Madeleine's War

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Thus arose the Albright Doctrine that has held sway since her ascension to Secretary of State: a tough-talking, semimuscular interventionism that believes in using force--including limited force such as calibrated air power, if nothing heartier is possible--to back up a mix of strategic and moral objectives. In an Administration that grew up gun-shy by reading and misreading the lessons of Vietnam, she's the one who grew up appeasement-shy by learning in painfully personal ways the lessons of Munich.

Ever since February 1998, when Milosevic began his gruesome campaign against ethnic Albanians in his province of Kosovo, Albright has been resolute about not allowing the West to dither as it did in Bosnia. "History is watching us," she told a meeting of foreign ministers last year, in the same London conference room where Bosnia had been debated. "In this very room our predecessors delayed as Bosnia burned, and history will not be kind to us if we do the same." She was in no mood to compromise. When the Italian and French ministers proposed a softening in the language they would use to threaten the Serbs, Albright's close aide Jamie Rubin whispered to her that she could probably accept it. She snapped back, "Where do you think we are, Munich?"

More than a year later, seven weeks into a messy bombing campaign, Albright still sees herself as a hard-liner whose job it is to restrain assorted free-lance peace-prize seekers who are eager to cut a compromise. She likens it to one of those toys where kids use both hands to tamp down characters that keep popping up as soon as others are swatted down. "Up until the start of the conflict, the military served to back up our diplomacy," she says. "Now, our diplomacy serves to back up our military."

Last week, diplomatic activity intensified and then became more urgent as NATO bombs mistakenly hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, setting off political explosions both in Beijing and at the U.N. Security Council. Albright was back at center stage: she met with Russian diplomats in Washington and Europe, traveled with Clinton to NATO headquarters in Brussels and military bases in Germany, convened a meeting of allied and Russian foreign ministers in Bonn and worked the phones to keep in line players ranging from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to Kosovar leader Ibrahim Rugova.

It began on Monday with the arrival in Washington of Viktor Chernomyrdin, the former Russian Premier tapped by Boris Yeltsin to help mediate Kosovo. "We're pursuing a double-magnet strategy," Albright explains. "We've been tugging Moscow toward our position of how Kosovo must be resolved and then encouraging them to tug Belgrade in that direction." There were many issues on the table, but one serves as a good example of last week's diplomatic maneuvering: the effort to get Russia to support publicly the deployment of an international military force in Kosovo and then try to sell it to Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic as part of a peace agreement.