Madeleine Albright, who died tonight (Wednesday) at the age of 84, the first state secretary ever, said of her tenure that she is “the best job in the world.” She said this, if I am not mistaken, to a journalist who accompanied her on her morning journey to the office. The limousine picked her up at four in the morning, and she read telegrams on the way to work. So, in the second half of the 90s, there were still no smartphones; There were barely any cell phones.
But in the second half of the 90s it was indeed “the best job in the world”. America was then at the height of its power. She was, in a fully qualified way, not only to the glory of the recommendation, “the only superpower.” Russia was sprawled on the ground, exhausted and bleeding. China has not yet even been recognized as a “market economy” for joining the World Trade Organization and normalizing its trade relations. North Korea was already annoying, but had not yet tried nuclear missiles in the atmosphere and beyond. Iran was still confined to an area east of the Tigris River.
In 1997, Madeleine Albright became the “Chief Diplomat” of the United States, as they began calling this priesthood after World War II (once the Secretary of State also handled internal affairs). The Soviet Union collapsed, Yugoslavia disintegrated, Czechoslovakia disintegrated, the former communist countries of Central / Eastern Europe began to rally to the NATO flag and knock on EU doors.
The United States had the full premiere in all parts of the world. Historian Francis Fukuyama’s famous adage about the victory of Western democracy as the “end of history” was a fait accompli.
Albright was allowed to be perfumed by these fragrances of success. She came to the State Department from academia, through the tenure of the ambassador to the UN. She spent years in research, especially of communism in Eastern Europe. The choice was not accidental. Her father was a diplomat in the service of Czechoslovakia, before the Communists seized power in 1948, and purified The ranks of the government.
“I almost had a stroke”
Unlike most of her predecessors and most of her successors, she came to the State Department without the reputation, or millstone, of a technocrat. In the eyes of her critics, she radiated impracticality. General Colin Powell, who succeeded her in 2001, once recounted a meeting she attended at the White House when she was ambassador to the United Nations, in 1993. He was the chief of staff. The subject of the meeting was the deadly war in Bosnia, the former Yugoslav Republic, in which Serbs fought Muslims. The images from Sarajevo burned the north of the world. Albright wanted the U.S. to intervene to save them. “Finally,” she said, according to Powell, “what do we have an army for?”
“I almost had a stroke,” wrote Powell, who has known something about the military and its political uses since he was a junior officer in the Vietnam War and since leading the First Iraq War.
Two years later, the U.S. and its allies did intervene against Bosnia’s Serbs, dragging them to a peace conference held at the U.S. Air Force base in Ohio.
Six years later, when Albright was Secretary of State, the United States went to war against Serbia to expel it from Kosovo. It was a real war, which included heavy bombing of Serbia, including its capital Belgrade. Recognize its independence to this day.
In Moscow, the young secretary of the Kremlin’s National Security Council, Vladimir Putin, watched those events. He gritted his teeth, attributing the attack on Serbia to Russia’s weakness and Western treachery. He became prime minister exactly two months after Serbia’s surrender, and was sworn in as president five months or less later. He was rewarded with the decision to erase that disgrace by amending the strategic balance.
The US shrugged
It is not possible, however, to tie to Albright the crowns tied to the heads of celebrities in her predecessors, such as Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, who enjoyed the status of kings-philosophers in American foreign policy. Nor was she endowed with the political cunning of James Baker, the Secretary of State in the Bush Sr. administration, who was perhaps the most effective Secretary of State of our time. But it left a mark on the Clinton administration’s approach to Eastern Europe.
In post-mortem wisdom – and this is wisdom always reserved for obituaries – this approach has failed miserably. The elimination of Russian democracy and the wars between Georgia and Ukraine are the evidence.
In the 1990s, the United States responded with a shrug to Russia’s economic collapse and exacerbation of its political crises. Could it have helped save Russia? It is difficult to know. Of millions at a time when Russia was moving too fast from a centralized economy to a market economy.
The market economy was nothing but a capital-government economy, and resulted in a huge theft of public assets and natural resources. The famous oligarchs, whom the United States is now pursuing in a rage, were the beneficiaries of that theft.
Similarly, the Clinton administration was an active participant in a process that resulted in a political collapse and massive violence between Israelis and Palestinians. But the names of Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk are far more relevant to the understanding of those days than the name of Albright, to whom they were formally subject.
Hillary stamped her foot
Albright was appointed secretary of state in late 1996 by Hillary Clinton’s intervention, then the very influential first lady of the United States. Bill Clinton was re-elected president in November 1996. Everyone knew his first secretary of state, Warren Christopher, would be replaced. Officially of the candidates to replace him.
Albright was the only woman. Alongside her name at the time was the New York Times, which is mentioned only to go out of her way, and her chances of being appointed are tiny. Hillary, according to the stories, stomped on her leg. She thought this characterization oil exuded misogyny, misogyny. She insisted on her appointment. Bill answered her.
Eventually Albright will be reminded of this breakthrough, or ceiling breakthrough. She encountered rudeness and ridicule, which women encounter, or at least encountered, often during their ascent on the corporate or political ladder. In Russia and Serbia politicians, though not in the service of the government, have given her typical vulgar titles. Abusive graffiti was smeared on walls. She wiped the saliva from her cheeks.
It was followed by two more secretaries of state, Condoleezza Rice under President Bush Jr. and Hillary Clinton under Obama. There is no doubt that the “glass ceiling” has indeed been cracked.
She decided to be apscopal
Albright was, how to put it in non-gendered Hebrew, the second Jewish Secretary of State ever. It was preceded, of course, by Henry Kissinger. But while Kissinger never denied his Judaism, though he was not overly interested in it, Albright claimed she only found out about it at the age of 59, after becoming secretary of state, following a post in the Washington Post.
That claim yielded an understandable degree of distrust, though it had, perhaps, a core of truth. She claimed that her parents hid her Judaism from her because of the Holocaust experience. Her grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust, and they wanted to protect her from the possible consequences of her religious and ethnic identity. who knows.
There was once a considerable social anti-Semitism in the United States, which hindered the professional and political progress of many people. Quite a few of them renounced Judaism, or humiliated it. , Under the label of membership in the Episcopal Church, is the small but influential Protestant Church in the United States, which is the American equivalent of the Anglican Church in England.
It will be interesting to see who will conduct her burial ceremony and how.
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