The reviewer replies.

I reviewed Madeleine Albright's book; I didn't write it. Her phrase "the indispensable nation" strikes me as hubristic, but in fact it may be accurate, with major implications for our foreign policy. The ones she proposes are not jingoistic.

War is many things, certainly "human tragedy" and some party's "moral failure," although that may also apply in certain circumstances to the refusal to use force. But the notion that war should be diplomacy by other means has largely been a principle of restraint. War can create conditions susceptible to renewed diplomacy, even peacemaking. Contrast Kosovo (diplomacy, war, renewed diplomacy) to Rwanda (diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy, genocide, chaos). Rwanda may have been one of the Clinton administration's great failures (Albright was UN ambassador at the time), and perhaps Operation Gatekeeper was, too. Still, Madeleine Albright was one of the best secretaries of state we have had over the last fifty years. That is a positive moral judgment on my part, albeit a relative one. The problem for Michael Griffin, I suspect, is that that is not the one he would come to.

MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS