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Hillary Clinton on Monday said that as president of the US she would set up an annual "E8" summit including India and China that would aim to tackle global warming and work towards energy security.
The group, which would be modelled on the G8 summit of the world's largest economies, would enable the US to offer the global leadership on climate change that had been abdicated by the administration of George W. Bush, she said.
She also pledged US leadership to negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto protocol that would create binding carbon-emission reductions for the US and the other participants. At a recent meeting in Washington of the world's leading carbon emitters, Mr Bush pointedly refused to accede to binding targets.
"As president I will make the fight against global warming a priority," she wrote in the forthcoming issue of the magazine Foreign Affairs, in an exposition of her foreign policy.
"Rapidly emerging countries, such as China, will not curb their own carbon emissions until the US has demonstrated a serious commitment to reducing its own through a market-based cap-and-trade approach."
Mrs Clinton set the US's refusal in 1998 to ratify the Kyoto protocol on climate change within a broader critique of the decline of the nation's international standing under Mr Bush. In a carefully crafted article that placed Mrs Clinton's foreign policy within a centrist mould, she pledged to restore the US's reputation in the world but also said it "should be prepared to act on its own to protect its vital interests".
She promised both to co-operate with friends and to talk to enemies. But she eschewed the word "multilateralism" and made scant reference to working through the United Nations.
"This administration has unilaterally pursued policies that are widely disliked and distrusted," she wrote. "Yet it does not have to be this way. The world still looks to the United States for leadership. American leadership is wanting, but it is still wanted."
She argued that "ending the war in Iraq is the first step towards restoring the United States' global leadership", and she promised to convene a meeting, within two months of taking office, of the joint chiefs of staff to draw up a viable plan for troop withdrawal.
However, she declined to provide a deadline for the withdrawal and indicated that many thousands of troops could remain for many years.
On Iran, Mrs Clinton pledged to pursue aggressive diplomacy but reiterated that "all options remain on the table".
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