Witness, then, the “new” Madeleine Albright: humble, subtle and, to a surprising degree, effective. And that’s some of her critics talking. Example: at the Community of Democracies conference of some 100 nations in Warsaw last week, the secretary sat in a back row and merely introduced a poignant videotaped message from Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. No one called the United States indispensable. America’s role wasn’t even mentioned in the opening speeches–though the conference was the brainchild of Albright herself and her old friend Polish Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek. All this was deliberate. It was a way of pushing Albright’s all-American agenda–promoting democracy–but giving the rest of the world the face to say they were acting on their own. It wasn’t quite a Nixon-goes-to-China turnabout, but the change was notable: Albright, the hard-edged American jingoist, had turned multilateralist softie.
In the Mideast, too, where she flew late last week to make a final push for peace, Albright dropped the rhetoric of 1998. That’s when she publicly challenged the then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to come to the bargaining table–or else. In Jerusalem this time, she sought–gently–to prod the Israelis and Palestinians together for a summit, and some signs pointed to possible success in coming weeks. Even as right-wingers shouted “Albright, go home!” outside her hotel window, Prime Minister Ehud Barak publicly praised her for her “unique role” in keeping the peace after his historic pullout from southern Lebanon. Yet the State Department–which once touted her every small triumph–didn’t even bother to promote what that role was.
What’s changed? Associates say Albright was deeply hurt by all the criticism. In the last year, she has altered her style dramatically. “I think the secretary has grown in her job in a remarkable way,” says Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, a GOP member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and occasional critic. “She’s now practicing the art of the possible, not the confrontational. She’s trying to facilitate and not dictate.” Albright herself admits she’s responded to the bad press (interview) but wonders whether it’s more that “people have gotten used to me.” Her ex-spokesman, Jamie Rubin, calls it a new “serenity.” “She’s kind of gotten past all the critics. They’ve done their damage and stung, but she’s said, ‘I’ve only got about six months left, and I’m going to get as much done as I can’.” Circumstances have changed, too, he says. Much of Albright’s strident U.S. boosterism early on was aimed at a domestic audience; she feared a retreat into post-cold-war isolationism. Now, Rubin says, that “is clearly behind us.”
Perhaps. But Albright’s old reputation isn’t yet behind her. Her earlier approach–call it foreign policy by ultimatum–has left some messy situations in its wake. Among them: Kosovo, where about 6,000 U.S. troops seem committed for years, and Iraq, where her efforts to confront Saddam Hussein over U.N. nuclear inspections ended in a quagmire. Albright still tends to gloss over such problems. In a speech in Berlin on Thursday, she talked up “the present moment of hope” in the Balkans, though Serb dictator Slobodan Milosevic is as entrenched as ever and the region is a sinkhole of corruption and poverty. Another lingering charge is that Albright is a slouch at strategizing–her crueler critics still call her “Halfbright”–and that she hasn’t projected a coherent vision of where America should get involved and when.
Yet part of Albright’s new quietude lies in her conviction that she’s gotten a bad rap. Because America is now at the center of the world stage, everyone expects the lone superpower to get involved everywhere. And few people, her supporters say, appreciate how incremental foreign policy has become. The Community of Democracies was a case in point. The U.S. press buried the story of the conference or ignored it. Albright’s French counterpart, Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, sniffily dismissed the gathering’s goals as “oversimplistic” and refused to approve the so-called Warsaw Declaration that emerged from it.
And yet many of the 107 other participants that did sign considered the gathering a milestone. The Community of Democracies, some said, is a concept that’s quite new: an acknowledgment that democracy–now most nations’ form of government–is no longer an internal affair. The conference, which Albright hopes will be biennial, will hold nations to a set of universal standards on elections, the rule of law and freedom of religion, speech and the press. And it will provide a kind of group therapy for emerging democracies, sharing “best practices” on how to create independent judges and the like. The theory: true democracies that meet this test don’t make war on each other. “This is what Madeleine Albright is all about,” effuses a senior State official. “This is a crystallization of what she’s trying to do in the world.”
Even so, old reps die hard. Today Albright’s credibility remains fairly low in Washington. The TV networks, soured on foreign affairs, no longer travel with her; other journalists trade stories about the weak voice she is thought to have in the administration. Albright says she’s going to be “traveling around the world and working 36-hour days” in her final six months. But ultimately her reputation may take decades to play out. It will depend whether there is lasting peace in the Mideast, Milosevic goes and freedom comes to Serbia–and whether new global structures like the Community of Democracies long survive her departure.
