![]() ![]() (He died, in 2006, before a verdict was issued).Īlbright navigated a messy, post-Cold War world that posed big questions about when and how the U.S. “She felt our people’s pain because she had experienced herself persecution in childhood.” Kosovo “will memorize her eternally.” The Serbian leader, Slobodan Milošević, ended up on trial in The Hague for war crimes in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. “She gave us hope when we didn’t have it,” Kosovo’s President, Vjosa Osmani, said after Albright’s death. One of Albright’s legacies is the square and statue in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, honoring her role in what came to be known as “ Madeleine’s war.” Time magazine described Kosovo as “ground zero in the debate over whether America should play a new role in the world, that of the indispensable nation asserting its morality as well as its interests to assure stability, stop thugs and prevent human atrocities.” In the Clinton Administration, Albright was a dogged supporter of NATO intervention to stop Serbian attacks on Kosovars seeking independence. NATO air strikes and the arming of Bosnia’s Muslim and Croat forces eventually forced the Bosnian Serbs to negotiate in 1995. and NATO should conduct air strikes against Serbian forces, Albright famously turned to Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and asked, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” (Powell recounted the moment in his memoir, “I thought I would have an aneurysm.”) In the end, Albright won and the Clinton Administration ceded to her position. During subsequent debates about whether the U.S. In most cases, she advocated for “ assertive multilateralism.” During the war in Bosnia, she presented the first evidence that Serb forces committed genocide after the fall of the town of Srebrenica. It blended her profound moral values from her childhood experience in Europe with U.S. She succeeded in neither quest, but she was always willing to try.Īs America and its allies debate how to counter Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the so-called Albright Doctrine is relevant today. official to North Korea to negotiate with Kim Jong Il on ballistic missiles. She confronted Saddam Hussein over his reported arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and made the first trip by a senior U.S. Although barely five feet tall, Albright had no qualms about taking on dictators. offices in Geneva, between stops in London, Islamabad, Delhi, Riyadh, Vancouver, and other cities I barely remember. In 1997, we zigzagged across ten countries on three continents in twelve days, including a meeting, at an ungodly hour, at U.N. She was a devout diplomat and frenetic traveller well into her sixties. I travelled with Albright during her four years as Secretary of State. citizens, decades later, at a naturalization ceremony. “Only in America could a refugee from Central Europe become Secretary of State,” she told newly minted U.S. Like many first-generation immigrants, Albright developed a profound love for-and idealized illusions about-her adopted homeland. She landed in Colorado at the age of eleven and became a U.S. Her family first fled Adolf Hitler’s Nazis and later Joseph Stalin’s Communists as they expanded deeper into Europe. She was, after all, born into them, in the former Czechoslovakia, in 1937. “Putin is small and pale,” she wrote, “so cold as to be almost reptilian.” She described him as deeply “embarrassed” about the Soviet Union’s collapse and “determined to restore its greatness.” Throughout a career in foreign affairs that spanned nearly half a century, Albright was often eerily prescient, especially on Russia and the tragedies of Europe. ![]() In a final Op-Ed for the Times-published a month before she died, of cancer, on Wednesday, at eighty-four-the former Secretary of State recalled her initial impressions of the Russian leader. They spoke for nearly three hours about everything from Moscow’s relationship with the West to using chopsticks for Chinese food. official to meet Vladimir Putin shortly after his abrupt ascendancy to the Russian Presidency, in 2000. Madeleine Albright was the first senior U.S. ![]()
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