The Cable

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

Who did Clinton meet with at the summit?

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a busy couple of days Monday and Tuesday. As part of the leadership team hosting the 47-nation nuclear security summit, she and her staff certainly had their hands full. And Clinton did her best to meet with as many of her foreign interlocutors as possible, in addition to the ...

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a busy couple of days Monday and Tuesday. As part of the leadership team hosting the 47-nation nuclear security summit, she and her staff certainly had their hands full.

And Clinton did her best to meet with as many of her foreign interlocutors as possible, in addition to the 12 bilateral meetings she participated in with President Obama. Some of the meetings were fully fledged discussions, some were quick chats the diplomats call "pull-asides," and for one meeting she even left the convention center and went a foreign leader’s hotel.

Here are most, but not all, of the foreign officials Clinton met with this week who were not of the official schedule:

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore, Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci of Algeria, Foreign Minister Ahmad Aboul Gheit of Egypt, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, Foreign Minister Taïb Fassi Fihri of Morocco, Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya of Thailand (pull aside), Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia (with whom she signed an agreement), Foreign Minister Mariano Fernandez Amunategui of Chile, Foreign MinisterCelso Luiz Nunes Amorim of Brazil, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung of Vietnam, and Foreign Secretary David Miliband of Britain (pull aside).

So who was it that Clinton was willing to travel outside the convention center’s military cordon to go see? Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani, who was holding court at Georgetown’s Four Seasons Hotel. Why the special trip? Gilani outranks her, so protocol dictated that Clinton do the traveling.

Deputy Secretary James Steinberg had a string of meetings this week as well. The most interesting one was an unannounced session with Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor. That was the only high-level meeting Israel’s nuclear delegation had, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told The Cable.

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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