The Cable

The Cable goes inside the foreign policy machine, from Foggy Bottom to Turtle Bay, the White House to Embassy Row.

Meanwhile, what is Steinberg up to today?

While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is joined to President Obama’s hip for a series of world leader meetings Monday, her principal deputy James Steinberg is holding down the fort back at Foggy Bottom, hosting his own round of meetings with various interlocutors. Monday morning Steinberg met with Malaysian Prime Minister Tun Razak at the ...

While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is joined to President Obama's hip for a series of world leader meetings Monday, her principal deputy James Steinberg is holding down the fort back at Foggy Bottom, hosting his own round of meetings with various interlocutors.

While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is joined to President Obama’s hip for a series of world leader meetings Monday, her principal deputy James Steinberg is holding down the fort back at Foggy Bottom, hosting his own round of meetings with various interlocutors.

Monday morning Steinberg met with Malaysian Prime Minister Tun Razak at the Four Seasons Hotel next door in Georgetown. Razak met with Obama and Clinton later on at the convention center.

After that, Steinberg hosted Spanish Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Angel Lossada at the State Department. Steinberg has been working closely with the Spaniards, having just returned from the Balkans where he hung out with Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos.

Later Monday Steinberg will be visited there by Finnish Secretary General and Presidential Chief of Staff Paivi Kairamo-Hella. Finnish President Tarja Halonen is the head of the Finnish delegation, but doesn’t have a scheduled meeting with Clinton or Obama.

Then Steinberg will round out his afternoon by meeting with South Korea’s chief nuclear envoy, Wi Sung-lac, also at the State Department.

Busy day for Steinberg!

 UPDATE: We saw Steinberg exit the convention center with Assistant Secretary for East Asia Kurt Campbell at about 4:30. Looks like Steinberg was in on the bilateral meeting with Chinese president Hu Jintao. The Chinese had a press conference scheduled but then abruptly canceled it. More on that later…

Josh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.

Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.

A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.

Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @joshrogin

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