In the years since Zbigniew Brzezinski published his first book, The Permanent Purge, nearly six decades ago, he has been in turn a prominent scholar of the Cold War, one of the leading foreign policy public intellectuals in the United States, National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and, increasingly after the turn of the century, a critic of U.S. foreign policy. Still an active presence and a strong voice in international affairs, he published his latest book, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power, in 2012 and continues to scrutinize U.S. engagement around the globe with a keen, skeptical eye. Brzezinski has never been afraid to speak his mind and remains for some a controversial figure.
Charles Gati has produced a valuable, informative book that examines the many facets of Brzezinski’s life and works and seeks to place the man, his era, and his writings within the broader context of the United States, along with its adversaries and partners, adapting to a changing world. The book is also a classic immigrant success story. Part personal reminiscences and part academic analysis, the volume features chapters by scholars, former officials, journalists, former students, and—at the end—a section in which Gati interviews Brzezinski about his life. This is not a conventional Festschrift, and it contains some chapters that are critical of Brzezinski’s writings and policies. But it succeeds in highlighting the unique contributions made by this scholar/practitioner.
Like his fellow Central European immigrant Henry Kissinger (with whom, the book argues, he has enjoyed a collegial, not an antagonistic, relationship over many decades), Brzezinski was able with perseverance and strong willpower to rise up in the traditional foreign policy establishment, constantly contending with suspicions that his Polish background made it impossible for him to view the Soviet Union objectively. Indeed, when Jimmy Carter appointed Brzezinski, former Defense Secretary Robert Lovett opined: “We shouldn’t have a National Security Adviser like that who’s not really an American. I can’t imagine anyone negotiating with the Russians with his loathing and suspicion” (p. 17).
Brzezinski’s record as an analyst of the Soviet system and its strengths and weaknesses has largely been vindicated by history, even though some of his ideas were contested at the time. His early writings focused on the theory of totalitarianism, which he modified to explain the post-Stalinist evolution. He understood the weaknesses of the command economy and the rigid party organization and its obsession with control, eventually predicting in his book The Grand Failure that the system had inherent weaknesses that would facilitate its collapse. Mark Kramer reminds us that Brzezinski’s analysis of Soviet-style regimes remains a “rich, provocative, stimulating source” (p. 58).
Brzezinski’s works were roundly denounced—and avidly read—in the USSR, as was clear during a unique U.S.-Soviet conference on Eastern Europe, organized by Charles Gati and Oleg Bogomolov, that took place under the auspices of the International Research and Exchange Council in the turbulent fall of 1989. I was part of the delegation with Gati and Brzezinski, who was making his first visit ever to the Soviet Union. Also in the delegation was Marin Strmecki, who vividly recounts the scene in his chapter here. Lecturing to a hushed, standing-room-only crowd at the venerable Soviet Diplomatic Academy, Brzezinski told his audience that the USSR must recognize that its East European allies had the right to self-determination, and he praised Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalizing actions to date but said they had to go further. At the end of his speech, the auditorium erupted in thunderous applause. He went on from there to visit Katyń, the place that symbolized the massacres of Polish officers by Soviet troops at the beginning of World War II. The USSR had only just begun to admit the truth about Katyń, and he held a groundbreaking televised meeting with Soviet and Polish officials. The critic of Communism had become a player in the system’s demise.
Brzezinski’s years in the White House coincided with some of the most dramatic moments in U.S. foreign policy—the normalization of relations with China, the signing of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, the Arab-Israeli Camp David peace accords, the Iran hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the signing of the Panama Canal Treaty. The book argues that more was achieved in these years than in many other administrations; it also discusses the rivalry between Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance for the president’s ear and for control of the agenda.
The legacy of Brzezinski’s White House years remains controversial. He was the author of the policy of arming the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet occupation. Although this policy undoubtedly helped accelerate the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Mujahideen were the forbearers of the Taliban and ultimately of al Qaida. Brzezinski says he has no regrets about his support of the Mujahideen. Others might disagree.
In the 21st century, Brzezinski became a harsh critic of the invasion of Iraq and many other aspects of the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration. He also believes that the decision to stay in Afghanistan and try to modernize it was a mistake—as Soviet leaders had found out in the 1980s at great cost. Brzezinski has also been increasingly outspoken in his criticism of Israel’s policies in recent years, although he tells Gati that the only foreign country in which he feels at home—apart from Poland—is Israel. He argues for a long-term view of Russia’s evolution beyond the shadow of Putin and continues to believe that the younger generation will eventually change Russia for the better. (The Levada Center’s periodic surveys of Russian young people raise questions about this optimistic notion.)
Brzezinski’s rise and continuing influence are a testimony to the unrivaled opportunities the United States offers its immigrants, especially those with his talents, intellectual strengths, and drive. As Brzezinski himself points out at the end of the book, America is the only country in which someone called “Zbigniew Brzezinski” can make a name for himself without changing his name.
Book title: Zbig By Edward Luce. Avid Reader Press; 560 pages; $35. Bloomsbury; £30
Editor: These paragraphs attempt to inflate the political reputation of Brzezinski, as the ghost like apparition as Kissinger fades from popular memory! This sentence offer clues to what Luce’s politcs are about:
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Editor: Please note my placing some sentences in italics for emphasis!
Brzezinski further tightened the screws by picking up where Kissinger had left off, persuading Carter to normalise relations with China. The Soviet leadership’s feeling of isolation seemed to curb their behaviour. And after Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he financed the mujahideen insurgency which, over the next decade, weakened the Kremlin.
As the sun went down on the Soviet Union, Brzezinski’s reward was to be treated in Poland as a national hero. More surprising was a visit to Moscow in 1989. Addressing the foreign service’s Diplomatic Academy, Brzezinski was his usual uncompromising self, laying out the need for a market economy, democracy and a loose federation of republics. When he finished he was met with raucous applause. To the Americans in the room, that moment marked the cold war’s end.
The question of why Brzezinski’s accomplishments are not more recognised has many answers. Kissinger was deceitful and charming; Brzezinski honest and too often rude. One was a brilliant self-publicist; the other had no time for Washington games. Nobody ever doubted who commanded Kissinger’s loyalty: himself. Brzezinski was thought by the WASP establishment to be putting Poland first. Whenever Carter was critical of Israel—and tensions were high in the lead-up to the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978—Brzezinski was accused of antisemitism, a charge this book refutes.
But the main reason is that Carter’s presidency was overshadowed by the mishandling of the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the hostage-taking that blighted his last year in office. Mr Luce argues that, in the run up to the revolution, Brzezinski’s advice was ignored. That does not quite wash: on other matters he was usually able to bulldoze the State Department aside. The Iranians delayed the release of the hostages until five minutes after Ronald Reagan took office. This ensured Reagan got the credit—just as he did for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Neither Brzezinski nor Kissinger ever served in government again, but both retained a taste for power. During the presidential campaign, Kissinger had sought to ingratiate himself with Reagan by blaming the mess in Iran on Carter’s preference for human rights. When he heard of Kissinger’s muck-spreading, Brzezinski’s mordant retort was typical: “I conclude that, although power corrupts, the absence of power corrupts absolutely.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Choice is superficially an election-year foreign policy tour d’horizon, more sophisticated in analysis and recommendations, and certainly more statesmanlike in temper, than current writings by the Bush administration’s supporters. It is a nuanced expression of the conventional wisdom among American foreign policy experts, and a condemnation of the self-defeating arrogance of the Bush administration’s conduct during the past two and a half years.
“‘Globalization’ in its essence means global interdependence,” Brzezinski writes. Therefore the American choice today is between attempting to create “a new global system based on shared interests,” or attempting to “use its sovereign global power primarily to entrench its own security.” The latter risks ending in “self-isolation, growing national paranoia, and increasing vulnerability to a globally spreading anti-American virus.” There would even be a risk of the United States becoming a garrison state.
One might think there are other, wider possibilities for a United States uneasily enjoying its “unilateral moment” (as the neoconservatives put it), while seeing itself as “the indispensable nation…standing taller because it sees further” (as the last Democratic secretary of state said). However, Brzezinski implicitly rejects the notion that the United States might be better off if it modified its notion of national mission and concomitant aggrandizement of national power in acknowledgment of the good sense in George Kennan’s counsel (in this journal over four years ago) that for Americans “to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world [is] unthought-through, vainglorious, and undesirable.” Kennan added that “this planet is never going to be ruled from any single political center, whatever its military power.”
Brzezinski’s book therefore needs to be considered at two levels. The first is within the political assumptions in which it has been written, undoubtedly shared by most American foreign policy analysts and political figures today. The second would take account of the skeptical perspective articulated by Kennan and question the assumptions widely held among American officials and experts concerning the desirability or happy inevitability, and benevolent consequences, of American global hegemony.
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This developed against a background of anxiety about the growing hostility of the Islamic states toward the US, coincident with Samuel Huntington’s argument that a war between civilizations was on its way. The attacks of September 2001 brought uncertainty to an end. The Bush administration launched its “War on Terror,” which despite President Bush’s explicit denial that Islam was at fault, was widely and emotionally seen as resembling a war between civilizations, with Islamic militants taken as representative of much of Islam and the United States as champion of the West (uneasily followed by its traditional allies).
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Brzezinski deplores the administration’s determination to disconnect the war it had declared from its political and historical sources. He writes that The US inclination, in the spring of 2002, to embrace even the more extreme forms of Israeli suppression of the Palestinians as part of the struggle against terrorism is a case in point. The unwillingness to recognize a historical connection between the rise of anti-American terrorism and America’s involvement in the Middle East makes the formulation of an effective strategic response to terrorism that much more difficult.
Thus, he writes, an initial surge of solidarity with the United States that found expression in Europe and elsewhere just after the attacks waned as the Bush administration revealed its view of the struggle and of the appropriate response:
Culminating in the “axis of evil” formulation, the American perspective on terrorism increasingly came to be viewed as divorced from terrorism’s political context. The nearly unanimous global support for America gave way to increasing skepticism regarding the official US formulations of the shared threat.
Combined with the administration’s treatment of its supposed allies and its attacks on the United Nations and other international institutions, this skepticism was responsible for the international isolation in which the United States found itself by the time it decided to invade Iraq.
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Editor: the final paragraphs of William Pfaff essay are instructive of Brzezinski’s Foreign Policy.
The ultimate criticism to be made of the position Brzezinski shares with many other foreign policy experts is that it ignores or denies the importance of what historically has been the principal force in international relations—the competitive assertion of national interests, founded on divergent values and ambitions among nations, assuredly including democratic ones.
His argument presumes that such differences will find resolution in some version of an end of history, achieved through convergence with the United States. Brzezinski and those who share his views would seem to believe in what has been called the Whig interpretation of history: that history’s purpose has been to lead up to us. The pursuit of national interest by other states produces the “global chaos” against which he warns. Condoleezza Rice made the identical argument, as in a speech last year to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, saying that policies based on balance of power are the road to war.
This position rejects both the classical Western view of history, which is not progressive, and the realist school of political philosophy dominant in past Western political thought, which traditionally has taken a disabused view of human nature and political possibility. The progressive view is a manifestation of hope, or of faith. It amounts to an ideology, teleological in nature. It denies the proposition that hegemony produces hubris, inviting the attention of Nemesis, ending in destitution.
The notion that the United States has an exemplary national mission has always been central to American political thought and rhetoric. In Woodrow Wilson’s view (and that of many in the US today) this mission was divine in origin. Wilson (a president respected by today’s notably secular neoconservatives) held that the hand of God “has led us in this way,” and that we are the mortal instruments of His will—a view that has repeatedly found an echo in the discourse of George W. Bush. This sense of mission lies behind the American claim to an exceptional role in international society.
Brzezinski argues that the practical consequence today of America’s global security role and its extraordinary global ubiquity [is to give the United States] the right to seek more security than other countries. It needs forces with a decisive worldwide deployment capability. It must enhance its intelligence (rather than waste resources on a huge homeland security bureaucracy) so that threats to America can be forestalled. It must maintain a comprehensive technological edge over all potential rivals…. But it should also define its security in ways that help mobilize the self-interest of others. That comprehensive task can be pursued more effectively if the world understands that the trajectory of America’s grand strategy is toward a global community of shared interest.
This belief that the United States has a unique historical mission—whether or not divinely commissioned—is not open to logical refutation. But an American policy that rests on a self-indulgent fiction must be expected to come to a bad end.
Every country has a “story” it tells itself about its place in the contemporary world. We are familiar enough with the American story, beginning with the City on a Hill and progressing through Manifest Destiny toward Woodrow Wilson’s conviction we are “to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty…. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth.” The current version of the story says that this exalted destiny is fatefully challenged by rogue nations with nuclear weapons, failed states, and the menace of Islamic extremists. Something close to Huntington’s war of civilizations has begun. National mobilization has already taken place. Years of struggle lie ahead.
The “isolation” of the United States today is caused by the fact that its claims about the threat of terrorism seem to others grossly exaggerated, and its reaction, as Brzezinski himself argues, dangerously disproportionate. Most advanced societies have already had, or have, their wars with “terrorism”: the British with the IRA, the Spanish with the Basque separatist ETA, the Germans, Italians, and Japanese with their Red Brigades, the French with Palestinian and Algerian terrorists, Greeks, Latin Americans, and Asians with their own varieties of extremists.
America’s principal allies no longer believe its national “story.” They have tried to believe in it, and have been courteous about it even while skepticism grew. They are alarmed about what has happened to the United States under the Bush administration, and see no good coming from it. They are struck by how impervious Americans seem to be to the notion that our September 11 was not the defining event of the age, after which “nothing could be the same.” They are inclined to think that the international condition, like the human condition, is in fact very much the same as it has always been. It is the United States that has changed. They are disturbed that American leaders seem unable to understand this.
When American officials and policy experts come to Europe saying that “everything has changed,” warning that allied governments must “do something” about the anti-Americanism displayed last year in connection with the Iraq invasion, the Western European reaction is often to marvel at the Americans’ inability to appreciate that the source of the problem lies in how the United States has conducted itself since September 2001. They find this changed United States rather menacing. An Irish international banker recently observed to me that when Europeans suggest to visiting Americans that things have changed in Europe too, as a direct result of America’s policies, “it’s as if the Americans can’t hear.” A French writer has put it this way: it has been like discovering that a respected, even beloved, uncle has slipped into schizophrenia. When you visit him, his words no longer connect with the reality around him. It seems futile to talk about it with him. The family, embarrassed, is even reluctant to talk about it among themselves.
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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