Clinton gets her second wind as she marks her first six months in a job where analysts say she treads a fine line between showing loyalty to President Barack Obama, a former political rival, and imposing herself as chief US diplomat.
Clinton has walked the tightrope well, many add.
But The Cable, a blog for Foreign Policy magazine, said her broken elbow and other circumstances, such as sharing the limelight with high-profile envoys, have made it difficult for Clinton to "dominate her foreign policy turf."
The speech on Wednesday as well as her weekend travel to India and Thailand, the venue for an annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, will raise her profile, it said.
Since breaking her elbow June 17, Clinton has missed a meeting of the Group of Eight leading industrial countries in Italy, another on European security in Greece, and a US-Russia summit with Obama in Moscow.
So far Clinton has traveled to Asia, the Middle East, Iraq, Europe, Mexico, the Caribean, Central America and Canada.
Wendy Chamberlin, a former ambassador to Pakistan and career diplomat who now heads the Middle East Institute, told AFP that old colleagues describe Clinton "as a team player," something that is "very much appreciated" by Obama.
"I haven't seen any tension between the two," Chamberlin said of the former rivals for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.
Chamberlin does not think Clinton has tried to avoid upstaging Obama; it is simply that both Clinton and Obama share the international limelight, whereas Clinton's predecessor Condoleezza Rice had it to herself.
"Rice had a president (George W. Bush) ... who was not very much appreciated when he went abroad," Chamberlin said.
As popular as Clinton is overseas, Obama is popular, too, she said, adding: "I don't think you can upstage Barack Obama."
The pair make a "balanced team" because they both take a "measured" approach toward world affairs and stress the importance of listening to the needs of people around the globe, she added.
The Cable, quoting an unnamed foreign-policy hand in former president Bill Clinton's administration, said that for Hillary Clinton to raise her profile, she must "take on some of the key issues that had been tasked to special envoys."
However, with the six-month mark coming up, it said, there may not be much time to convince world leaders she is the person to deal with rather than super envoys like Richard Holbrooke, George Mitchell and others.
Holbrooke is tasked with overseeing stabilization efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- Obama's main front in the war on terror -- and Mitchell is the pointman on the Arab-Israeli peace process, another top priority.
There are also special envoys for North Korea, Sudan and climate change.
Chamberlin and James Goldgeier, an analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations where Clinton is due to give what the State Department calls a "major foreign policy address," disagree that the envoys sap her authority.
"All of those envoys know who's boss," Chamberlin said. "I think the envoy system was a wise move. I think in future they may become competitive with her, but I don't see that happening yet."
Goldgeier added: "She's got talented people in Holbrooke and Mitchell ... as well as someone like (James) Steinberg serving as deputy, so she should let them operate as she has."
One urgent problem that Clinton and Obama have omitted to tackle so far is what Chamberlin calls the "failed state" at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is key to US efforts to stabilize Afghanistan.
Chamberlin expressed concern that there is still no top leadership at USAID, despite Clinton rhetoric about shifting from the Bush administration's reliance on military force to a balance between defense, diplomacy and development.
"Clearly getting a leader on board is a very high priority for me," Clinton told an employee during a State Department meeting on Friday when asked if a new USAID administrator would be appointed by the end of the year.
Clinton is due Monday to visit with USAID, which she oversees as secretary of state.
Copyright AFP 2008, AFP stories and photos shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium
