E-mail a friendMadeleine Albright
airdate October 28, 2009
Now a professor at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, Madeleine Albright was America's first female secretary of state. Her public service career includes U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and positions on the National Security Council. Albright co-founded the Center for National Policy and chairs the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. She's also the author of three New York Times best sellers, chair and principal of Albright Capital Management LLC and chair of Albright Stonebridge Group.
Former secretary of state discusses how her pins function to make foreign policy more accessible. (1:18)
Full Interview (11:05)
Madeleine Albright
Tavis: Always pleased to have Madeleine Albright on this program. She is, of course, the former U.S. secretary of State and the first woman to hold that post, as we know, in all of U.S. history. She is now the chair of her own global strategies firm and a best-selling author.
Her latest text is called "Read My Pins," love the title, "Stories from a Diplomat's Jewel Box." Madame Secretary, an honor to have you on this program, as always.
Madeleine Albright: Great to be with you, Tavis, thank you.
Tavis: I get to see you in person, not on satellite.
Albright: I know. This is a first. It's terrific, thanks.
Tavis: Glad to have you here. Let me start with some sour news of the day. Then we'll get to the exciting and fun stuff in the new book. Three hotspots around the globe; we'll start in Pakistan. A car bomb blast the other day, over 90 dead. What about Pakistan and our relationship with that country?
Albright: Well, I think it's a very complicated place. I say that it has everything that gives you an international migraine. It has nuclear weapons, terrorists, extremism, poverty, corruption, and a weak government, and a very difficult place.
But it's a very important relationship to us and Secretary Clinton is there now in order to show the importance of the relationship and to reach out as best she can to be someplace else than just the capital and have some town hall meetings. It's a very, very important country for us.
Tavis: Important, but what ought our strategy be? What's the goal right now as you see it, given our relationship with the country?
Albright: Well, the problem with it is is that there are a lot of Taliban that are on that side of the border from Afghanistan, also that there are al Qaeda there. The point is that a lot of the terrorism that we have to work against is coming out of Pakistan. It is a government that's friendly to us and we have to get the Pakistani military itself to really take a more active role so that we don't have to.
Tavis: You mentioned Afghanistan, and as you well know, being a former diplomat, it's impossible these days to talk to any diplomat without hearing Afghanistan and Pakistan mentioned in the same sentence. These things, to your point now, are connected, and in Afghanistan today six U.N. workers killed in Afghanistan. Your thoughts about that?
Albright: Well again, it's a very hostile environment and one of the issues as President Obama makes his decisions about what to do is that in order to get rid of al Qaeda in Afghanistan we have to make sure that the Taliban don't provide safe havens for them. So trying to develop some security so that the Afghan military and police take over is what the issue is.
But to see people killed, especially the international workers that are there trying to get some kind of security along with the military from NATO makes it a very, very difficult decision for the president.
Tavis: How difficult a spot are we in now, given the Bush policy over eight years to basically run out of Afghanistan into Iraq?
Albright: Well, I know people are tired of having us always blame things on the Bush administration, but the bottom line is that President Bush did the right thing after 9/11 to go into Afghanistan, but then they took their eye off the ball and for reasons that are unclear to most people took the fight to Iraq when there was no connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
Not paying attention to Afghanistan for the last eight years is part of the problem, so I do think that President Obama has a hard job in terms of trying to do something after that vacuum.
Tavis: I know you relatively well and I know you may not want to answer the former question; maybe you'll answer the latter. The former question is what advice would you be giving the president about what he ought to do in Afghanistan, since he's talking to everybody on his staff and listening to their ideas. If you don't want to answer that, what should his decision about what to do with troops in Afghanistan be based upon?
Albright: Well, I think that I'll answer the second part of it.
Tavis: See how well I know you? (Laughter)
Albright: I think that it has to be based on several things, which is why he's taking his time. One is obviously what our military can do, because getting rid of al Qaeda is what he said the goal was. But it has to be based on the political situation also, what kind of structure is there, can we count on the Afghan government, and also in terms of its regional location.
I think that's part of the issue. Afghanistan is not just a country somewhere, it is in the middle of a very complicated set of geographical problems and so I think he has to consider the regional role, the internal political situation, what our troops can really do, and what the Afghan people themselves can do.
Tavis: And finally, Iraq. This past Sunday 120 people, 150 people dead in Iraq. Do we have an exit strategy? What ought the exit strategy be? What's our plan there?
Albright: Well, I think that we will leave, and we have to leave, and part of the strategy there, again, is to get the Iraqi police and Iraqi military to take care of their own problems in the government.
What is happening there is it is not as fast a process as people thought. This last attack was against some of the buildings within Iraq that are part of the government structure, and there has to be a move towards a new election there and the idea that we will leave and that the Iraqis have to be able to run their own country.
We, however, have a tendency as Americans to make lists and check them off and say, "This job is done." Nothing is that simple. There will be some American troops that do remain in the area and I think that this is an ongoing issue. Democracy is not an event, it's a process, and setting up a country is not an event. They are going to have to really slowly but surely take over their own lives.
Tavis: Thanks for indulging those questions of the news that everybody else is talking about on the international stage. You came here today to talk about your new book, "Read My Pins," and I'm glad to have you on for that.
Speaking of Iraq, there's a famous story we now know in this book about the pin you wore dealing with Mr. Saddam Hussein. I'll get to that in just a second. Let me ask first to describe what you have on today, since you're so known for these brooches. What is this brooch today?
Albright: Well, I'll tell you. I have a bunch of new ones because most of them are in a museum in New York, the Arts and Design. So I just got this pin from the former chief of Staff - the Joint Chiefs of Staff Shalikashvili, and the pin is called "America."
It has an eagle in the middle and it has four little pearls around, standing for equality, justice, liberty and prosperity. So it's a pin that kind of signifies how proud I am to be an American.
Tavis: Since I teed you up for the Saddam Hussein question, take it away, that brooch.
Albright: Well, I'll tell you, this book would have never happened if it hadn't been for Saddam Hussein because when I first went to the United Nations it was right after the Gulf War and as you know, the ceasefire was translated into a bunch of sanctions resolutions.
So we talked about Iraq practically every day. My instructions from Washington were to say perfectly terrible things about Saddam Hussein, which he deserved because he'd invaded another country.
So all of a sudden a poem appeared in the Baghdad papers in which I was compared to many things but one was an unparalleled serpent. (Laughter) And I happened to have a snake pin, so I wore it when we did Iraq issues and you've seen the pictures when the ambassadors come out of the Security Council. There's a lot of press there.
So a camera zeroed in and said, "Why are you wearing that snake pin?" And I said, "Because Saddam Hussein called me a snake." And then I thought, well, this is fun. So I went out and I bought a lot of costume jewelry and I wore it depending upon what we were going to do.
So if I was in a good mood and good things were going to happen there would be balloons and butterflies and flowers, and if bad things then spiders and bees and wasps. (Laughter) And if I was wearing a spider and it wasn't Halloween, then terrible things were going to happen.
So when President Bush, the first President Bush had said, "Read my lips," and so I said, "Read my pins," and that's how the whole thing started. (Laughter)
Tavis: Who knew that a brooch could be an active tool in diplomacy?
Albright: Can you believe it? I teach a course on the National Security Toolbox and there's no pin in any diplomatic manual. But it did get to be kind of fun and people noticed it. I would sit across like this, for instance, with the Russian foreign minister. We were re-negotiating the antiballistic missile treaty and I had a pin that was actually an arrow, but he took a look at it and he said, "Is that one of your missile interceptors?" And I said, "Yes, we make them real small and it's time to negotiate." (Laughter)
Tavis: You mentioned earlier that so many of your brooches now, your pins, are in an exhibit that's in New York right now. When you had to loan your pins to them, how have you replenished your stash?
Albright: Well, I'll tell you what's happened. I have a whole new stash and we call them pity pins, because people are feeling sorry for me that mine are all gone. So I'm getting a whole new batch and they're fun and there are going to be a lot of new stories that go along with them.
But I think the reason I wrote this, Tavis, is that you asked me a lot of very hard questions and I love foreign policy. I think it's very important for ordinary Americans to understand what this is about, how to make foreign policy less foreign.
The pins allow me to explain some foreign policy issues. I kind of call it foreign policy with a spoonful of sugar and a little bit of humor. Life is grim and we don't have to be grim all the time, and so they did serve as good signals.
Tavis: Speaking of good signals, I wanted to ask that question now. How important are the little things like a brooch in a very cantankerous back-and-forth negotiation to humanize you, to humanize the conversation, to change the subject? How important is that?
Albright: I think the thing that people need to know is you sit down at a table with somebody and you actually try to make some kind of conversation - "Great tie," or whatever, just to kind of have an ice-breaker. And so I think that helps.
In the end, I found that the foreign ministers that I got to know personally, even though we would argue in pretty tough ways on issues because you were there representing national interests, if you have some sense that you're dealing with another human being, a really good negotiator not only understands what your national interest is but put yourself into the other guy's shoes.
So I think the humanity of it helps, and what's fun too is that protocol demands that you give presents back and forth, so instead of getting a fountain pen and a clock or something, (laughter) somebody would give me a pin and then they'd be really glad when I wore it the next time when we actually talked. They'd say, "Thank you for wearing the pin that I gave you." So I think it did humanize things.
Tavis: I guess the question is with all those rules how you got to keep those gifts.
Albright: Well, I couldn't the expensive ones. (Laughter) I'll tell you what happened. They finally figured out that you can't give an American something over X number of dollars because they would end up in the State Department treasury and then they'd auction them off. So I didn't get a lot of expensive ones.
Tavis: Yeah, but they looked nice on you.
Albright: Thank you very much.
Tavis: Madeleine Albright's new book is called "Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat's Jewel Box." Always an honor to have you on the program.
Albright: Great to be with you. Thanks, Tavis.
Tavis: It's good to see you.
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