EDITORIAL : A NEW SECRETARY OF STATE? ALBRIGHT HAS THE CREDENTIALS. IT'S THE WHITE HOUSE THAT'S WORRISOME.

UNITED Nations Ambassador Madeleine Albright is bright, articulate, vigorous, experienced and is respected by people on both sides of the aisle in Congress. We have every reason to believe that she would be a worthy successor to the able Warren Christopher as secretary of state.

Albright's record speaks for itself. Besides that, we were most favorably impressed by Albright's forceful personality during a meeting in October with Daily News editors and reporters.

But secretaries of state can do only so much. The ultimate decision maker on foreign policy always is the president. And since presidents usually listen to many people both within and outside government on matters of foreign policy, it isn't always possible to know exactly how much influence any secretary of state has had.

And this takes us to the Clinton administration's foreign policy. The president has said on many occasions that the United States, as the world's only superpower, has an obligation to lead. That's a given. The question is where this policy should take us - and why.

This is especially true in connection with by far the most important foreign policy goal of all - forging productive relations with Russia in the post-Cold War era. Unfortunately, the Clinton administration is needlessly irritating Moscow - and extending U.S. commitments - by supporting the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

``We are firmly opposed to plans to move up to our territory the North Atlantic Alliance and its military infrastructure,'' Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin warned in Portugal during a recent conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. ``It is surely obvious that the emergence in Europe of new lines of division would lead to a worsening of the entire geopolitical situation in the world.''

That might have been an exaggeration. Nevertheless, Russians have experienced invasions from the west on two occasions in this century, so it should come as no surprise that Moscow is sensitive about NATO expansion, regardless of all the reassurances from Washington about its good intentions.

Albright, who if confirmed would become the first female secretary of state, told the Daily News that changing conditions in the world require ``a different kind of diplomacy and a different kind of working with allies.''

That should be the case with Russia and NATO, which after all was a defensive alliance against the former Soviet Union. The expansion of NATO clearly threatens to jeopardize a lot of diplomatic opportunities for improving relations with Russia - and someone in the State Department should say so.