Hillary Clinton made a celebratory return to the State Department for the unveiling of her official portrait, an occasion timed for the return to power of her friends.

“It is such a joy to be back here, and I haven’t seen this portrait in a really long time,” the 67th secretary of state joked at a gathering in the Benjamin Franklin Room. “Between COVID, between not wanting to finish it during the prior administration, it’s been a while.”

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The joke landed in the friendly crowd, which included her husband, Bill Clinton, and a pair of former staffers from his administration — Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his wife, Evan Ryan, an assistant secretary of state during Barack Obama’s second term who is now the White House Cabinet secretary under President Joe Biden. And she credited Blinken with setting the diplomatic conditions to rally NATO in support of Ukraine when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the campaign to overthrow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“We had burned so many bridges with our allies and our friends,” Clinton said. “So reinstating a foreign policy that plays to the best of American values, that puts our interests and security front and center but does it in a way that actually brings people to us, not pushes them away, would have been thought to be extremely difficult. And indeed, it was. But it was accomplished.”

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It’s a salute that will irritate Republican foreign policy hawks who tried to persuade the Obama administration to send weapons to Ukraine in the earliest years of the war — Ukraine was not given lethal aid until 2019 — and also argued that Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 “enticed Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine,” as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has put it.

Blinken, for his part, gave a warm review of Clinton’s tenure at Foggy Bottom. “She led with both America’s values and our interests in calling out Putin for who he really is from the start,” he said. “To make sure that America could more effectively lead and drive global good in the world, Secretary Clinton modernized and updated how we actually do diplomacy, and she also invested in our single greatest asset, and that’s our people.”