Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who served in the Clinton Administration recently attended the Young Entrepreneurs International Business Forum in Omsk, Siberia. According to Pravda, she began her speech to the meeting on “Non-Economic Aspects of Entrepreneurship” in Russian. She said “Hello and thank you! It’s a pleasure for me to be here. She wrote in her autobiography that she was trying to learn some Russian.
She surprised the audience with her speech. She said that democracy was not the perfect system:
“It can be contradictory, corrupt and may have security problems. America has been having hard times recently.
We have been talking about our exceptionalism during the recent eight years. Now, an average American wants to stay at home — they do not need any overseas adventures. We do not need new enemies,” Albright said, adding that Beijing, London and Delhi became a serious competition for Washington and New York.
“My generation has made many mistakes. We give the future into the hands of the young. Your prime goal is to overcome the gap between the poor and the rich,” the former head of the US foreign political department said.
Well, who knows. It was Pravda, and only the first few words of her speech were in Russian, perhaps it was mistranslated.
It does sound pretty much in line with our current administration’s desire to portray America in a very negative modest way. We have much to be modest about, and if we can just be modest enough, maybe they’ll all like us. Is this what she said to everyone while she was our globe-trotting Secretary of State?
Ms. Albright is best remembered for photos of good times in North Korea.
American Elephants 