As NJ.com reports in Princeton dean departs for Washington to work for Clinton, “Anne-Marie Slaughter has resigned as dean of the prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs to serve the first female director of the State department’s Office of Policy Planning, reporting directly  to new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is very clearly building out a robust and experienced team to deal with the multi-pronged challenges the U.S. faces abroad. She immediately brought on board a successful peace negotiator, George Mitchell, to tackle the Mideast and Todd Stern, who led the US delegation to the Kyoto talks in 1997,  to work toward reaching agreements to reduce global pollution. Clinton reached outside of the State Department to discuss concerns regarding the global economic downturn and issues regarding China with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.  We are sure to hear more about that.

And by bringing on Slaughter, an expert on global governance and American foreign policy, who co-chairs the Princeton Project on National Security, and serves on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, Clinton is putting in place a philosophical underpinning which can guide the State Department’s actions, rather than simply “putting out whatever fire is burning brightest”.  She also appears to be putting a stake in the ground about the termination of practices which erode civil rights, for any global citizen, and which undermine the core principles on which this country was founded.

Slaughter, said to be one of our country’s finest legal minds, in her most recent book “The Idea that Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World,” explores the relation between the United State’s power and the bedrock principles upon which our country rests. She lays out a vision that, despite aggression and adversity in the world, America should fight to retain its basic values of justice and tolerance in addition to liberty, democracy and equality.  In other words, no Guantanamo Bay.  No torture.

This shift in policy thinking at the highest levels suggests a paradigm shift in how America will deal with the rest of the world, the values which will come into play, and the more just and tolerant approach we might expect when dealing with other countries, even those who don’t always agree with us.

I, for one, see this as a very welcome change.  And one which might bring more of our distant neighbors back into that circle of collaboration and trust on which so much of the world depends for safety and progress.  For me anyway, the positive steps in this direction convince me what data suggests: women do approach politics, legislation and diplomacy with a bit kinder and more nurturing touch.