When Madeleine Albright’s pin took a jab at Vladimir Putin and her other brooches used to deliver sharp diplomatic messages
- Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who died on Wednesday, sent signals with her decorative pins and brooches when meeting leaders around the world
- One she wore while meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2000 took aim at the Kremlin’s war in Chechnya. ‘He was not amused. I probably went too far’
Madeleine Albright, who died Wednesday, knew how to deliver a diplomatic message without even saying a word. She sent signals with her decorative pins and brooches.
The first female secretary of state learned the power of her “pin diplomacy”, as she described it to CNN in 2015, when she was serving as President Clinton’s US ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 1997.
After the Gulf War, when the US was seeking the passage of resolutions for tougher sanctions on Iraq, Albright said Iraq’s state-controlled media “compared me to an ‘unparalleled serpent’”, she told Smithsonian magazine in a story from June 2010 about the museum’s exhibit “Read My Pins: The Madeleine Albright Collection”.
Albright had just the elaborate jewellery piece to counter the charge: a gold pin of a snake coiled around a branch with a jewel hanging from its mouth.
When she wore it to her next meeting on Iraq, “the press asked me about it [and] I thought, ‘Well, this is fun.’ I was the only woman on the Security Council, and I decided to get some more costume jewellery. On good days, I wore flowers and butterflies and balloons, and on bad days, all kinds of bugs and carnivorous animals. I saw it as an additional way of expressing what I was saying, a visual way to deliver a message.”
