As a candidate, she warned that Iran might be obliterated if it carried out a nuclear attack on Israel and said Jerusalem should remain Israel's undivided capital. As a senator, she voted to label Iran's Revolutionary Guards a "terrorist organization" and to approve President George W. Bush's plan to go to war against Iraq.

So while Hillary Rodham Clinton's nomination to be the U.S. secretary of state is being scrutinized - and generally welcomed - across the globe, the view in the Middle East is more complicated. The region expects prompt attention from the incoming administration, a notion that was reinforced when President-elect Barack Obama, in his nomination statement Monday, spoke of the need to restore American diplomacy and influence and specified three crises on Clinton's agenda: the spread of nuclear weapons to Iran and North Korea, and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

In many other parts of the world, her selection was greeted with optimism, part of an anything-is-better-than-Bush argument. As Sergei Markov, a Kremlin-connected political analyst and a member of the Russian Parliament, put it, "The most important thing is not who is coming in, but who is leaving."

Andreas Etges, a professor in Berlin, made a similar point, albeit less sharply: "There may not be agreement on all policy matters, but with Obama and Hillary Clinton you can at least guarantee a better atmosphere."

Many people interviewed in more than a dozen countries had high regard for Clinton, including Prime Minister Yehude Simon of Peru, who called her an "extraordinary woman."

But others, like Jorge Castaneda, Mexico's former foreign minister, and Julio Burdman, an Argentine political analyst, said her knowledge of and interest in their region remained too vague to judge.

"There won't be a big change in relations with Latin America, at least not at first," Burdman said.

In the Middle East her record is extensive, and the question being debated was whether the once-hawkish-sounding Clinton would now set a different tone. Would she, as the Obama administration's chief diplomat, focus on negotiating with Iran and coaxing Israel to withdraw from the Golan Heights to make peace with Syria, and from most of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to foster the creation of a Palestinian state? Many suspect that she will.

Raghida Dergham, a columnist for Al Hayat, the London-based pan-Arab newspaper, wrote not about if but when "negotiations begin between Barack Obama's administration and the government in Tehran," and urged Washington to view the region's problems as interconnected - "not to think of Iran regardless of Iraq, or of Syria regardless of Lebanon, or of Israel regardless of Palestine."

For pro-Western Arabs and liberal and leftist Israelis, this is a widely held view - that the moment may be ripe for a grand bargain aimed at stopping Iran's nuclear ambition and spreading influence. Diplomatic steps would include Israeli territorial withdrawal in exchange for regional recognition. Given Clinton's strong pro-Israel credentials, the advocates of this view argue, she could carry it out.

Cengiz Candar, a political analyst and columnist in Istanbul, made the same point, saying that Clinton's nomination "raised hopes in the Middle East that former President Bill Clinton's Mideast peace efforts, which ultimately failed close to the end of his presidency, would be revived," with new opportunities for accords between Israel and its neighbors.

"There's much more hope that with Hillary Clinton we'll see more active American engagement," he said.

In Israel, some share that hope. Others, who say the Arab world is not ready for a deal or who want Israel to keep the territory for reasons of security or history, worry precisely about such ambitions. Even some who favor compromise are suspicious of potential pressure.

Eitan Haber, a close associate of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s, when he negotiated a regional peace deal with President Clinton's help, wrote a dismissive opinion article about Hillary Clinton in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper Tuesday. He wrote that her sole ambition was to be president and to succeed, and that the next prime minister of Israel had better "get in the trenches and maybe put on a helmet."

Many Israeli analysts say that much depends on who is elected prime minister here in February. If the leader of the conservative Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu, won, as now appears likely, a comprehensive plan would probably be harder to implement than if Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the head of the centrist Kadima party, won the vote. But Netanyahu's supporters argue that in the long run, Israel will be safer with a slower approach.

Reactions from Palestinian leaders have been notably muted. Saeb Erekat, chief negotiator for the Palestinian Authority, said that "Hillary is a good lady" and that he hoped she would "stay on course with the two-state solution."

Mahmoud Zahhar, leader of the militant Hamas party, which runs Gaza, seemed to want to leave the door open for a possible softening of Washington's approach by praising her experience and adding, "For sure it will reflect on international policies."

A major theme among reactions to Obama's foreign policy nominations was that a period of greater international cooperation would probably follow. At the United Nations, for example, diplomats were upbeat over the choice of Susan Rice as the American ambassador to the body and the restoration of her post to cabinet level.

Italy's foreign minister, Franco Frattini, said he looked forward to an Obama administration's taking a more multilateral approach and asking for "greater political commitment" and more "cooperation and co-responsibility" from Europe, including to send more soldiers and financial aid to Afghanistan.

In Germany, Clinton's stock has remained high since she tried - and failed - in the early 1990s to institute a national health insurance program similar to many in Europe.

That kind of reaction - viewing Clinton through the lens of her years as first lady - has produced both positive and negative reactions. In Saudi Arabia, Muhammad al-Zulfa, a historian and member of the Shura Council, an advisory body to King Abdullah, said that "the presence of her husband as the closest man to her can contribute to her perspective on the Middle East."

But in London, Robin Niblett, a foreign policy scholar, said that Europeans, while noting Clinton's intelligence and skills, worried about her ties to the past and her potentially polarizing political style.

And in Russia, memories of her husband's approach to Moscow as a weak state brought concern. In addition, there was suspicion over keeping Robert Gates, the defense secretary of President George W. Bush, in his position.

"These appointments do not provide for special optimism, because they mean successiveness and not reformation of the foreign political concept of the White House," said Konstantin Kosachyov, chairman of the international affairs committee in the Russian Duma, according to the Interfax news agency.

By Ethan Bronner, International Herald Tribune, December 2, 2008