25 March 2022 - First female Secretary of State Madeleine Albright dies aged 84
Madeleine Albright, first female secretary of state, dies at 84
Dareh Gregorian (CNBC News, 23/03/2022)
Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of state, died Wednesday, her family said in a statement. She was 84.
She died of cancer, her family said, adding that she was “surrounded by family and friends” at the time.
“We have lost a loving mother, grandmother, sister, aunt and friend,” the statement said, as well as a “tireless champion of democracy and human rights.”
Madeleine Albright Was the First “Most Powerful Woman” in U.S. History
Robin Wright (The New Yorker, 24/03/2022)
Madeleine Albright was the first senior U.S. official to meet Vladimir Putin shortly after his abrupt ascendancy to the Russian Presidency, in 2000. They spoke for nearly three hours about everything from Moscow’s relationship with the West to using chopsticks for Chinese food. In a final Op-Ed for the Times—published a month before she died, of cancer, on Wednesday, at eighty-four—the former Secretary of State recalled her initial impressions of the Russian leader. “Putin is small and pale,” she wrote, “so cold as to be almost reptilian.” She described him as deeply “embarrassed” about the Soviet Union’s collapse and “determined to restore its greatness.” Throughout a career in foreign affairs that spanned nearly half a century, Albright was often eerily prescient, especially on Russia and the tragedies of Europe. She was, after all, born into them, in the former Czechoslovakia, in 1937. Her family first fled Adolf Hitler’s Nazis and later Joseph Stalin’s Communists as they expanded deeper into Europe. She landed in Colorado at the age of eleven and became a U.S. citizen at the age of twenty. Like many first-generation immigrants, Albright developed a profound love for—and idealized illusions about—her adopted homeland. “Only in America could a refugee from Central Europe become Secretary of State,” she told newly minted U.S. citizens, decades later, at a naturalization ceremony.
Madeleine Albright’s enduring legacy: U.S. leadership and women’s empowerment
Editorial Board (The Washington Post, 24/03/2022)
Madeleine K. Albright stood out and stood up. As the first female U.S. secretary of state and one of the few women in leadership on the global stage during the 1990s, Ms. Albright — who died Wednesday at the age of 84 — took a hard line against dictators and tyrants from the Balkans to Haiti to Rwanda. She pushed the United States to intervene in the Bosnian war in 1995 and again four years later to stop Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo. Hers was a steadfast belief that democracy would triumph over authoritarianism and that the United States had to lead for it to happen. She also championed the expansion of NATO to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The doctrine that she called “assertive multilateralism” became a defining U.S. foreign policy of the post-Cold War era.
Madeleine Albright saw US as an ‘indispensable nation’ and NATO expansion eastward as essential
Peter Harris (The Conversation, 24/03/2022)
Madeleine Albright may have not coined the phrase “indispensable nation,” but she will always be associated with the concept.
By the time she became Secretary of State in 1997, the United States had become a beached superpower. During the Cold War, its forces had been deployed across the world for the explicit purpose of deterring Soviet aggression. When the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so did the primary justification for America’s enormous troop presence abroad and globe-spanning web of military alliances.
The Czech-born Albright, who died on March 23 at age 84, helped the United States to conjure a new rationale for its militarized global role in the post-Cold War era.