Rick Scott extols ‘trailblazer’ Madeleine Albright, echoes her muscular foreign policy

Sen. Rick Scott weighed in Wednesday on the passing of the first female Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, extolling her legacy during an interview where he discussed Ukraine policy.

“Clearly a trailblazer. Clear advocate for democracy all across the world. She will go down in history as a great American and somebody who was always fighting to try to make democracy in the United States and around the world,” Scott said on BBC World, where he made the case for American support of the Ukraine cause, including repeating calls for planes to go to Ukraine.

Scott has been one of the more forceful advocates on the right for American support for Ukraine, and it was apropos that he had occasion to recognize the legacy of Albright. Her tenures as both Secretary of State and Ambassador to the United Nations during the Bill Clinton administration saw the United States reckon with the geopolitical landscape after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Albright was known for positing that the United States was the “indispensable nation.” The concept that informed a tactical hawkishness that characterized American foreign policy between the end of the Cold War and the end of the Clinton administration, which gave way soon enough to the global war on terror under George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Aggressive containment of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was the hallmark of the Clinton-era Iraq strategy, enforced via a no-fly zone and sanctions. Muscular rhetoric was the Albright watchword.

Regarding sanctions, she was steely even when asked about more than half a million Iraqi children dying because of them in 1996.

“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it,” Albright told Lesley Stahl of CBS.

Such uncompromising rhetoric was common.

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future,” she said in 1998, as she pressed for Iraq to permit inspections of nuclear sites and refused to take bombing off the table.

Scott, for his part, has gotten increasingly comfortable with Albright-esque turns of phrase.

“Don’t take anything off the table,” Scott said. “I would never tell (Vladimir) Putin what I’m going to do or not going to do.”