Video: Hillary Clinton announces that she'll seek the Democratic Party presidential nomination

It was hardly a secret, but today, HRC made it official.

She's entering the race to become the Democrats' presidential nominee in the 2016 election.

Clinton said that "the deck is still stacked in favour of those at the top".

"Everyday Americans need a champion," she added.

Many progressive Democrats are still hoping that Massachusetts senator and consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren takes a run for the top job.

Clinton's populist message prompted the Washington Post's Aaron Blake to note its similarity to Warren's slogan that "the system is rigged".

And, he added, "there's no way it's a coincidence."

Of interest to Canadians will be Clinton's approach to foreign policy.

Inside the Beltway, it's widely understood that she differed with President Barack Obama on some key issues when she served as secretary of state.

Her close associate, Richard Holbrooke, had a terrible relationship with the president as Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Some of these differences were chronicled in a 2013 book written by Johns Hopkins University foreign-policy expert Vali Nasr, who was a senior adviser to Holbrooke.

In The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat, Nasr decried Obama's reluctance to engage in diplomacy in the Middle East and the president's failure to take into account the consequences of sectarian conflict between Shias and Sunnis.

Nasr also condemned Obama's "foreign policy in retreat" for giving China a free reign to advance its economic interests around the world.

Nasr's book clearly left an impression that had Clinton been given more authority, things might have worked out differently. Anyone who reads The Dispensable Nation would probably conclude that if Clinton becomes president, the U.S. will be a more aggressive player in international affairs than it has been under Obama.