IT cannot be easy to serve your former rival for the presidency as secretary of state, especially when you see him awarded the Nobel peace prize after nine months in the job. So the last thing Hillary Clinton needed on a trip to Moscow last week was to be embarrassed by Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister.

Clinton had gone for a two-day visit in the hope of winning Kremlin support for tougher measures against Iran after President Dmitry Medvedev’s suggestion last month that Russia might abandon its opposition to sanctions if Tehran refused to come clean about its nuclear activities.

Instead she was snubbed by Putin, the real power in the Kremlin. “If we speak about some kind of sanctions now, before we take concrete steps, we will fail to create favourable conditions for negotiations,” he said during a trip to China. “That is why we consider such talk premature.”

Clinton’s failure to secure assurances from Russia on Iran despite earlier US concessions to Moscow on missile defence, meant she returned home with little to show for her efforts. The apparent failure of the trip reinforced critics’ doubts about her ability to play a strong diplomatic role.

President Barack Obama has hived off the world’s biggest trouble-spots to powerful envoys, leaving detailed negotiations to high-profile figures such as George Mitchell in the Middle East, Richard Holbrooke in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Dennis Ross in Iran. Iraq remains in the purview of Joe Biden, the vice-president.

Clinton’s time has been largely taken up by the kind of unglamorous diplomacy that rarely generates headlines in the US. “Mitchell got the Middle East, Holbrooke ‘Afpak’, Biden Iraq,” said an American journalist. “What’s she got? Africa?”

In fact, she has Russia and China and has secured some victories, such as helping the Turks and Armenians to re-establish diplomatic relations after a century of enmity.

However, at a recent talk on foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, Clinton barely mentioned the pivotal issues of Afghanistan and Middle East.When she went to Northern Ireland last week in the midst of Obama’s negotiations on Afghanistan, she looked like somebody in search of an issue. To rebut claims she had been marginalised, she appeared on NBC television last week and dismissed the notion as “absurd”.

“I’m not one of these people who feels like I have to have my face in the front of the newspaper or on TV every moment of the day,” she told the interviewer, Ann Curry.

At 61, she appeared to have given up on her ambition to become the first female president of the US.

“I have absolutely no interest in running for president again,” she said. “None. I know that’s hard for some people to believe, but I just don’t.”

Offering Clinton the State Department was regarded as a shrewd move by Obama, making use of her talents while keeping her under his control.

Clinton was described by Samantha Powers, an Obama adviser, as a “monster” and was expected to clash with heavyweight figures such as Robert Gates, the defence secretary, who stayed on from the administration of George W Bush.

Instead, Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, told The New York Times that Gates views her as “tough-minded, clear and focused”. At a retreat for his 22-member cabinet in July, Obama told two guests that Clinton was “the ideal cabinet officer”.

A Clinton aide said Obama’s policy of appointing envoys had meant she could avoid tricky issues. “No one is going to emerge covered in glory from trying to sort out Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said.

Tina Brown, the columnist and editor, said losing the race for the presidential nomination might have given Clinton some freedom and brought under control the husband she once described as “the big dog on the porch”.

“After some rocky moments, Hillary seems to have found, in the heart of her chief rival’s administration, an unexpected comfort level,” Brown wrote.

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