Whatever happened to the good old days of quiet diplomacy: good old boys making deals behind the curtain with winks and nods, leaving us reporters like biblical scholars or rabbis trying to decipher their meaning of holy writ?

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to town for a meeting of G8 foreign ministers that turned out to be a lecture tour. Blunt talk is one thing but this was a bruising.

Her first session with Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon had hardly begun when she dressed him down over who had been left out of the Arctic meeting. And she knew when she sat down with Power Play host Tom Clark that she was giving the Hillary high kick right to the crux of important Harper government policy.

As the leading power of NATO, she knew she was backing the prime minister into a corner on Afghanistan. She had to know that her request for Canadian troops to stay in Afghanistan flew in the face of Stephen Harper's oft repeated promise that not a single Canadian soldier will remain after 2011.

U.S. President Barack Obama knows that like Lyndon Johnson, failure could hang on the thin reed of the outcome in Afghanistan. This war is too important to the Americans for diplomatic niceties.

As if that wasn't bad enough, then she zeroed in on the one issue that could fracture Harper's party and caucus: abortion.

When the British foreign secretary joined in, there was little hope that the prime minister's much-ballyhooed G8 initiative, maternal and child health, could still be successful.

How could the prime minister's brain trust not have seen that a signature focus on family planning would not draw them into an abortion debate with their G8 partners? Some of course will call this gross interference in the domestic affairs of Canada. It was, and it was intended to be.

The U.S. secretary of state left behind officials here sputtering over their maple syrup, questioning whether the leftist Obama hierarchy had decided to play hardball with a Canadian government too close to its own right wing Republican opponents.

Three snubs in two days left the department of foreign affairs in a tizzy. Most comforted themselves, believing her remarks -- coming from a famously outspoken woman, passionately devoted to activist progressive government, and feminism -- were personal and not political.

We can fuss all we want about whether this special relationship is still all that special but for Mrs. Clinton at least, it looks like soft power has been replaced by hard elbows.