WASHINGTON INSIGHT

DIPLOMAT IN MOTION: In sharp contrast to her predecessors, Madeleine Albright is taking a high-profile, activist role as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. After a string of speeches in which she laid out the Clinton Administration’s new foreign policy of “assertive multilateralism,” Albright whirled off to Cambodia and Somalia to see U.N. peacekeeping operations up close. Now she’s back at U.N. headquarters in New York, testing the new policy with the tongue-twisting name. Its aim: improve relations with other Security Council members by giving them more say on decisions. Uncle Sam would still provide some push--but not dictate actions the way the U.S. has since the U.N. decision to intervene in the Persian Gulf War. . . . Skeptics question whether “assertive multilateralism” is merely a two-word contradiction--a clever phrase used to mask what is, in fact, a non-policy. But Albright insists it “is not a phony phrase.” And she has been noted throughout her career to be a politically savvy woman who knows how to build coalitions.