines about deals and deeds, but foreign policy analysts will pay greater attention to Ms Clinton's words, especially her speech in Chennai. This is the first time a Democratic Party politician has laid out the wider canvas within which the US sees its relations with India. This wider canvas was first sketched out in a famous 2000 essay penned by Ms Clinton's illustrious and learned predecessor, Condoleeza Rice in Foreign Affairs in which she offered a new US perspective on India that subsequently came to shape former US President George Bush's strategy and helped deliver the India-US civil nuclear energy cooperation agreement. Unlike the Republican Party, the Democrats never fully embraced this new view of India. Worse, both President Barrack Obama and Ms Clinton did not enthusiastically support the deal as senators. Coming to office in the context of the 2008 financial crisis and confronted by the problem of global imbalances, the Obama Administration reached out to China and even floated the "G-2 theory", that the US and China could run a new bipolar world as partners rather than adversaries. President Obama went to the extent of legitimising China's interests in South Asia.