(CNN) — Madeleine Albright, the first female Secretary of State for United States, who helped direct Western foreign policy following the Cold War, has died. He was 84 years old.
His death was confirmed in an email to staff at the Albright Stonebridge Group, a global strategy firm founded by Albright.
Albright was a central figure in the administration of President Bill Clinton, first serving as the US ambassador to the United Nations before becoming the country’s top diplomat in her second term. She championed the expansion of NATO, pushed for the alliance to intervene in the Balkans to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing, sought to reduce the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and defended human rights and democracy around the world.
In a New York Times op-ed written last month, just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Albright argued that Russian leader Vladimir Putin would be making “a historic mistake” by invade Ukraine and warned of the devastating costs to his country.
“Instead of paving Russia’s path to greatness, invading Ukraine would ensure Mr. Putin’s infamy by leaving his country diplomatically isolated, economically crippled, and strategically vulnerable to a stronger and more united Western alliance,” Albright wrote.
He was a face of US foreign policy in the decade between the end of the Cold War and the War on Terror triggered by the attacks of September 11, 2001, an era heralded by President George HW Bush as a “new world order”.
The United States, particularly in Iraq and the Balkans, built international coalitions and occasionally intervened militarily to push back autocratic regimes, and Albright—a self-identified “pragmatic idealist” who coined the term “assertive multilateralism” to describe America’s foreign policy— the Clinton administration — drew on his experience of growing up in a family that fled Nazis and communists in mid-20th-century Europe to shape his worldview.
He saw the US as the “indispensable nation” in using force-backed diplomacy to uphold democratic values around the world.
“We stand firm and we see further into the future than other countries, and we see the danger here for all of us,” he told NBC in 1998. “I know that American men and women in uniform are always willing to sacrifice for freedom, democracy and the American way of life.
