Zbigniew Brzezinski on trying to control the whole world

"Zbig" Brzezinski, circa 1993 (you have to read to the end to find out about the green tint!)

Zbigniew Brzezinski was Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser during his term as President. And he was seen as the leading hardliner of that Administration, whose chief opponent in that regard was Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. And during the Reagan Administration, it often sounded like he was as hardline as any of the Reaganauts.

But he comes from the "realist" school of foreign policy. And appreciating the need to firmly grasp reality is a tremendously better perspective in general than the faith-and-ideology-based approach of the neoconservatives and their more traditionally rightwing allies like Dark Lord Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. It may also be that Brzezinski's perspective just shifted over the years. Or maybe people didn't appreciate the nuances of his approach.

In any case, he has been one of the strongest critics of the Iraq War, both before the invasion and all during the still-unfolding disaster.

So it's an interesting exercise now to look into his 1993 book Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century and to see some of how he viewed the immediate post-Cold War world. His final chapter is called "The Illusion of Control". He thought that political conditions in the world of 15 years ago were characterized by four areas, all of which were in "a dynamic and interactive expansion": physical power, political activism, personal expectations, and, the pace of societal change.

Interestingly enough, even in the case of political activism, he argued, "It is an illusion, however, to think that change in any of the [four] above dimensions is truly controlled by mankind." Each of them, in his view, had an internal dynamic that had to be taken into account. Here is what he said in that regard about political activism and the pace of social change:

Much the same is true of the other two major dimensions of our changing reality. Political activism is not necessarily tantamount to the establishment of an effectively functioning democracy. It is, however, a process that involves ever-increasing social demands for participation in decision making, for human rights, and for limits on the unequal distribution not only of power but also of privilege. It transforms a politically passive humanity into an activist mass yearning for a sense of direction. ...

Finally, societal change dramatically alters within the life span of a single generation both the prevailing culture and the socio-economic infrastructure, and does so at a pace that is at least equivalent to what used to transpire within the time span of a century. The interaction of technology, education, travel, and modern communications has redefined totally the meaning of time and distance and has generated rapid alterations - on the subjective level - in the social mores, and—on the objective level - in the social context.

Of course, a large part of the charm of reading and writing about things at the level of a Grand Theory like this is that you can pretty much squeeze any kind of particular policy prescription of your own into them. Or, to put it another way, they don't necessarily say much.

But given how far off the tracks of reality the operative conceptions of the Cheney-Bush administration's foreign policy have gone, what looked like goody-two-shoes generalizations a decade and a half ago can look more like feet-firmly-on-the-ground pragmatism now. After all, we now live in a world where two of the leading neoconservative ideologues, former Bush speechwriter and hagiographer David Frum and Richard Perle, former head of the Defense Policy Board and one of the main instigators of the Iraq War, wrote a book entitled An End to Evil (2003). One in which they argue about their vague bogeyman called Terror and their glorious war on it:

Throughout the war [the so-called "war on terror"], the advocates of a strong policy against terror have had one great advantage over those who prefer the weaker line: We have offered concrete recommendations equal to the seriousness of the threat, and the soft-liners have not, because we have wanted to fight, and they have not. For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation's great cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are fighting to win— to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.

And these great prophets of Utopia lay out their own Grand Theory of a world controlled by the virtuous United States of America. The book's last paragraph, which begins with a Bircherite sneer at the United Nations, says:

We mentioned before the strange feeling of the UN headquarters on a quiet weekend afternoon. A visitor can sink into one of the quaint futuristic chairs in the corridors, close his or her eyes, and dream for a minute the dream that built the place. The authors of this book are not immune to that dream - even as we recognize that the UN has traduced and betrayed it. A world at peace; a world governed by law; a world in which all peoples are free to find their own destinies: That dream has not yet come true, it will not come true soon, but if it ever does come true, it will be brought into being by American armed might and defended by American might, too. America's vocation is not an imperial vocation. Our vocation is to support justice with power. It is a vocation that has earned us terrible enemies. It is a vocation that has made us, at our best moments, the hope of the world. (my emphasis)

That's their Utopian dream, these men who want to purge the world of evil through bombs, bullets and torture. An endless series of Iraq Wars, in other words, stretching into the indefinite future.

The foolish, militaristic vision of Perle and Frum is indeed very inferior to Brzezinski's recognition that there are processes in the world that have to be recognized and understood in order for human beings to influence their effects on the world in constructive ways. Not even a "single superpower" or a "hyperpower" like the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union can control those processes, and certainly not acting on its own.

In nuclear arms control, to take just one example, the knowledge of how to make a bomb is known to human beings. That knowledge is not going to just disappear from the world, short of an all-out nuclear war and Nuclear Winter, or some comparable catastrophe. So we desperately need effective international arms control agreements that take full account of that reality. Instead, the grand idealists of the Bush Administration have reduced "counter proliferation" to an excuse for invading Iraq, and also Iran, though the latter is still avoidable. Elsewhere, the proliferation dynamic was allowed to continue for the last 6 1/2 years, accelerated by the Cheney-Bush policy of attacking "evil" countries that don't yet have the deterrent of nuclear weapons (Iraq, maybe Iran) but not "evil" countries that supposed do (North Korea).

Bzezinski certainly had a more realistic understanding of the limits of American power in 1993 than the neocon fantasists of 2003 and today:

In such a setting, even though America will remain for some time to come the peerless superpower, its effective global sway may lack authority. American power by itself will be insufficient to impose the American concept of "a new world order." Just as important, the inclination toward cultural hedonism may make it more difficult for America to develop a shared language with those major portions of mankind that will feel they are excluded from meaningful participation in world affairs. As a consequence, they are likely to be on the lookout for some mobilizing message and some relevant example around which to rally in a comprehensive challenge to the global status quo. (my emphasis)

And, when somebody's right, they're right. Brzezinski in 1993 on dealings with the Islamic world ("Moslem" seemed to be the preferred American spelling at that time, though "Muslim" is now standard):

The West should understand that the 1 billion Moslems will not be impressed by a West that is perceived as preaching to them the values of consumerism, the merits of amorality, and the blessings of atheism. To many Moslems, the West's (and especially America's) message is repulsive. Moreover, the attempt to portray "fundamentalist" Islam as the new central threat to the West - the alleged successor in that role to communism - is grossly oversimplified. Politically, not all of Islam—in fact, relatively little - is militantly fundamentalist; and there is precious little unity in the political world of Islam. That philosophically much of Islam rejects the Western definition of modernity is another matter, but that is not a sufficient basis for perceiving a politically very diversified Moslem world - which ranges from black West Africa, through Arab North Africa and the Middle East, Iran and Pakistan, Central and South Asia, all the way to Malaysia and Indonesia - as almost ready to embark (armed with nuclear weapons) on a holy war against the West. For America to act on that assumption would be to run the risk of engaging in a self-fulfilling prophecy. (my emphasis)

He also had some useful thoughts on the increasing significance of religion as a social and political force. And he elaborates the point mentioned in one of the quotes above, that for a large part of the world, many things in everyday American life appear morally repulsive. That doesn't mean that their view is somehow more cosmically correct than ours, or vice versa. But it does mean that it's foolish to assume that the whole world wants to be like America. They don't.

He also predicts, and I think this has been borne out, that "the world's ideological discourse in the foreseeable future is likely to be surprisingly uniform", with formulas about democracy and human rights widely used. As he noted, "Only very fringe groups dare to profess openly their contempt for or rejection of democracy."

He uses an intriguing phrase, "texture of life" to describe these differences between the comparative hedonism of American life and the poverty and deprivation of a large part of the world. This is also a thought-provoking observation:

It is ironical that when the world was enormous, separated by weeks and even months of sailing time, the human condition in terms of man's relationship to nature and in terms of man's self-comprehension was in fact much more uniform than it is today, when distance is now only a matter of hours and an instant global perception of events is possible through television. Any further widening of the gulf in the texture of life, though that gulf may be currently somewhat obscured by the universal adoption of democratic rhetoric, will certainly make it more difficult to cope with the world's tangible socioeconomic problems and political dilemmas.

He also cautions against any overestimation of the appeal of democracy and what has come to be called the "market economy", in their American forms or otherwise:

It would be a mistake, however, to see the above as a sign of a universal surge in the appeal and staying power of democracy as such. It would be an even more egregious error to confuse the rhetorical uniformity with philosophical consensus. Though the notions of "democracy" are fashionable, in much of the world the practice of democracy is still quite superficial and democratic institutions remain vulnerable. There is no shared global understanding of the real meaning of democracy, and especially to what degree democracy should go beyond the political realm and also entail at least minimum guarantees for individual material well-being. Confusion is even more evident in the case of the concept of "the free market." Today, it is also triumphant—with "Thatcherism" held in higher repute than Marxism. But in many parts of the world the understanding of its inner workings, and of its cultural mainsprings, is quite shallow. Moreover, unless democratic practice, and especially the economic performance of the free market system, leads to a demonstrable improvement in social conditions, it is only a question of time before a negative reaction to these concepts sets in.

Brzezinski's view of foreign affairs isn't the be-all and end-all of an optimal foreign policy.

But if we can get the country's foreign policy back to being run by reality-based officials, we will definitely be able to achieve a better set of problems than the ones Cheney and Bush have created.

It's worth noting, though, that Brzezinski describes his own view as emphasizing that for the West in general and the United States in particular to play the most constructive role it can in addressing global problems, we have to recognize that the effort "will succeed or flounder on the critically important philosophical/cultural dimension." He expresses hope that the "green" movement will play a critical role in that larger process:

... [C]ultural and philosophical change is a matter of historical waves and not of disparate policy decisions. That change can be influenced by a heightened moral and ethical awareness but it cannot be directed politically. Change can only come out of a fundamental reevaluation of the core beliefs that guide social conduct and from a recognition of the need for a globally shared concept of the meaning of the good life, with the latter based on notions of self-restraint in social self-gratification. The West's ecological movement — whatever may be said about some of its specific advocacy — may be the first step toward such self-limitation. That may prove to be the movement's greatest philosophical contribution, auguring the emergence of a broader acceptance of the principle of self-denial as the point of departure for a globally shared moral consensus. (my emphasis)

Gosh, who knew that under that "realist" exterior was a hippie nature freak yearning to get out? :) :)

Tags: iraq war, zbigniew brzezinski