HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, the US secretary of state, is as close to perfect a face that post-Bush America can present to the world. Intelligent, articulate and engaged, she projects a charm appropriate to her role as the US government’s top diplomat. It’s particularly useful for the young administration of President Barack Obama, which Clinton herself described as having made many changes in its “openness and approach to people with whom we don’t agree.” The changes include a deliberate search for areas of common interest, of instances of “cooperation, not competition,” of occasions for “working with, not against.”

This stance is of significance to peoples all over the world who are closely watching the United States extricate itself from the swamp of the Bush era, which had as its mantra “either for us or against us” and which found it convenient (and profitable) to bomb the bejesus out of the countries that it mapped out as within the “axis of evil.”

It will be profoundly disappointing if, like the usual proconsuls that come and go, dispensing pennies and patronage, Clinton is merely talking the talk. When she sought the Democratic Party’s nomination as presidential candidate early in 2008, she amazed even her admirers with the depth and breadth of her campaign as well as her perseverance despite the terrible sexism that came into play. And at the Manila Forum conducted Friday by ABS-CBN at the University of Santo Tomas, she pushed the right buttons and then some, skillfully matching eloquence with wit, cool with warmth, and making even the most predictable motherhood statement sound like a bell of hope.

In the dark days of the Marcos dictatorship, even the small warnings of US President Jimmy Carter against human rights violations evoked that level of hope among Filipinos. And Clinton’s statements on corruption and how it should be publicly exposed, on the inequality between men and women as “one of the most important, unfinished, challenges of the 21st century,” on being committed to women’s rights as human rights, and on the need for civil society to focus not only on human rights violations but also on the promotion of workers’ rights, seemed to be addressed directly to those keeping faith in the struggle, in engagement, in that French term’s truest sense.

But this is not to lose sight of a fundamental fact: Clinton represents the United States and is above all else committed to upholding its best interests. The woman may show what it’s like to be all at once beautiful (“like Sharon Stone,” a student gushed), powerful and high-minded, but one can do worse than keep in mind that in the scheme of things, the peace in Mindanao that she said her government wanted to facilitate is not only essential to the Philippines’ progress but also good for the US government’s purported designs on it as a forward base in Southeast Asia. Or that stamping out corruption is necessary not only in stamping out poverty but also in preserving US investments. And so on.

(Why does it suddenly call to mind Michael Kimmelman’s review of Goya’s paintings—say “Cuantas baras,” a ruthless image of a priest in a long wide robe, and “Mariano Goya,” a tender portrait of a boy with his toy behind him—and a description of the man’s genius as, among other things, lying in the ability “to move so effortlessly between cruelty and love”?)

This is not saying that an undesirable dichotomy is at work, only that this is the way of realpolitik even under the Obama administration that, since its beginnings, promised hope and change.

This is also saying that for all the warm feelings that Clinton generated in promising more aid to typhoon victims, in visiting a school that lost much of what it had to floods and connecting with its students, and in declaring her commitment to peace, women’s rights, democracy and a “broader and deeper” RP-US relationship, there’s more on her plate.

Of the “thousands of planes circling in the air that [Team Obama] had to bring down safely” when it came to office, let the cleanup of the old US bases in the Philippines and an equitable Visiting Forces Agreement be among them—at the very least.