U.S. official says the U.S. intends to 'work well' with Lieberman in his second term as Israel's foreign minister.
It was June 18, 2009. Then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had just finished a meeting in Washington with Israel’s new foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. The press conference after the meeting quickly turned into a public clash between the two, with Clinton calling on Israel to freeze construction of settlements and Lieberman letting her know that this would not happen.
Shortly thereafter, Clinton left her office on the seventh floor of the State Department and set out for a meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House. On the way, though, she stumbled and broke her right elbow. Of course Lieberman had nothing to do with the accident, but the joke around Washington those days was that Clinton’s fall was a good simile for the atmosphere at the meeting with the Israeli foreign minister.
To call relations between Clinton and Lieberman “chilly” would have been a compliment. Not only did Clinton oppose Lieberman’s positions and worldview; she took objection to him personally. Lieberman’s public support for Vladimir Putin after Russia's parliamentary elections in December 2011 only added fuel to the fire.
Consequently, Lieberman was practically an outcast in the State Department in Washington, not to mention the White House. In the three and a half years he was in office, he visited Washington twice, with more than two and a half years between the visits. Senior U.S. officials tried to persuade Clinton to change her policy toward Lieberman. They explained that unofficially boycotting him would only make him more extreme, and would turn him into a spoiler of any diplomatic efforts the United States would try to advance.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.557548
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