Memo To The President Elect

Memo To The President Elect

How We Can Restore America's Reputation And Leadership

By Madeleine Albright

Madeleine Albright is one smart cookie. This book really held my attention all the way through. She concentrates almost exclusively on foreign policy, but that's easy to forgive since that's her area of expertise.

From picking a vice-president to the qualities to look for in the rest of the president-elect's cabinet, Albright has an opinion. For example, she half-heartedly advocates picking a vice-president from the opposing party,

The most likely candidate for a bipartisan appointment, therefore, is a person with moderate ideas and no future political ambition. Such an appointment will provide more the appearance of bipartisanship than the reality. Too bad, but that is why we have elections.

Before going into specifics about how to deal with each world region, she also makes some general points about American leadership,

To argue that international law is useless because it is not always enforced is no different than suggesting that laws against murder are without value because murders are still committed. No country gains more from a strong international legal regime than Americans do, precisely because we have so many interests to protect.

She goes on to offer the president-elect region-by-region advice on how to handle existing and potential foreign policy crises. And it's all good advice. This book is definitely worth a read in order to evaluate how a new President will do by how he/she picks a cabinet and says he/she will deal with different countries.

tags: book review  foreign policy