Albright’s Advice for the Next President
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Thursday night the next presidency “is going to be one of the most difficult ones that any president has faced.” Albright, who served as President Clinton’s top foreign policy official and is an adviser to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, warned that the “brand of America has been very much tarnished” and that U.S. foreign policy faces serious difficulties.
Albright laid out five “major trends” in foreign policy facing the next president, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, democracy, globalization, and climate change. Democracy is “the best system of government, not only for us, but for everybody,” she said. Still, Albright said, under the Bush administration democracy has come to be “identified with occupation, and it has gotten a bad name.” As a result, the next president will have to “make the spread of democracy a reputable project,” she said.
Albright also said the United States should work to “mitigate the worst parts of globalization,” namely to rectify the gap between the rich and the poor. Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state during the 1999 Kosovo war, believes the next president is “clearly going to have to send more forces and use NATO” in Afghanistan. She also said she would “put Pakistan right up there” as one of the most dangerous places in the world. Albright named Iraq as “the greatest disaster in American foreign policy,” and said it is worse than the Vietnam War “in terms of its unintended consequences.”
She also criticized the Bush administration for not paying enough attention to the Middle East peace process until now. At the same time, Albright noted her recent meetings with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and said “people felt pretty good about the Annapolis process. They felt that it was a real step forward to have that many Arab leaders at the table with the Israelis.”
