Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) promised a measured and experienced foreign policy Monday, attempting to refocus the Democratic presidential contest with one week to go before two contests that could make or break her campaign.

Recent major international events, including a change of leadership in Cuba and attacks on the U.S. embassy in Belgrade, are reminders that foreign policy is a pressing issue, the candidate noted in a speech in Washington. She said such incidents serve as reminders despite the emergence of other concerns.

Clinton’s speech took several shots at Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), but departed little from her previously stated policy positions and tacks.

She criticized Obama’s foreign policy speech of last year in which he said the United States should strike targets in Pakistan if embattled President Pervez Musharraf does not crack down on terrorists there. She also continued to take issue with Obama’s promise to meet with dictators without preconditions.

Flanked by Gen. Wesley Clark and former Veterans Affairs and Army Secretary Togo West, she harped mostly on the experience angle. She compared Obama to President Bush because he would enter the White House without major foreign policy experience.

“[Obama] wavers from seeming to believe that mediation and meetings without preconditions can solve some of the world’s most intractable problems, to advocating rash unilateral military action without cooperation from our allies in a sensitive region of the world,” Clinton said.

“The American people don’t have to guess whether I understand the issues, or whether I would need a foreign policy instruction manual to guide me through a crisis, or whether I’d have to rely on advisers to introduce me to global affairs,” she said.

Despite her critique of Obama’s Pakistan posturing, she also provided some tough talk for such situations. She said that terrorists who take shelter in a safe haven country after attacking the United States “are putting that country at risk.”

Earlier in the day, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, speaking on behalf of the Obama campaign, said American foreign policy needs a new face and that Clinton is more of the same.

“In the very substance of policy, there’s an extent to which Sen. Clinton is trapped within an establishment view of the world and inevitably represents a kind of continuity in the activity of our foreign policy,” Danzig said.

Clinton’s speech comes just more than a week before March 4 primaries in Ohio and Texas that are critical to her campaign. Former President Bill Clinton has said his wife must win these two contests to win her campaign against Obama, who has not lost a contest since Super Tuesday.

Hillary Clinton said that the United States must revise its strategy in Afghanistan, agreeing with a soldier who once told her it contained “the forgotten front lines in the war against terrorism.”

She also spoke out on China, saying the Bush administration’s economic and trade policies have turned it into America’s banker.

“It’s become a global superpower that needs to be convinced to play by the rules in the global marketplace,” said Clinton, who increasingly has been battling Obama over trade issues as both try to win the critical primary in Ohio, a heavy manufacturing state. “We play by the rules and they manipulate their currency.”

Clinton was also endorsed Monday by retired Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.