An enemy of tyrants, he was a central figure under the Bill Clinton presidency. It helped shape Western foreign policy after the Cold War. He was 84 years old
NEW YORK When I interviewed her in Washington three years ago to talk about the resurgence of fascisms, particularly in Europe, the subject of her latest book, she answered my first question by quoting Primo Levi, not herself: That he said every era has its fascism and that you can get to great tragedies like the holocaust without police terror: just deny the facts, distort information, pollute the judiciary, spread nostalgia for a fabulous past. Words to think about given what is happening before our eyes. Madeleine Albright’s eyes closed forever yesterday after seeing what she, who twice fled the great European totalitarianisms of the twentieth century and then was a major protagonist of American foreign policy in the 1990s, had obviously imagined and feared.
Albright, the first woman to serve as Secretary of State, died of cancer at the age of 84.
Madeleine, daughter of a Czechoslovakian diplomat (registered in the Prague registry office as Marie Jana Korbelova, Albright, her American husband’s surname), was forced to flee her country for the first time in 1938 after the persecution of Jews and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, carried out by the Nazis, and then again ten years later to escape Stalin’s oppression.
Deeply connected to the totalitarian and Holocaustridden Eastern Europe of his origins, with most of his relatives including three grandparents who died in the concentration camps of the Third Reich, Albright has witnessed the rebirth of fascism year after year and witnessed wellknown leaders who preceded his eyes became dictators.
In his fascism, he pauses to analyze in particular three figures who are still in power and play an important role in the Ukraine conflict: Putin, the great protagonist, the Hungarian Orbn and the Turk Erdogan, who is arming the Ukrainians and Condemns Moscow to the UN, but then does not apply sanctions against Russia and the media with Putin.
A Democratic activist, Albright’s government career began in 1976 with the election of Jimmy Carter. The President’s foreign policy adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, brings her into the White House as an assistant. He later becomes an advisor to Geraldine Ferraro during her (unsuccessful) run to vice president and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis.
When Bill Clinton arrives at the White House, he appoints her first US Ambassador to the UN and then Secretary of State. Far from being an isolationist, Albright interprets her role as the executor of a policy of intervention in the international conflicts of an America she sees as the indispensable nation.
It moves by attempting to assert what it believes to be the United States’ moral superiority, but also by engaging other countries in what it defines as vigorous multilateralism. He also makes mistakes that he later acknowledges in his memoirs, such as refusing to intervene decisively in Rwanda, where in 1994 a small UN peacekeeping mission failed to prevent a genocide that killed at least a million people. Instead he will enforce the principle of humanitarian intervention in the Balkan war: after the massacre of Srebrenica by the Serbs, despite the presence of a small contingent of blue helmets, he wins the resistance of the Pentagon and gives the green light for the American bombing. Two months later, in Dayton, the American special envoy Richard Holbrooke obtained the signing of an agreement which, although leaving various questions unanswered, put an end to a war that had claimed at least 100,000 lives.
March 23, 2022 (change March 23, 2022 | 23:02)
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