Madeleine Albright died just as the terrible historic forces she spent her career attempting to suppress are raging in Europe once more, unleashed by a nemesis, Vladimir Putin, whom she had repeatedly warned was a dangerous threat to peace.
As a child refugee from her birth country, the former Czechoslovakia, she was exiled twice by fascist and communist dictatorship. Her fate as an academic, a diplomat, and an American patriot was shaped by that experience and its influence on her family. During her time in the Clinton administration, it also affected her approach to post-Cold War Europe and the devastating conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as her strong support for NATO expansion into former Warsaw Pact countries. Putin attempted to get the Western alliance to stop its progress east by holding Ukraine hostage before to the attack.Albright's death on Wednesday comes as Europe is once again shaken by worries of a belligerent Russia, major refugee flows, civilian carnage, and the threat of nuclear war, as Putin's invasion of Ukraine shatters 30 years of strategic calm.Albright warned of Putin's objectives and character to the end of her life, predicting a strategic calamity and violent resistance if he attacked Ukraine.
On the eve of the war, Albright wrote in The New York Times that "invading Ukraine would ensure Mr. Putin's notoriety by leaving his country diplomatically isolated, economically devastated, and strategically defenseless in the face of a stronger, more united Western alliance." "Ukraine has the right to self-determination, regardless of its neighbors. Great countries accept this in the current period, and Mr. Putin must do the same "Albright was the author of the article. "This is the message that recent Western diplomacy has sent. It distinguishes between a world where the rule of law applies and one where there are no rules at all."month. "Ukraine has a right to self-determination, regardless of who its neighbors are. Great countries in the modern era acknowledge this, and Mr. Putin must as well "Albright penned the text. "That has been the message of recent Western diplomacy. It distinguishes between a world controlled by the rule of law and one that is governed by no laws at all."
Those words, some of the last Albright would utter, defined a diplomatic career marked by staunch support for democracy and the right of people to live in freedom, as well as a willingness to try to reason with strongmen like Putin and the late North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, the father of the Stalinist state's current dynastic leader, whom she had visited in 2000.Albright had an early opportunity to assess Putin's character, as she was the first senior US official to meet him shortly after he took over from Boris Yeltsin in early 2000.
She praised Putin's "can-do" approach after their first three-hour meeting in the Kremlin, as she explored ways to engage Moscow in order to avoid a return to the Cold War chill. However, as she revealed last month in The New York Times, her private judgment, which she documented as she flew home, was more caustic and ominous, and has been confirmed by subsequent events." 'Putin is little and pallid, so chilly as to be almost reptilian,' I wrote," Albright remembered in the Times column. She also mentioned another of her impressions at the time, which prophesied a 20-year rise in anti-Western sentiment, culminating in the invasion.
" 'Putin is humiliated by what happened to his country and determined to regain its greatness,' " Albright wrote at the time, quoting her impressions.Albright, however, used that encounter to try to persuade Putin to show mercy in the Russian republic of Chechnya's fight against separatists, which featured a relentless bombardment that killed thousands of civilians. "Neither of us minced words on Chechnya," she told reporters after failing to persuade Moscow to halt an offensive that is already being interpreted as a pattern for the persistent bombing of people in Ukraine in an attempt to break their will and resistance.
At a time when the Obama administration was attempting to "reset" relations with Moscow, Albright was largely supportive of efforts to persuade Russia that NATO was not a threat to its security.
Albright was once again warning of Putin's bigger goals by 2014, when he grabbed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in what was, in hindsight, a rehearsal for his march into the rest of the country last month.
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