Well, she got neither peace nor airstrikes nor her Marine deployment. Instead, she got the phone hung up in her face by a two-bit leader of the year-old Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a rabble of armed Albanians so ragtag as to make the Irish Republican Army look grand by comparison.

This is a version of "Wag the Dog" in which we lose to the Albanians. What makes it all the more humiliating is that Albright's objective in all this was to save the KLA and the Kosovars from destruction at the hands of the Serb army.

Unfazed, Albright is now sending Bob Dole, who is taking time off from selling Viagra, to cajole these ungrateful guerrillas to give lip service to her autonomy plan. The KLA, upon reflection, will likely agree. And we can then go and bomb Serbia on their behalf.

Such is the state of U.S. foreign policy under Madeleine Albright. She has turned into a master of the empty threat and the useless gesture.

Iraq policy is little more than empty threat alternating with useless gesture. North Korea is unrestrained, testing and exporting missiles, threatening its neighbors, violating the 1994 "framework agreement" to freeze its nuclear program, even as Albright clings to it for fear of having to do something about North Korean violations.

Russia is today more hostile to the United States than at any time since the fall of communism, routinely trying to thwart American policy in Iraq, Kosovo, Iran and wherever else it can.

And China. Albright followed her Rambouillet fiasco with a visit to China that can only be called puzzling. She makes a great point of delivering a short lecture or two on human rights, even as she demonstrates that the United States is prepared to do absolutely nothing to back up these "values." In preparation for her visit, one human rights activist was sentenced to a labor camp, and 10 others were arrested for trying to start a political party.

She says how unpleasant all this is. The Chinese tell her to mind her own business. And they then get down to business, working on the terms for China's entry into the World Trade Organization.

Yet remember how Albright was ushered into her office two years ago with swooning front-page stories about her intelligence, her charm and, above all, her toughness? "The lady is a hawk," sang Newsweek. "The Munich mind-set has made Ms. Albright far from squeamish about the use of military force," chimed in the New York Times.

Where did this nonsense come from? This is a woman who supported the nuclear freeze -- the flabbiest, stupidest strategic idea of the 1980s -- opposed aid to the Nicaraguan contras and opposed the Persian Gulf War. Ah, but she was for getting tough in Somalia. So when it came to opposing the Soviet nuclear buildup in Europe (the nuclear freeze would have prevented NATO from countering Soviet SS-20s), communist adventurism in Central America and Saddam's reach to take over the Persian Gulf, she took a pass. But she was for taking on the mighty Mohamed Farah Aidid.

Albright no longer gets fawning coverage. That would be too much of a stretch. Now she gets merely sympathetic coverage of the oh-how-tough-it-is-to-be-secretary-of-state-in-such-an-unruly-world variety. CBS News, for example, aired a long puff piece on her Rambouillet fiasco: what good intentions, what difficult problems, what stubborn negotiators.

Why has she gotten such an easy ride in the media? Is it unmanly to point out that her tenure has been a mess and a mediocrity? If Warren Christopher had committed a miscalculation as large as hers at Rambouillet, he would have been pilloried.

Indeed, Christopher -- the Damascus pilgrim, 27 visits for naught, Hafez Assad's favorite windup toy -- was routinely pilloried for a lot less. Being stiffed by the dictator of Syria is bad, but not half as bad as being dissed by the woodsmen of Kosovo.

Moreover, Christopher had the virtue of making no pretense of toughness. The self-proclaimed daughter of Munich, on the other hand, has specialized in a policy of assertive bluff. Her most remarkable achievement has been to make one wistful for Warren Christopher.