Transcript: Clinton's Opening Statement At Senate Hearing

In our efforts to return to economic growth here in the United States, we have an especially critical need to work more closely with Canada, our largest trading partner, and Mexico, our third largest.

Canada and Mexico are also our biggest suppliers of imported energy. More broadly, we must build a deeper partnership with Mexico to address the shared dangers arising from drug trafficking and the challenges along our border, an effort begun this week with the meeting between President-elect Obama and President Calderon.

Throughout our hemisphere, we have opportunities to enhance our relationships that will benefit all of us. We will return to a policy of vigorous involvement, partnership even, with Latin America, from the Caribbean to Central America to South America. We share common political, economic, and strategic interests with our friends to the south, as well as many of our citizens who share ancestral and cultural legacies. We're looking forward to working on many issues during the Summit of the Americas in April and taking up the president-elect's call for a new energy partnership around shared technology and new investments in renewable energy.

And in Africa the foreign policy objectives of the Obama administration are rooted in security, political, economic and humanitarian interests, including combating Al Qaida's efforts to seek save havens in failed states in the Horn of Africa, helping African nations conserve their natural resources and reaping fair benefits from them, stopping war in the Congo, ending autocracy in Zimbabwe and human devastation in Darfur.

But we also intend to support the African democracies like South Africa and Ghana, which just had its second peaceful change of power in a democratic election. We must work hard with our African friends to reach the millennium development goals in health education and economic opportunity.

Many significant problems we face will challenge us not only on a bilateral basis but all nations.