Albright: ‘I Don’t Know’
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James Joyner | Friday, June 19, 2009 |
At her lecture to the Atlantic Council last night, Madeleine Albright repeatedly uttered three words seldom heard in Washington: “I don’t know.”
What struck me, though, was her humility on three of the most difficult issues facing the West right now: the ongoing chaos in Iran, the relationship with Russia, and the future role of NATO. For all of those, she forthrightly admitted that she didn’t have the answers.
Albright is not a woman lacking in confidence. One doesn’t get to where she has, let alone as a woman coming up when she did, by being a wallflower. Certainly, too, her expertise on these topics is unquestioned. The international relations school at the University of Denver is named after her father, she has her PhD in international relations from Columbia, and she has spent decades studying, writing about, and making public policy decisions on these issues.
Regardless, they are enormously complicated and there are simply too many variables to make definitive policy prescriptions, let alone predict the outcomes, from outside. She’s being rather too modest to say she now knows only “what she reads in the newspapers” — she’s far too active in the foreign relations community for that to be true — but she’s right that none of us have all the facts.
More at the link on what we do and don’t know about these issues.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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“I don’t know.”
A liberal tells the truth, THE END IS NEAR!!!!!!!!!
