Clinton Adopts Steve Jobs’ ‘Think Different’ Motto to Take On China

The U.S. must face the challenge of rising economic and political powers such as Brazil, India and China by making economic concerns central to its foreign policy, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said today.

In a speech to the New York Economic Club, Clinton gave her views on how to deploy diplomacy to spur job growth, lower trade barriers and learn the lessons from the European debt crisis and Arab Spring. She cited a maxim of Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple Inc. who urged all to “think different.”

China has been “gaming the system to hold down the value of its currency to give its companies a leg up,” she said. Brazil and India, whose rapidly growing economies have transformed them from developing nations into international power brokers, have placed “economics at the center of their foreign policies,” Clinton said.

Economic rivals are entering markets directly or deploying natural resources “to build and exercise power,” she said.

That “critical concern” hit home for U.S. officials last year when China cut production of rare earth minerals — used in everything from flat-screen televisions to weapons systems. China controls more than 90 percent of the supply.

“The challenges of a changing world and the needs of the American people demand that our foreign policy community — as Steve Jobs put it — think different,” Clinton said. “We have to position ourselves to lead in a world where security is shaped in boardrooms and on trading floors, as well as on battlefields,” she said.

Free Trade Pacts

Her address follows this week’s congressional approval of free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, ending years of stalemate. Supporters said the accords are the biggest opportunity for exporters in decades.

It also comes as European officials are outlining a rescue plan that may include deeper investor losses on Greek bonds, higher bank capital levels and increased firepower for bailouts and the International Monetary Fund.

Slovakia this week completed ratification of an expanded bailout fund of 440 billion euros ($604 billion) to prevent contagion from a debt crisis that has spread from Greece to other countries in the 17-nation bloc. Slovakia, which joined the euro in 2009 as a former communist nation seeking economic opportunity, was the last euro nation to clear the rescue packet.

“We have seen governments toppled by economic crisis,” Clinton says to the 104-year-old club. The sovereign debt crisis that began at the end of 2009 has triggered a change of government in Greece, Portugal and Ireland.

Arab Revolutions

Clinton cited the impact of popular uprisings in the Middle East, which caught the U.S. off guard, and were triggered by economic hardships such as record-high food prices.

“Revolutions born in a Tunisian marketplace have swept across an entire region,” Clinton said, referring to the 26- year-old unemployed seller of fruit and vegetables who set himself on fire to protest his treatment by Tunisian police.

“To succeed, the Arab political awakening must also be an economic awakening,” she told the audience of business leaders.

Clinton has focused increasingly on the economy since taking over at the State Department in 2009, shifting the focus of the world’s biggest economy toward rivals in Asia.

She has held export promotion events during stops in Australia, meetings on trade while in India and discussed new regional trade agreements during visits to Vietnam. Today, she is pledging to build in the Pacific the same type of institutional framework that binds the U.S. and its Atlantic neighbors, according to State Department officials who weren’t authorized to comment on the record.

Economic Statecraft

Clinton said agencies such as the Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade Representative oversee parts of the agenda and the Obama administration will work to coordinate those efforts more closely.

Diplomacy in support of business will be crucial to the future of U.S. power and prosperity, said Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

“The economy is the basis of our security, the basis of our power abroad, the basis of our military might,” Gelb said in a telephone interview. “You want us to protect ourselves in the world, we’ve got to rebuild our economy. In terms of foreign policy, there’s nothing anywhere near as important.”