Albright Envisions New Global Approach to Advance Democracy

As she contemplates the last two years of her Cabinet tenure, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has begun drawing plans for a new international order, one that would revamp existing global institutions and spawn entirely new ones.

Albright sketched the outlines of her idea for a new, formal grouping of the world’s democratic nations in a wide-ranging interview recently with Times reporters.

The new order, she said, would enable its members to work more productively to protect their own freedoms and help those countries within reach of self-government take the final steps toward democracy. She cited four initial candidates: Colombia, Ukraine, Nigeria and Indonesia.

An aide referred to Albright’s concept as a kind of international “democracy club.”

“The 21st century . . . ought to be the century of democracy,” Albright said during the interview, conducted in her offices on the seventh floor of the State Department. “We’re going to be putting an awful lot more emphasis on organizing the democracies, working with them . . . so that they can work with each other better.”

There will be no retreat from global responsibilities for the United States as it enters the next century, she stressed. The challenge is determining how the United States can best project its enormous power.

Other nations will “either organize with us or against us,” she said. “But we are the organizing principle, and we have to understand our responsibilities.”

During the course of the interview, Albright:

* Stressed the need to combat the growing danger inherent in the spread of weapons of mass destruction, especially from an economically unstable Russia.

* Suggested for the first time that she would support deployment of an antimissile defense system under certain conditions to combat the proliferation threat.

* Cited the imminent enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to include Hungary, Poland and her native Czech Republic as the event that “I feel best about and proudest of.”

* Said her greatest fear as secretary of State is “the call in the night about the terrorist attack.”

She divulged no new details, however, about the Clinton administration’s strategy for dealing with the continuing crisis in Iraq.

Albright, 61, a single mother and respected academic, achieved celebrity status in January 1997 when she became the United States’ first female secretary of State. She dominated the American foreign policy arena during much of her first year in office with infectious enthusiasm, snappy sound bites and a string of diplomatic successes.

Last year was different.

The crises that swept Southeast Asia and Russia were, at their heart, financial dilemmas, shifting key decisions from Albright’s State Department to the Treasury. The standoffs in Kosovo and Iraq had strong military dimensions, elevating the Pentagon, the White House and President Clinton’s national security advisor, Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger.

Albright said she was not concerned about what some foreign policy observers characterized as her diminished influence during 1998.

“I think that, obviously, when you’re in the White House, you pop into the president’s office at different times,” she said. “But I spend a lot of time with the president, talk to him on the telephone, and I’m in his office a great deal, so I have no problem with that.”

As she outlined her priorities for the next two years, she left little doubt that she plans to devote more of her energy to changing the global political system and the way Washington deals with it--changes she believes will better position the United States for the challenges of the 21st century.

Albright believes that the United States stands at the brink of a new era in global affairs, much as it did half a century ago, when it emerged from World War II as the world’s strongest nation, unable to retreat to its prewar isolationism.

Elaborating on Albright’s comments, a senior State Department official said conceptual planning for a new organization of democratic states is still in its early stages. He indicated that the proposal has not yet been discussed with other governments but Albright hopes “to have a concrete program, a road map to that general goal, in a matter of weeks, perhaps by the beginning of the spring.”

The senior official suggested that multinational institutions normally not associated with the State Department, such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, could fall within the scope of the department’s review.

“She’s saying that, just the way we updated NATO for the post-Cold War era with enlargement, we need to renew [global] financial institutions to deal with the crises we’ve just seen,” the aide said. “She doesn’t have an answer yet, but we’re not ceding this to Treasury.”

Albright’s formulation is the latest effort by U.S. officials to define the U.S. role as the sole superpower in the post-Cold War world.

In 1991, at the end of the Persian Gulf War, President Bush talked about a “new world order” that would avoid the strife of previous decades.

Bush, like Albright, envisioned a coalition of nations in which the United States would be paramount. Yet his rhetoric was often murky, allowing some militia organizations and other far-right groups to misinterpret his proposal as a plan for a world government to be run from United Nations headquarters in New York.

After Clinton defeated Bush in the 1992 election, administration officials carefully avoided using the term “new world order,” although they clearly were intrigued by the concept.

As U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Albright in 1993 suggested a policy of “assertive multilateralism.” Critics complained that her idea also assigned too important a role to the U.N. bureaucracy and to other members of the world organization.

Today, Albright contends that the nation faces “a very dangerous situation” caused by the threatened spread of weapons of mass destruction, especially by rogue states such as Iraq and North Korea and transnational terrorist organizations.

She said the U.S. must be prepared to undertake a range of diplomatic and military interventions to stop the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and missile systems.

And, breaking with decades of Democratic Party orthodoxy, Albright said the United States must at least consider developing and deploying a ballistic missile defense system--a variation on President Reagan’s controversial “Star Wars” initiative.

The challenge, she said, is to find a way to fit a missile defense system into existing arms control treaties. During the Reagan administration, Democrats on Capitol Hill argued that “Star Wars” would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a step they said the nation should be reluctant to take because it would jeopardize other arms control agreements.

Albright said it is not yet clear whether massive defense systems able to protect whole cities from ballistic missile attacks are scientifically feasible. However, she said it is time to consider ways to overcome the diplomatic impediments to developing such a system.

A more immediate challenge, she said, is to prevent Russia from turning itself into a supermarket for illicit sales of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and missile systems.

Although Moscow has signed a series of nonproliferation agreements, the country faces catastrophic economic difficulties.

If the Russian leaders “have financial problems, they will sell their goods,” she said.

Albright, once a professor specializing in East-West issues, said Washington must treat Russia as “a potential great power . . . that has to be dealt with very seriously.”

“They have to be part of the system,” she said. “We can’t let them fall through the floor.”