Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is more and more putting forth fresh–and welcome–ideas.
On her present seven-nation tour of Africa, for instance, her words did not evoke the comforting resonances of the past (“democracy . . . progress . . . free enterprise”).
Instead, touching down in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, she immediately acknowledged that the United States and its allies had badly mishandled the 1994 Central African Rwanda crisis, which has become Africa’s Bosnia, a symbol of ethnic holocaust. Factions split in that tortured country, militias were formed, and hundreds of thousands were butchered.
Calling for a recognition of responsibility in order to move forward, and eschewing the old shibboleths, she told the assembled Africans, “Let me begin that process here today by acknowledging that we–the international community–should have been more active in the early stages of the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994 and called them what they were: genocide.”
At the time, of course, the American administration did not want to call anything at all genocide. Why? Because the horrendous crime of deliberately wiping out a whole people would obviously call for a response, and this administration, and the top echelons of our military, stay as far away from any effective action as humanly possible.
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And so we see America’s first woman foreign-policy leader taking courageous steps, at least rhetorically, and coming out on the right side of issues: staying in Bosnia until the job is done, putting real pressure on Israel’s far right government to fulfill the Oslo Accords, and now trying to learn from the world’s pusillanimity and shortsightedness in Central Africa.
But there is a problem here, one that is bound to get tougher the more our outspoken (especially compared to other recent secretaries of state) and even “dashing” foreign policy chief speaks out and tries to act. She is not going to have anybody behind her because, deep into his second term now, the fellow in the White House is growing more and more unwilling to take any risks at all.
According to a comprehensive piece in The New York Times on the president this week, “Liberals and moderates alike described Mr. Clinton as trapped in a risk-averse, aimless administration of his own making.
Perhaps this is unfair. The president has, after all, gone along with such excellent foreign policy moves as NATO expansion. But, outside of a few acts that were pushed and carried through by activists on other levels of government here and in Europe, this has been an administration that has constantly tied itself in knots and moved in odd ways to cancel out its power.
A couple of the dichotomies: The president constantly tells the world about the superiority of the American economy and about the pre-eminence of the “one remaining superpower,” yet he refuses to lead in the world (not paying our $1.02 billion in United Nations dues is one example of many).
The president talks, rightly I believe, about the liberating power of free enterprise–and for all peoples–but at the slightest whim we slap sanctions on countries across the globe. (The Helms-Burton bill, punishing foreign companies for doing business with Cuba, is one instance.)
So even as Secretary Albright struggles valiantly to put some intelligence and some teeth into our responses, it is evident how much of that world, responding to the last six years of American non-leadership, is beginning simply to go its own way. As historian Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, puts it: “A general mood has arisen in Europe that is certainly discontented with American leadership and hegemony . . . and with the idea that the U.S. has suffered from a great sense of arrogance.”
One has the feeling, watching her sweep around the world, that Secretary Albright is welcomed as a breath of fresh air in many places. But her outspokenness will become a disability if, after some months, it remains merely outspokenness.
The Rwanda horror that she brought up in Addis Ababa is a case in point. The world could have avoided the holocaust there, but that would have meant taking action not after the militias began killing people but before –while they were being formed, while their radios were spewing out ethnic hatred, and when one could see what was surely going to come.
But such acts would demand leadership ready to deter bloodshed. One has to give the lady credit: She’s stepping in where all those men who supposedly run the world have so feared to tread.