Madeleine Albright has already earned herself a footnote in the 2008 election by appearing as a household god standing behind Hillary Clinton as the senator conceded defeat in Iowa. Ms. Albright, 71, was also among the Clinton old guard quickly put out to grass in an effort to counter the youthful surge of Barack Obama: When Mrs. Clinton welcomed her New Hampshire victory she was surrounded by bright young faces.

In “Memo to the President Elect: How We Can Restore America’s Reputation and Leadership” (HarperCollins, 303 pages, $26.95), Ms. Albright, President Clinton’s secretary of state and a senior adviser to Mrs. Clinton on foreign policy, would appear, from her convoluted discussion of whether to refer to the president as “he” or “she,” to be directing her thoughts to the woman we may one day call Clinton 44. But that is to get ahead of ourselves.

The Democratic landscape is fast shifting, giving a whole new meaning to Ms. Albright’s remark that “I have had to guess what will happen between the fall of 2007 and the end of 2008. This is nerve wracking because so little can be ruled out.” Quite so.

Who will be the president-elect this time next year is up in the air. The reader therefore finds Ms. Albright’s foreign policy proscriptions accompanied by echoes of half-baked remarks offered by Messrs. Obama and Huckabee.

How, for example, would she persuade Senator Obama to abandon his idea of paying personal visits to the world’s top tyrants? Where should she start with Governor Huckabee, whose ignorance of the intelligence report on Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the lifting of martial law in Pakistan, and so much else, betrays a candidate way out of his depth?

She considers Mr. Obama’s idea “one of the least useful gimmicks,” because she believes “the first 100 days” gambit offers an unnecessary hostage to fortune. Franklin Roosevelt invented the idea, but he was addressing a single issue, the Depression. Foreign leaders feel less inclined to fall in with an American president’s wishes than the Federal Reserve. When President Carter tried the “100 days” trick, he soon came undone.

But she backs Mr. Obama’s contention that words can be a means of change when she praises President Kennedy, whose “enthusiasm and eloquence seemed to embody an America sure of its direction and skilled in the art of bringing others along.” She believes good public diplomacy, as performed by great presidents such as Ronald Reagan, can go a long way to changing the world.

As for talking to dictators, she recalls FDR’s remark about Hitler that “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it.” As a Czech who fled Nazism, she is under no illusion that jaw-jaw is always better than war-war. Yet she concedes that “it is sometimes necessary to do business with genuinely villainous people, though you would be well advised, when you do, not to drink toasts or smile in front of cameras.”

She points out that while Vice President Cheney was insisting that America should not talk to North Korea, Kim Jong Il bought a nuclear bomb. When the Bush administration began talking to him, he agreed to stop.

Ms. Albright believes that America’s contempt for international law and the Geneva Conventions has caused our reputation in the world to plummet, though hers is by no means a straight partisan account of where the Bush administration has gone wrong. She believes something important has been lost since the sympathy evoked in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on America. But she is optimistic.

“You must begin with the understanding that our right to lead is no longer widely accepted,” she tells her president. “We have lost moral legitimacy … To many, the Statue of Liberty has been replaced in the mind’s eye by a hooded figure with electrodes … As soon as you begin to speak, America’s voice will change … Around the globe, ears that have closed will open at least for a moment; so too will minds.”

She is evenhanded in her criticism, even traducing her old boss President Clinton, whose “first year was marked by undisciplined meetings in which junior political advisors were allowed to participate and the talking went on forever without decisions being made.”

She offers a complex and nuanced approach to policy and mostly spares the neo-conservatives criticism. When it comes to specific proposals she suggests: addressing world poverty and green issues; moving, like President Reagan, toward worldwide nuclear disarmament, and acknowledging that Russia under President Putin has to find its own way back to democracy.

More controversially, she believes President Bush was right not to set a timetable for our withdrawal from Iraq, “but wrong in arguing that the presence of our troops will somehow prevent catastrophe.” Like Senator Biden, she believes “it may be that the only way to keep Iraq together is to allow it to divide.”

Although force against Iran should be a last resort, she suggests that “force may in the end prove necessary and you should keep your contingency plans updated.” We should talk to the Iranians, if only to find out what they are thinking, but always behind closed doors, in secret.

Al Qaeda should be attacked “relentlessly and at its most vulnerable points,” and if that means in Pakistan, then that is fine, too, though we should keep our plans to ourselves. “Ally or not, it would be a mistake to provide more than the most minimal advance notice,” she writes.

She believes in strongly supporting Israel, but not in trying to remake the Middle East. “We must accept that transforming the Arab world is not our job.”

Ms. Albright offers tough and reasonable suggestions to overcome difficult and perhaps intractable problems, and this book, elegantly written with the help of a ghost, Bill Woodward, is a valuable primer on foreign policy for the general reader as well as presidential candidates.

nwapshott@nysun.com