Hooton praises Clark

Matthew Hooton highlights the upcoming Clark/Bush meeting as a time for the PM to shine, in a column that praises Clark often. Extracts are:

Helen Clark has the potential to pull off something spectacular when she meets counterpart George Bush this week. We should expect nothing less.

Despite one or two notorious gaffes, Clark is the most skilled diplomat ever to be prime minister. Reports last year about her potential to be secretary-general were true, and she would have done the job better than any of the alternatives, including Ban Ki-moon. Our Foreign has nothing but praise for her knowledge, skill and hard work.

Clark's diplomatic skills have been honed through a lifetime of interest in foreign . Her involvement in politics was not sparked by housing, health or education, but by , apartheid and Mururoa. Her first important job was chairing the foreign affairs select committee, and she has travelled an enormous distance from when she worried the CIA was bugging her as she shepherded the anti-nuclear legislation through the committee in the 1980s.

The very fact she has secured a full two hours with President Bush is testament to her abilities. Along with Australia's John Howard, Clark and Bush are the old hands in the Asia Pacific region. Clark has put aside any personal concerns about Bush's policies to forge a warm friendship with her American colleague.

In doing so, she has taken a political risk. Not all her supporters will be pleased to see her hobnobbing with the president, but Clark is more sophisticated than the average Labour hack. She knows it can only be in New Zealand's interests to have the closest possible friendship with the world's strongest military and economic power.

On Afghanistan, Clark's commitment to standing beside Bush was such that she put her own government at risk when the faction of the , led by Laila Harre, split with Jim Anderton over his support for the war.

In the context of this wider friendship, the dispute over our nuclear policy has become silly, especially now it enjoys unambiguous bipartisan support.

The dispute was never really about the substance, because allies Japan and Denmark had similar policies. The real trouble was that the Lange government went back on a private understanding about how the policy would be implemented.

But the US is the elder sibling. It's the one who should be big enough to forgive the pip-squeak down the hall for telling a fib, especially when it was more than 20 years ago, and when our soldiers' lives continue to be put at risk in pursuit of common values.

The time has surely come for the US to drop us from its list of “very, very, very good friends” and recognise that it has few more loyal allies in the world than Clark's New Zealand. The prime minister has the diplomatic skills to make these points more delicately than a newspaper columnist. A lifetime of training has prepared her to exceed everyone's expectations this week.

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