For all the talk about Iran, Iraq and Gaza this week, very little has been said about Hillary Rodham Clinton's sometimes testy relationship with America's biggest potential rivals, China and Russia.

At today's confirmation, Clinton will emphasize the need for the country to pick its foreign policy battles (her mantra is a flexible, somewhat fuzzy, Kissingeresque concept called "Smart Power"), call for restoration of the country's standing in the world and knell the death of Bush-era "Cowboy Diplomacy."

Yet Clinton has done her own share of gunslinging on China and Russia -- especially during 2007-2008, when she positioned herself as a wily hawk to Barack Obama's helplessly naive dove.

Some memorable examples:

-- Almost precisely a year ago, speaking in New Hampshire, Clinton mocked Bush for his notorious comment that he looked into Vladimir Putin's soul and liked what he saw. "I could have told him — he was a KGB agent. By definition he doesn't have a soul," Clinton joked.

Putin returned the favor in middle-school-cafeteria style, telling an audience in Russia: "A state official must at least have brains."

-- Clinton repeatedly dismissed Putin's hand-picked successor, President Dmitry Medvedev, as a Putin puppet (and famously mis-pronounced his name as "Medyeduvuh" during a debate). While her estimate was CW at the time, and is still the consensus position among the country's foreign policy establishment, Medvedev has recently shown signs of emerging from Putin's shadow.

-- Clinton's most heroic moment on the international stage was her 1995 trip to Beijing where she famously declared "[I]t is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights."

-- During the campaign, Clinton was an outspoken critic of China's Tibet crackdown -- to the point where she urged Bush to boycott the opening ceremony of last year's Beijing Olympics. Obama agreed with her.

-- Clinton hammered China's leadership particularly hard for exporting toys with a high lead content to the U.S. "How dare they?" she asked an audience in Iowa in 2007.