"Madeleine Albright, who died Wednesday at the of eighty-four, was America’s first female secretary of state. But the countless headlines touting that fact risk reducing her accomplishments to gender. That’s not fair: she was so much more than a trailblazer.

Albright was an imperial ghoul, as ruthless in her pursuit of American global dominance as any man. She played a central role in crafting a post–Cold War policy that wrought devastation on multiple continents. Her biography was a harrowing one: her family fled Nazi persecution when she was a , and twenty-six of her relatives, including three grandparents, were murdered in the Holocaust. It’s a traumatic story, but rest assured: she presided over of plenty of trauma and death for others in return."