This was nobody's idea of a romantic Valentine's Day. While millions of couples prepared for a quiet night out, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her top aides bundled onto an Air Force jet bound for France, where peace talks between Yugoslav Serbs and Albanians were stalemated. From the moment she landed, Albright began trying to punch through the impasse. She bluntly threatened the Serbs with warnings about NATO air strikes, charmed the Albanians with the promise of U.S. support and kept her fellow foreign ministers in line by reminding them of their commitment to hit the Serbs hard if negotiations failed. As the day wound down, Albright sat through a tense meeting with the Kosovo "contact group" and grimly repeated America's commitment to bomb Belgrade if necessary. While the delegates sat in an uneasy silence after her pronouncement, the Secretary put up her hand with a final observation. "I just want to say," she cooed, "that it is a great honor being the only woman in the room and spending Valentine's Day with so many handsome men." The dour diplomats couldn't stifle their chuckles.
The performance was typical Albright, a balance of charm and force in the pursuit of a policy based on pure pragmatism and an underlying belief that the U.S. can help restore order to the badly fractured Balkans. In the past month, Albright has moved to the center of U.S. negotiations over the fate of the ethnic Albanians living inside the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Last Saturday, after jetting back to France, Albright hiked up and down stairs for nine hours in the drafty 14th century castle in which talks were under way, carrying proposals between hard-line Serb negotiators and Kosovo guerrilla chieftains. By day's end, she had moved the Albanians, including key negotiator Veton Surroi, close to accepting the NATO plan, but the Yugoslavs were still stonewalling. "They are not engaging," she told TIME in an exclusive interview. Her plan, aides say, was to secure agreement from the Albanian side within 48 hours, isolating the Yugoslavs and presenting Belgrade with a simple choice: join the agreement or be bombed. "I did a lot of castle shuttling today," she said, as she slumped into a couch during a negotiating break, clearly tired by the work. Boasted a proud staff member: "She's quarterbacking the Kosovo diplomacy." But a very difficult game lies ahead.
The problem is that Albright's plan for Kosovo calls for putting NATO ground troops onto Yugoslav territory, something President Slobodan Milosevic says violates his sovereignty; it would be, he says, as if he had suggested putting NATO troops into Northern Ireland to control unrest there. NATO says the ethnic violence in Kosovo demands a strong international response. For Albright and her team, the stalled talks have meant preparing a two-track approach that will involve bombing if Milosevic refuses to negotiate and ground troops if he agrees to a last-minute concession.
Albright has long believed that the only things Milosevic understands are blunt words and brute force. She's been contemptuous of the Serb strongman ever since her first visit as Secretary of State to Belgrade in 1997, when he patronizingly told her she was a neophyte in Balkan politics. Albright, who spent three years in Belgrade as the daughter of a Czech ambassador, shot back, "Don't tell me I'm uninformed. I've lived here."