The button was meant to be labelled with the Russian word for “reset”, but the state department did not get the translation quite right. The Russian word they chose, peregruzka, actually meant “overcharged”.
Lavrov was quick to point out the error. “You got it wrong,” he told her bluntly, relishing the Americans’ embarrassment.
The pictures of Clinton and Lavrov holding a mislabelled toy button have since been used by the administration’s critics to illustrate its alleged naivety in trying to cuddle up to the Russian bear.
Over the course of the US presidential election campaign, Donald Trump has repeatedly pointed to the handling of the Russian relationship as an example of Clinton’s mis-steps in office. Unable to deny her wealth of foreign policy experience, Trump has instead sought to denigrate it as “bad experience”.
Clinton has argued that her tireless globetrotting in her four years as secretary of state rescued the US from the diplomatic pit the country had dug for itself with the Iraq invasion and the unilateral spirit of the George W Bush administration.
Her years as secretary of state do not provide a transparent guide to how a President Hillary Clinton would act – the presidency is a very different job, with much greater powers and burdens.
Interviews with former aides, senior officials and her foreign counterparts paint a complex picture of Clinton the diplomat, that defies easy categorisation as “hawk” or “dove”.
But Clinton’s distinctive way of mixing soft and hard US power, her awareness of her nation’s exceptional might and her instincts for how and when to use it are likely to follow her to the Oval Office.
The story of the toy button has several layers. Though it fell to Clinton to make the gesture, she was among the most sceptical in Barack Obama’s administration over the prospects for a rapprochement with Russia.
“Everything we did to reach out to the Russians, she would make sure that we were bolstering relations with Poland and strengthening Nato and not overlooking human rights,” said Philip Gordon, who was Clinton’s undersecretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. “People forget that the reset had those two halves and she was really the guardian of the latter hal
f.”
Her role has certainly not been forgotten by Moscow. Under Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin has not hidden its preference for Donald Trump, and has sought – through cyber-attacks and leaks aimed at embarrassing the Democratic party – to help his campaign.
As Trump has faltered, Russia has hurried to use the remaining months of the Obama administration to achieve its military aims in Syria. The UN has warned that eastern Aleppo will reduced to rubble by December, leaving an incoming president little or nothing to defend, and paltry options in the rest of Syria.
There is much in Clinton’s record as secretary of state to suggest Putin has reason to hurry. When it came to some of the most critical foreign policy decisions made during her four years at Foggy Bottom, Clinton was consistently on the more hawkish side of the argument, frequently taking a more forceful line than her president.
In Libya, she helped convince a reluctant Obama to take part in a military intervention being championed by European and Arab states. On Iran, she had ridiculed him during the primary campaign for saying he would meet the Islamic Republic’s leader unconditionally. It was “reckless and naive” she had said.
Once she arrived at the state department she took the lead in building a high wall of sanctions around Tehran, playing “bad cop” to the outstretched hand of Obama’s “good cop”.
And towards the end of her time as secretary of state, as the Syrian civil war grew ever more horrific, Clinton advocated a robust train-and-equip policy in support of the armed opposition, although she eventually lost that argument with the White House.
Those instincts were on clear display when it came to the biggest foreign and security dilemma facing the Obama administration in its first year in office: what to do about the US entanglement in Afghanistan.
In 2009, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, and the US generals were calling for a surge in troop levels aimed at pushing the Taliban back and stabilising the security situation before the government of President Hamid Karzai could be left to stand on its own.
Ranged against them were Vice-President Joseph Biden, and Obama’s inner circle, who doubted the value of yet more deployments, arguing for a much smaller military presence to conduct counter-terrorist operations against al-Qaida, rather than counter-insurgency against the Taliban. Clinton sided with the generals.
“Clearly she had very good relations with Secretary Gates and the senior military leadership at the time and so was inclined to support their arguments,” Derek Chollet, who served as principal deputy director of Clinton’s policy planning staff.
Clinton had appointed a veteran diplomat and one of her most fervent supporters, Richard Holbrooke, as her envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He had a memorably acerbic, hard-charging manner but on this argument he was a dove, dubious of the generals’ faith in quick military fixes. Clinton stayed personally loyal to Holbrooke – but she did not follow his advice.
“The American military and the White House campaigned to get Holbrooke fired,” a former western diplomat said. “On two occasions she saved Holbrooke, but she didn’t back him much beyond that, and in particular she backed the American military against Holbrooke’s advice. She was consistently hawkish.”
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