Scene Two: Rambouillet, France, late February. Standing atop a makeshift podium in a musty school gymnasium, taking questions, an exhausted Albright looks downcast, ashen-faced. After some of the hardest, most grueling negotiations of her life, U.S. credibility seems in a shambles. Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic has defied an American ultimatum to call off attacks on the renegade province of Kosovo. Even the Kosovar guerrillas are, brazenly, resisting U.S. pleas to let NATO protect them (they want to fight for full independence). It wasn’t exactly an Achesonian moment: the “indispensable nation,” as Albright likes to call the United States, looked instead like a referee tossed out of the ring at a World Wrestling Federation match. Four U.S.-imposed deadlines passed without threatened strikes until last Thursday, when the talks finally collapsed. NATO bombing may now be imminent–but over the weekend the humanitarian disaster that Albright tried to avert was already underway. Following the abrupt pullout of Western peace monitors, Serb forces unleashed their deadliest offensive of the year on three fronts.
The signing in Independence and the failed talks over Kosovo highlight the difference between rhetoric and reality in U.S. foreign policy. For Albright, that difference is now her biggest headache. It is also one reason she’s under attack, along with her counterpart at the White House, national-security adviser Sandy Berger, and their boss, Bill Clinton. While Albright is at home evoking the spirit of the Truman Doctrine, most of what U.S. diplomats must deal with today are odd little eruptions like Kosovo–isolated cases of ethnic conflict that fit into no easy pattern. The titanic standoff of the cold war has dissolved into a chaos in which crises seem to crop up suddenly, triggered in unexpected ways. In 1997, for example, a financial collapse in Albania led to an arms flow across the border to the Kosovo Liberation Army, until then a small, powerless group. We now live in a world in which dictators like Milosevic and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il can nimbly test the limits of America’s self-preoccupation. They are too small-time to arouse a national consensus to go to war, yet too annoying to be ignored, especially when they’re always popping up on CNN.
Albright can’t be blamed for this; even a Dean Acheson might be stymied by the messy landscape of the post-cold-war world. Yet the secretary’s problem, her critics here and abroad say, is that she still seems a cold warrior lost in the wrong decade, habitually casting foreign-policy flareups as challenges to U.S. might. Too hawkish by half, she tends to talk in black-and-white terms about issues that are decidedly gray. Several times in her two-year tenure she has slipped into rhetorical overkill: warning Milosevic dramatically a year ago that he couldn’t “do in Kosovo what he did in Bosnia” (the U.S. let Serb forces attack for another eight months, the first of many ignored deadlines); delivering a tough ultimatum to Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu over Mideast peace (he ignored it, with impunity). Again and again, she has tried to pull her boss, Bill Clinton–who is nothing if not equivocating–in a more aggressive direction, only to look over her shoulder and find he’s not there. NATO action against Milosevic was blocked for months last spring while the White House fretted over the instability that a Kosovar victory might cause.
On Friday, Clinton acknowledged, indirectly, that Albright may have been right all along about the need for NATO. He stood shoulder to shoulder with his secretary of State, declaring that Milosevic had “crossed the threshold.” But critics say U.S. credibility has suffered badly from all this back-and-forth between State and the White House. Albright “stands for lots of good things,” says Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, an emerging Republican voice on foreign policy. “But I think she has not been well-yoked to the White House… They’re saying one thing and doing another too often.” Even one of her former subordinates, an ex-senior State career official, says that “she is always marching up the hill and marching down again.” And again on Kosovo there seems to be some daylight between Albright and the more cautious, realpolitik-minded Berger: while she believes bombing may bring Milosevic to sign the peace plan, White House sources fear strikes will produce only war.
Albright, though bruised by the criticism, is unapologetic about her Munich-nurtured instincts. “I would rather be out front and criticized for saving lives than sitting back and waiting for somebody else to state the case,” she told NEWSWEEK in an interview Friday. “I mean, I come out of a Europe where I felt great wrong had been done because good people waited too long to try figure out what to do… I do believe in American power. That is my political philosophy and my foreign-policy views, added to my own personality, which is that I have always been an activist. I’m actually very proud of what I said about Kosovo.”
To Albright’s credit, her activist instincts are often spot on, if out of sync. The secretary was an early supporter of intervention in Bosnia, too, back before the Serb atrocities forced Washington’s hand. Even when she overreaches, Albright is, like her boss, a superb political counterpuncher. Working the phones for three weeks after the snub at Rambouillet, enlisting everyone from Bob Dole to George Soros to lobby the Kosovar Albanians, she finally got them to sign on to the deal last week, putting all the pressure on Milosevic. And, behind the scenes, she has been the workhorse of the administration, cajoling the Palestinians into line at last October’s Wye Mideast peace talks, calling 40 members of Congress in a day to carry a vote on sending troops in Kosovo. “I rate her at or near the top of our best secretaries in helping to formulate and present policy publicly,” says Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
That’s fine, as far as it goes. But it helps to have a policy in the first place. Increasingly, the GOP elite complains that Albright and Berger lack any coherent sense of U.S. national interests or priorities. Around the world, the Clinton administration seems to be taking on quasi protectorates–in Bosnia, Haiti and the CIA-monitored West Bank and Gaza–all without fitting them into any overarching strategy. NATO is, in truth, no longer the grand alliance of Albright’s March 12 vision; that notion belongs in a museum along with Harry Truman’s gaudy vacation shirts. Moscow can’t be considered a real threat. NATO, instead, seems to be turning into an internal police force for a Europe still unable to quell its own violence after a century of war. Yet the administration only talks vaguely of “redefining” the alliance’s mission. Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s former national-security adviser, says the problem goes back to Clinton. The president, he says, jumps from event to event, like a campaigner, almost totally reactive, basically forgetting about Kosovo after he “solved” Bosnia at the Dayton peace talks in 1995, taking it up again when Kosovo crops up as massacre news on TV.
Clintonites bristle at the charges of incoherence. They do have a grand strategy, they insist: enfolding the rest of the world into a global “community” of democracies and open markets. And an enlarged NATO, they say, is part of that. That’s why bringing peace to Kosovo, now that Albright has staked U.S. credibility to it, is crucial. But her legacy, for the moment, will have to wait upon Slobodan Milosevic.
Credibility Gap?GOP critics have a point: Clinton’s foreign policy is inconsistent. The secretary of State’s habit of talking tougher than her boss hasn’t helped. Examples:
Kosovo = For some eight months the White House doesn’t back up Albright’s tough talk on ethnic cleansing in Kosovo; the Pentagon says bombing would aid the rebels. Iraq - For years Clinton says sanctions are essential to contain Saddam; then he turns on a dime and decides to bomb him out of office. China = Campaigning in ‘92, Clinton blasts Beijing; in office, he extends a too-loving embrace, called a “strategic partnership.” The Republicans charge that our “partner” is an unfair trade competitor whose spies steal our most sensitive technology. Mideast - After Israeli PM Rabin is assassinated, the peace process drifts and Albright threatens to bail out, but Israel calls the bluff. Clinton, in a burst of nine days of relentless negotiating, finally secures the Wye deal. But no one seems to be paying attention now that peace is languishing again. Russia - State Dept. habitually hypes Russian reform. The IMF, at the White House’s urging, pours in billions, much of which winds up in Swiss banks. But dreams of Yeltsonian democracy turn to fears of Weimar gangsterism. Should the Clintonites get some of the blame?
