Albright Then, Albright Now - Sec of State Madeleine K. Albright

National Review, June 28, 1999 by Jay Nordlinger

From Democratic campaigns to the the Kosovo campaign, a long way.

After the Cold War, miracles abounded, large and small. One of those- smallish but interesting-was the rebirth of Madeleine K. Albright as . . . what? A hawk? A freedom fighter? John Foster Dulles in a skirt and floppy hat? Albright's transformation has indeed been amazing. This is not the woman we knew for all those years, when, as a leading Democratic voice on foreign policy, she was assailing Ronald Reagan and his band-even George Bush and his-as reckless, warmongering, and dangerous. America is, to be sure, the land of self-reinvention; long may it be. Yet the secretary of state's metamorphosis-the emergence of the New Albright, as striking as any New Nixon-has gone all but unnoticed.

The Kosovo war was widely considered Albright's doing, as she had been the Clinton-administration official who pressed most insistently for it. It was also considered something of a personal project: Albright was born in Czechoslovakia and fled first the Nazis and later the Communists. Some of her relatives-the family was Jewish-were killed in the camps; others, luckier, were trapped in a Communist state. She herself was luckiest of all, brought to America, where her opportunities proved limitless. She naturally views Eastern Europe as her region and the Kosovo horror as her special responsibility. In May, Time magazine featured her on its cover, with the legend "Albright at War." The photo showed her at her most bellicose: in a military jacket, complete with insignia, at an air base in Germany, barking into a cellular phone. Her face was the very picture of toughness and resolve. By comparison, Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands War was a whimpering doe.

Albright now portrays herself-and is uniformly portrayed in the press- as a child of Munich; that is, a woman stamped forever by the deal struck in that city in 1938, which sacrificed Czechoslovakia to the Nazi beast and, in fact, did not prevent broader war. She takes pains to explain that she is an enemy of appeasement, a quick and uncompromising foe of any aggressor. Yet this is largely how Reagan's men, and Bush's, saw themselves, and she mocked them constantly and opposed their every significant effort. "My mindset is Munich," she now assures us; "most of my generation's is Vietnam." Her boss, President Clinton, recently praised her for "not only learning the lessons of Munich, but also of Czechoslovakia under Communism." According to Time, she was stalwart at a 1998 meeting of foreign ministers, held in London. The Italians and French proposed that the group use softer language toward the Serbs. Albright's aide, Jamie Rubin, whispered to her that she should probably accept. She apparently shot back, "Where do you think we are, Munich?"

With each passing day, she sounds more and more like her old bogeyman, Reagan, sometimes even mimicking his precise language. She reminds the public that America is the world's "indispensable nation." What is "at stake" in Kosovo, she says, "is the principle that aggression doesn't pay." In an eerie echo of what the Reaganauts used to insist about Nicaragua, she sniffs, "Just because you can't act everywhere doesn't mean you don't act anywhere." We almost expect her to look at her detractors, shake her head with a sad smile, and quip, "There you go again."

Just as it was considered, in some quarters, impolite in the 1940s and '50s to discuss who had done what in the world war, and just as it was considered, again in some quarters, impolite in the 1970s and '80s to discuss who had done what in the Vietnam War, it is now considered impolite to reflect on who did what-and stood for what-during the Cold War. Recriminations are bad form. Yet a little wonderment is well nigh irresistible. Ronald Reagan, in his speech to the 1992 Republican convention, one of his last addresses, said that he had heard "those speakers at that other convention," the Democratic one, "saying, 'We won the Cold War.' And I couldn't helping thinking, 'What do you mean "we"?'" Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's defense secretary, can now only chuckle bemusedly at Albright's new persona: "The kindest way of putting it is that she has seen the light and realizes the error of her ways. Who knows? Maybe she's been reading Margaret Thatcher's memoirs."

Albright's story, in every way, is a peculiarly American one: A refugee, the daughter of a diplomat, she married into a newspaper fortune, made all the right connections, became a Washington hostess, and maneuvered her way to the very top of the profession she extravagantly loves. For almost her entire career, she spoke for dovish, unassertive, accommodationist positions, not at all dissimilar to the ones she is presently deriding as weak, irresponsible- practically un-American. She was, for example, a fierce opponent of the Gulf War. In March 1991, Democratic congressmen gathered for a retreat, demoralized that the war they had sought to block had gone so well and proven so popular with the public. Albright was there to comfort them and buck them up. She observed irritably, "All problems can't be solved by bombing the bejesus out of some small country."