Madeleine's War

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Albright does not have Kissinger's ability (or desire) to conceptualize overarching strategic frameworks and analyze how an action in one corner can ripple around the world as through a spider web. Nor does she excel at the cautious contingency planning that marked, and sometimes paralyzed, many of the corporate lawyers--Cyrus Vance, James Baker, Warren Christopher--who once held her job. Consequently, she urged intervention in Kosovo without worrying too much about either the geostrategic ramifications (how it would affect Russia, China, Macedonia, Greece, et al.) or about game planning all the contingencies (how to cope with a horrific tide of refugees and be ready to use ground troops if Milosevic was defiant).

The most scathing recent criticism along these lines was particularly painful. Peter Krogh, who had been her close friend and mentor when he was dean of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service during her tenure there, wrote two weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, "I cannot recall a time when our foreign policy was in less competent hands." The bombing of Iraq has only entrenched Saddam Hussein's power. The bombing of Serbia has likewise entrenched Milosevic and contributed to a refugee debacle. To make matters worse, these involvements have come at the expense of America's primary strategic interests: integrating Russia and China into the international system.

More broadly, Krogh accused Albright and her colleagues of conducting a policy based on scolding other nations. "They instruct the Russians and the Japanese on their economics, the Chinese on their politics, the Iraqis on their military, the Serbs on their provinces, the Latin Americans on drugs and the U.N. on reform...It is a foreign policy of sermons and sanctimony accompanied by the brandishing of Tomahawks." The article, which Krogh had passed around in advance to fellow members of the foreign policy elite, set Washington buzzing. Albright, brittle about her image, was furious.

Albright is particularly defensive--she brings it up in conversation--about charges that her ill-fated peace conference in Rambouillet last February was a mistake. She threw herself into the conference personally, hiking up and down the French chateau's drafty stairs with proposals. But it ended in close to humiliation. She never forced Milosevic to attend personally, and the Serbs yielded little. The Kosovars were also initially recalcitrant. The U.S. and NATO found themselves committed to an unwieldy committee-directed bombing campaign with no good contingencies for using ground troops or coping with a brutal refugee crisis if the air war failed.

But what were the alternatives? Perhaps an all-out ground war, though there was no political support for that on either side of the Atlantic. Or instead of bombing, the U.S. could have tried to slow the Serbs' village-by-village campaign in Kosovo through more monitors and brokered cease-fires. Or it could have resigned itself to the situation being resolved, as conflicts in a messy world sometimes are, by a civil war in which NATO focused simply on preventing a refugee crisis and providing humanitarian relief.