(CNSNews.com) – While much attention will be focused Monday on President-elect Obama’s announcement that former rival Sen. Hillary Clinton will assume the top diplomatic post in his administration, his nominee for ambassador to the United Nations will also draw scrutiny in foreign capitals.

Susan Rice, a foreign policy advisor to Obama who was assistant secretary of state for African Affairs in the second Clinton administration, is expected to be named as envoy to the U.N.

Since Obama’s election, advocates of closer U.S. cooperation with the world body have been urging him to appoint an ambassador who will reflect a determination to renew American global leadership by re-engaging with the U.N.

Rice, a 44-year-old African-American – no relation to outgoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – has been a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where she has been an advocate for tougher action to end the humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan’s Darfur region and a critic of Bush administration’s response to the crisis.

If the U.S. was serious about stopping the genocide there, she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2007, it would take a series of steps to back up its earlier pledge of harsh consequences should the Sudanese government not accept peacekeepers and stop killing innocent civilians.

Those steps would include financial penalties, sanctions including those targeting the oil sector, and the passage of legislation freezing assets and authorizing force to stop the genocide. And if Khartoum failed to act, she said, “the Bush administration should use military force to compel Khartoum to admit a robust U.N. force and stop killing civilians.”

Rice cited options including the imposition of a no-fly zone and the bombing of the Sudanese regime’s aircraft, airfields and military and intelligence facilities.

If confirmed for the ambassador’s post, Rice will be confronted at the U.N. with strong opposition to such views:

-- In the Security Council, veto-wielding permanent member China, Khartoum’s leading oil customer and weapons supplier, has also been its chief ally and protector.

-- In the General Assembly, most of the African, Arab and Islamic states would object to the threat of Western intervention in Sudan. They similarly oppose the handover of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to the International Criminal Court, which has indicted him for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

-- At the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, the Islamic bloc has led efforts to block Western-led condemnation of Sudan’s Islamic government. A HRC-supervised process preparing the agenda for a global conference on racism scheduled for next April is ignoring Darfur, although some experts argue that the crisis should top the agenda if the conference is to have any value at all.

Rice has shown herself in the past to be willing to forego diplomatic niceties.

In the waning days of the Clinton administration, she aroused the anger of the Sudanese government when she visited a rebel-held southern part of the country – the north-south civil war was still underway – and met with former slaves there.

During that visit, Rice expressed outrage at hearing the testimonials of southern African women and children who had been captured, enslaved, tortured and raped by Arab militiamen.

“I’m here to show the world, despite what the government of Khartoum says, despite what some of our partners in the European Union pretend ... slavery exists,” she said at the time.

Irate, the government responded by canceling the visas of American diplomats who would regularly visit the semi-closed U.S. Embassy in Khartoum from their postings in neighboring countries.

Criticism of Clinton
 
Rice studied at Stanford University, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and received her doctorate in international relations from Oxford University in England.

She joined Clinton’s National Security Council staff in 1993 and served as assistant secretary of state for African Affairs from 1997 to 2000, under Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, described as a mentor.

How Rice gets on with the likely next holder of that post, Hillary Clinton, remains to be seen.

Despite her historical association with the Clinton administration Rice teamed up with Obama during the Democratic primary campaign and had strong words for some of Clinton’s foreign policy positions.

Last February, Rice told reporters Clinton had shown poor judgment when she voted to authorize the Iraq war and in supporting legislation designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.

“Those are critical foreign policy judgments,” she said. “They are judgments that any candidate should be held accountable for. And obviously we look forward to Senator Clinton’s explanation of how and why she got those critical judgments wrong.”

Recently several dozen senior figures including former secretaries and state and defense, ambassadors and lawmakers signed up to a statement calling on Obama to “revitalize the U.S.-U.N. relationship.”

Released by the United Nations Foundation and the Partnership for a Secure America, the statement recommended nine steps, including ratifying outstanding treaties, “paying our debts on time,” placing “well-qualified Americans in open positions at the U.N.” and joining the Human Rights Council, which the Bush administration has largely shunned.

William Luers, president of the United Nations Association of the USA, has urged Obama to “select as soon as possible a distinguished American with serious international experience to represent you at the U.N.” and to elevate the position to a cabinet rank.

“The ambassador should be willing to listen, be patient and work with other nations – friends and adversaries – on the immediate challenges the U.S. faces on issues under U.N. consideration,” Luers said in a recent memo.

The U.S. has had 26 permanent representatives to the U.N. since President Truman appointed Edward Stettinius Jr. to the post in 1945.

Those who made their mark included Adlai Stevenson in the early 1960s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the mid-1970s, Jeane Kirkpatrick in the President Reagan’s first term, Albright in 1993-1997, John Negroponte in 2001-2004 and John Bolton in 2005-2006.

Bolton’s term probably did more than anything else to upset multilateralists, while many Americans wary of the U.N. said the administration could not have had a better representative in the position at a time when U.N. reform was badly needed and Iran and North Korea were stepping up their defiance of the international community.

Bush had bypassed Senate opposition and appointed Bolton during a congressional recess, but when the recess appointment was due to expire, critics in the Senate declined to approve his nomination.

At the time of the recess appointment, Susan Rice in a Washington Post op-ed said the president had “shocked even his most cynical critics by nominating the combative neoconservative John Bolton to one of our most complex and sensitive diplomatic posts.”