Madeleine Albright may have not coined the phrase “indispensable nation,” but she will always be associated with the concept.
By the time she became Secretary of State in 1997, the United States had become a beached superpower. During the Cold War, its forces had been deployed across the world for the explicit purpose of deterring Soviet aggression. When the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so did the primary justification for America’s enormous troop presence abroad and globe-spanning web of military alliances.
