WASHINGTON -- Eighteen months after one of the most dazzling debuts in government, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright gets a decidedly mixed report card from the foreign policy establishment of which she has long been a prominent member.
She draws high marks for shepherding NATO expansion through Congress and ending a rift with Europe that plagued President Clinton's first term. And Albright, who is thrilled when passing strangers recognize her and call out her first name, is widely praised as a salesperson for America's goals overseas.
"She has, at a time when it is most difficult to get any focus by the American people on foreign policy, been able to communicate to the public and the press better than any secretary of state we've had since I've been here," said Sen. Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, who arrived in 1973 and is the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.
But she is criticized for prolonging a paralysis in the Middle East peace process; an unraveling of the anti-Iraq coalition; stalled arms-control efforts; and an appearance of drift in policy toward Russia.
Despite Albright's wooing of North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms, the curmudgeonly chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations panel, the Clinton administration has failed to pry more money out of Congress for foreign aid or to pay America's billion-dollar debt to the United Nations.
And Albright is not seen as a key player on Asia at a time when U.S. relations with China and handling of the region's financial crisis loom as the administration's most serious foreign policy challenges.
"What you see is a secretary of state with a highly visible role -- and she has reveled in it," said Robert Zoellick, State Department counselor in the Bush administration. "But as you look around the world, you have to ask, 'Where is she putting her mark?' "
After style is subtracted, the substantive record that's left "is quite disappointing," says John Steinbruner, a senior fellow and foreign policy specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Albright's goals, spelled out in a recent interview, are so broad that her success in achieving them is hard to measure:
"I see my job as one that requires setting a longer-term course for American foreign policy," assembling a strong team and getting the long-demoralized foreign service "back on track," she said.
"I've tried to show, while we set specific priorities, that every part of the world has a role to play. Every continent, every region is part of our concern now, where it wasn't during the Cold War."
Addition to the team
Albright's tenure is beginning to draw a critical look with the addition of Richard C. Holbrooke, a diplomat with comparable star quality, as ambassador to the United Nations. In the zero-sum world of Washington perceptions, his rise is seen as her decline. The resulting tension in Albright's inner circle is palpable.
A close political ally, who insisted on anonymity, says Albright is excessively concerned about her image and has trouble sharing credit.
"I could care less about my image," Albright retorted. "I care about whether I represent the United States well." In her defense, Albright contended that because she is the first woman to hold her job, "people attribute things to how I feel that they would not attribute to a man."
Few could have sustained the glorious honeymoon that followed Albright's appointment at the beginning of Clinton's second term in the White House.
Here was a scrappy but compassionate advocate for human rights with a flair for forceful sound bites. Her family history of having escaped Hitler and Stalin powerfully dramatized her description of the United States as the "indispensable nation."
Albright, now 61, became the hottest player in the Clinton Cabinet. She seemed game for anything: throwing out the first ball at Oriole Park, performing a song-and-dance number in front of Asian statesmen.
Albright's first-year forays enhanced the reputation for bluntness that she had earned as Clinton's first U.N. ambassador. On a June 1997 trip to the Balkans, for example, she told a Croatian government minister that he should be ashamed of himself.
But Albright's toughness has been tested and, some say, found wanting, in fruitless attempts to mediate an Israeli pullback from the West Bank and revive the Middle East peace process.
She summoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to a White House summit in May, only to have Israel reject the terms for the meeting and complain loudly about getting an ultimatum from the United States. The summit idea withered.
Albright says her action "changed the dynamic" of the negotiations and, as a result, the Israelis have moved closer to a deal the Palestinians can accept.
Netanyahu 'called her bluff'
But this optimistic view is not widely shared.
"The Middle East has proved an embarrassment," said Zoellick. "She decided to lay down a marker with Netanyahu, and he called her bluff."
Her iron-lady reputation may have eroded overseas as well: "She's not seen as the kind of figure whom adversaries would be afraid to cross," said Josef Joffe of the prestigious German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung.
Albright played a key role in the latest Iraq crisis, over weapons inspections, flying secretly to New York to lay the groundwork for the deal later worked out between U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
But the episode only underscored how time and competing national interests have weakened the once-solid world coalition against Iraq. Albright, however, says the fact that it has lasted this long is an achievement.
Albright's courtship of Helms broke the Republican financial stranglehold on foreign affairs agencies and on U.S. contributions to the United Nations. But the deal came undone in the House, where Republicans wrote in anti-abortion language that Clinton threatened to veto.
After winning Senate approval of the global agreement banning the use of chemical weapons, the Clinton administration has failed to advance its arms-control agenda in Congress or with Russia, which has yet to ratify a strategic arms treaty. Meanwhile, the administration was unable to prevent India and then Pakistan from testing nuclear weapons.
"When you look at the general health of the [arms-control] regime right now, the arrows are pointing down -- there's trouble across the board," said Joseph Cirincione, an arms control specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank. "Then you look at the administration approach and you can't identify a lead person on this issue."
Albright argues that there have been arms-control gains, noting in particular that China has abandoned nuclear tests and is cooperating more in efforts to curb missile proliferation.
"It's not easy, it's not perfect, but it's not foundering," she said of the arms-control effort.
Fixture on the scene
Having served on the Carter administration's national security staff, worked on Capitol Hill, taught at Georgetown University and run a think tank before she became Clinton's first U.N. ambassador in 1993, Albright has been a fixture on the foreign policy scene for years.
"I think she's doing pretty well," says Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, U.N. ambassador in the Reagan administration, citing in particular how Albright has approached Central and Eastern Europe. But Kirkpatrick faults Clinton for a lack of clear leadership on foreign policy and says she doesn't know how much influence Albright has in trying to shape it.
"Albright believes as a matter of principle that she has a serious obligation to reflect the views of the president," Kirkpatrick said.
Because of Albright's European background, she was warmly welcomed in European capitals where Warren Christopher, her predecessor at Foggy Bottom, encountered friction.
"Quite frankly, I think the overall impression is extremely good," says Jonathan Eyal of the Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank in London. "There's no doubt that she has refocused U.S. foreign policy in Europe and destroyed that image that the Clinton administration was not interested in the old continent."
Some critics contend Albright has been so focused on Europe that she has paid too little attention to other critical parts of the world, such as Russia.
Fluent in Russian, she struck up a good working relationship with Foreign Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov that smoothed over Russian opposition to NATO expansion, which she then helped move through the Senate.
But most experts see her playing less of a role in policy toward Moscow than her deputy, Strobe Talbott; Vice President Al Gore or even the Treasury Department.
The good news for Albright is that her fingerprints are missing from what some analysts see as an inadequate U.S. response to the financial near-calamity in the former Soviet Union.
The challenges Albright has confronted so far may be dwarfed by the problems that lie ahead, says Charles William Maynes, head of the Eurasia Foundation. He cited a combination of Russian and Asian financial crises, the simmering Balkan conflict and the always combustible Middle East.
Albright, known for tireless travel and unending effort, had a two word response when asked what she could have done better: "Work harder."
Pub Date: 7/20/98