“We are in one of the most crucial periods that I’ve ever seen,” the former secretary of state said.
“The virus knows no borders and cooperation is absolutely essential.”
— Secretary Madeleine Albright
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In 2009, Madeleine Albright’s 7-year-old granddaughter turned to her mother and observed: “Only girls are secretary of state.”
That 7-year-old was, of course, telling the truth from her perspective: In her lifetime she had seen Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton take on America’s top diplomatic post. But the world looked like that in large part because of the way paved by her grandmother.
Secretary Albright was once among the world’s most vulnerable people — her family first fled Nazi rule, then Communist rule, before arriving in the United States as refugees in 1948 — but she went on to become the first female secretary of state, in President Bill Clinton’s administration. During her tenure, she shaped much of the post-Cold War world order, expanding NATO to include more Central and Eastern European countries and reshaping the U.S.-Russia relationship.
Since leaving office in 2001, she has stepped into several different roles. She teaches at Georgetown University, she has published more than half a dozen books and she has co-founded a consulting firm — the Albright Stonebridge Group — that helps businesses navigate global markets and regulations. One of her firm’s earliest clients was the pharmaceutical company Merck, which needed help in distributing treatments for H.I.V. and AIDS in Botswana.
“Retreat to the sidelines? No way,” she wrote in her recent book, “Hell and Other Destinations.”
Secretary Albright sat down with In Her Words to discuss the world in the time of the coronavirus, restoring trust in democracies and who should be a part of leading that charge.
The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
You are known for the pins you wear. Could you explain the one you’re wearing today?
We lived in London all through the Blitz — my father was with the Czechoslovak government in exile — and I listened to the BBC all the time. During the war, the BBC began every broadcast with the first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth — in Morse code that translates to V for victory. So I decided that today I would wear the V pin because I learned a lot of lessons out of being with my parents during the war. Namely, my parents had no control over the bombs that were falling, the only thing they had control over was their behavior. And I think that’s very important now because we don’t have any control over how the virus started, but we do have control over our behavior.
In your latest book, “Hell and Other Destinations,” you write that when you read the paper, you imagine what you would do if you were secretary of state. Looking at the world today, what would your response plan look like?
I’d focus on partnerships in order to deal with what we know is an international problem. The virus knows no borders and cooperation is absolutely essential. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out you need to work with others on this. I have to say that I’m very troubled by the lack of reaching out to other countries now. If I were in office, I would be making a point to try to regain the trust that is necessary to act together to try to figure out how to have better bilateral relations and also how to use a variety of either regional or international organizations.
Does that global cooperation extend to the business world? What role does the private sector have in the recovery?
I really do believe that the private sector has a very large job to do. I mean, the government isn’t going to develop the vaccine.
When President Barack Obama was in office, he made that speech in Cairo about having different relationships with Muslim majority countries. Secretary Clinton wanted to enlarge on it by developing commercial relations with Muslim majority countries, and she asked me to run “Partners for a New Beginning,” which was trying to figure out how to get the public and private sectors working together. And I’m a great believer in that. I have believed for a long time that the private sector needs to be at the table earlier, not to just kind of be told what to do, but to be part of a process that tries to figure out some solutions.
In your book “Fascism: A Warning” you write, “Fascism draws energy from men and women who are upset about a lost war, a lost job, a memory of humiliation, or a sense that their country is in steep decline.” Do you think that coming out of the pandemic we’ll see more governments with a fascist bent?
I’m very worried about that. The best quote in that book, frankly, comes from Mussolini, who said, “If you pluck a chicken one feather at a time, nobody notices.” And there’s a lot of feather plucking going on now in a variety of places.
Fascism comes in initially because there are problems, and then X leader takes advantage of it to make divisions worse, saying it’s the fault of our neighbors or a group of refugees or any number of different aspects. The part that’s interesting is both Mussolini and Hitler came to power constitutionally. And some of the leaders of the countries that are going through this now were also elected.
How do we restore faith in democratic institutions?
I think it is going to be hard work. We are in one of the most crucial periods that I’ve ever seen — and I’m old and I’ve seen a lot of very serious problems, like World War II and communism taking over. I don’t think we’re going to go back to something. We need to develop a system that is able to deal with the fact that there’s been a breakdown in the social contract. People gave up a lot of individual rights in the 18th and 19th centuries in order to have a relationship with a government that is supposed to provide services and listen to what they have to say. That contract has been stressed.
But some people might see something like a lockdown or contact tracing, even within the context of the coronavirus, as quite undemocratic.
There does have to be some centralized aspect. People are very nervous because of their privacy, and some people don’t want to be told what to do. I do think that we have to be very careful. There needs to be some international way of trying to figure out the rules. What are the rules for the use of information? Where does privacy come in? This requires having conversations where people trust each other, instead of thinking that they’re on opposite sides.
What needs to happen to build a better world, post-Covid?
We need a recognition that things are different, that we are dealing with problems that require international cooperation.
I would make sure we talk to people with whom we disagree and try to understand where they’re coming from, not just tolerate them, but figure out what is motivating them.
If you were able to assemble an Avengers-style dream team to come in and fix the world right now, who would be on that team?
Well, it certainly would be a female team. Without naming names, I would really try to look for women who are in office, both in the executive and legislative branch. I would try to have a female C.E.O., but also somebody who heads up a nongovernmental organization. You don’t want everybody that’s exactly the same. Oh, and I’m about to do a program for the National Democratic Institute with Angelina Jolie, and she made the most amazing movie about what was going on in Bosnia, so I would want her on my team.
