The stakes for the US and Europe in NATO

The national security expert and adviser to Presidents Zbigniew Brzezinski, who passed away just recently, was a devout Cold Warrior. But he also tended toward a realist perspective. That manifested itself in the run-up to the Iraq War, when he made his opposition to invading Iraq very clear and public.

In an article from 2003, Hegemonic Quicksand The National Interest Winter 2003/04, he looked at the role of the European Union in US foreign policy in Eurasia and the Middle East, particularly the Islamist challenge in its various forms.

The current anti-Europe policy of the Trump Family Business Administration has given the US/European divisions over the Iraq War renewed immediate relevance. Brzezinski's article was written at that now-almost-forgotten moment after the ousting of Saddam Hussein's government when it still seemed possible that violence was quickly winding down in Iraq. War opponent Brzezinski even writes in this article, "The decisive military victories in the 1991 and the 2003 campaigns against Iraq firmly established the United States as the sole external arbiter in the area." It's jarring now to read material from later 2003 which refer to US victory in Iraq as an accomplished reality.

NATO has never been free of conflict among its various partners. At some times, that conflict has been significant. NATO formally began with the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949, constituted as a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union. For the first 52 years of its existence, until 1991, the Soviet Union also still existed. After the fall of the USSR, NATO became an alliance in search of a mission. Brzezinski's 2003 article focused on NATO as a force multiplier and essential partner for the United States. But partner for what?

At the beginning of the article, he forecasts, "For the next several decades, the most volatile and dangerous region of the world - with the explosive potential to plunge the world into chaos - will be the crucial swathe of Eurasia between Europe and the Far East." He describes that area as "the unstable region that currently extends from approximately the Suez Canal to Xinjiang, and from the Russo-Kazakh border to southern Afghanistan - almost like a triangle on the map. In the case of both areas, internal instability has served as a magnet for external major power intervention and rivalry." He also refers the triangle he describes as "the Global Balkans," a term that doesn't seem to have caught on.

And it's in managing the crises in that region in which he sees the mission of NATO consisting going forward from that point. He surveys other significant potential allies for that purpose, and explains why he sees them as less useful than NATO.

He writes that Israel and the United States have historically been close diplomatically and that it could "not only to be America's military base but also to make a significant contribution to any required U.S. military engagement." Israel does have the largest armed forces of any country in the region. And has nuclear weapons.

But, as he notes drily, "American and Israeli interests in the region are not entirely congruent." Brzezinski sees the US has having a strong long-term interest in decent relations with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), both of which Israel has no interest in strengthening. Although Israel can find common interest with the Kingdom and the UAE on issues like opposing the Alawite regime in Syria and regarding Iran as an adversary.

Brzezinski notes, though, that until there is a real settlement of the Palestinian issue, Israel's value as an active military ally to the US in the Middle East will be limited. Prospects for an Israel-Palestine peace agreement look considerably less optimistic in 2017 than they did in 2003.

He sees India's potential as a strategic ally limited by the intensification of both Hindu and Muslim sectarian politics. The increasing influence of Hindu nationalism in India since 2003 is part of this trend. He writes that "the more radical of the Hindu politicians tend to present" the "war on terrorism" as a war against Islam. This is problematic for reasons that should be obvious. But it does fit with the US Republican Party's understanding.

India also has long-standing tensions with its neighbors China and India. The conflict with Pakistan has the dispute over the Muslim-majority province of Kashmir, which is currently party of India at its center.

Brzezinski notes the trend, already strong in 2003, that "Russia has come to see its Muslim neighbors as the source of a potentially explosive political and demographic threat, and the Russian political elite are increasingly susceptible to anti-Islamic religious and racist appeals." Both of which are potentially factors that should theoretically facilitate an anti-Muslim-extremism alliance between the US and Russia. But Brzezinski also points to Russia's record in Afghanistan and Chechnya as a major factor in giving Muslim countries in the region a dim view of Russia. In addition, "the newly independent Central Asian states [which include many Muslims] increasingly define their modern history as a struggle for emancipation from Russian colonialism."

So Brzezinski saw the most promising ally of the US in promoting stability as being the nations of the European Union:

Only Europe, increasingly organized as the European Union and militarily integrated through NATO, has the potential capability in the political, military and economic realms to pursue jointly with America the task of engaging the various Eurasian peoples on a differentiated and flexible basis-in the promotion of regional stability and of progressively widening trans-Eurasian cooperation. And a supranational European Union linked to America would be less suspect in the region as a returning colonialist bent on consolidating or regaining its special economic interests.

And he states an essential condition for European-American cooperation:

European engagement will not occur, however, if it is expected to consist of simply following America's lead. The war on terrorism can be the opening wedge for engagement in the Global Balkans, bur it cannot be the definition of that engagement. This the Europeans, less traumatized by the September ll attacks, understand better than the Americans. It is also why any joint effort by the Atlantic community will have to be based on a broad strategic consensus regarding the longterm nature of the task at hand. [my emphasis]

The nuclear agreement with Iran is an example of what cooperation with the US and Russia can accomplish in that region. Brzezinski specifically cites the initiative taken by the EU at the time to get that process moving. It took over a decade to get it done. And it took a more cooperative arrangement between the US and Europe than the Cheney-Bush Administration practiced in 2003 and which the Trump Family Business Administration is clearly eager to jettison. Or, jettisoned: it may time to speak in the past tense about that.

But some of the issues on which he focuses are also reminders now of opportunities missed: promoting an Israel-Palestine peace agreement, stabilizing Iraq (a sadly forlorn hope in retrospect) and improving relations with Iran. The latter is something on which significant progress has been made. But Trump seems to be signaling - he sends so many confusing signals - that he's signing on to the Saudi and Israeli push for war with Iran. So it's not only on global climate change that the Trump Family Business Administration is veering away from common ground with the EU. "Active strategic partnership between the United States and the European Union would also make it more likely that Iran could eventually be transformed from a regional ogre into a regional stabilizer." But stabilization of Iran and the Middle East is the opposite of what Trump and his Defense Secretary "Mad Dog" Mattis want.

Brzezinski's article from 14 years ago is a reminder of the stakes involved in the US downgrading NATO and undermining partnership with the European allies. NATO since 1949 has been a power multiplier for the US and has generally supported US policy in the world. And, as Brzezinski points out, achieving a more stable and constructive situation in the "Global Balkans" triangle requires for now and the foreseeable future close cooperation between Europe and the US.

NATO survived the crisis provoked by the Iraq War, just as it survived the Suez Crisis of 1956 in the first decade of its existence. Part of the reason surely had to do with the Northern Atlantic economic crisis that started in 2007-8 and created serious problems for European unity, which obviously took a bit hit from the Brexit vote. The US and European partners also found a common interest in NATO Enlargement, as outlined on the official site (my emphasis in italics):

29 March 2004: Accession of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

21 April 2005: Launch of the Intensified Dialogue on Ukraine’s aspirations to NATO membership and related reforms, at an informal meeting of foreign ministers in Vilnius, Lithuania.

21 September 2006: NATO foreign ministers in New York announce the decision to offer an Intensified Dialogue to Georgia.

28-29 November 2006: At the Riga Summit, Allied leaders state that invitations will be extended to MAP countries that fulfil [sic] certain conditions.

2-4 April 2008: At the Bucharest Summit, Allied leaders invite Albania and Croatia to start accession talks; assure the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia that it will be invited once a solution to the issue of the country’s name has been reached with Greece; invite Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro to start Intensified Dialogues; and agree that Georgia and Ukraine will become members in future.

9 July 2008[-] December 2008: Accession Protocols for Albania and Croatia are signed. Allied foreign ministers agree that Georgia should develop an Annual National Programme under the auspices of the NATO-Georgia Commission.

1 April 2009: Accession of Albania and Croatia.

4 December 2009: NATO foreign ministers invite Montenegro to join the MAP.

22 April 2010: NATO foreign ministers invite Bosnia and Herzegovina to join the MAP, authorising the North Atlantic Council to accept the country’s first Annual National Programme only when the immovable property issue has been resolved.

2 December 2015: NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels invite Montenegro to start accession talks to join the Alliance, while encouraging further progress on reforms, especially in the area of rule of law. In a statement on NATO’s “open door” policy, ministers reiterate decisions made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit concerning the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and encourage Bosnia and Herzegovina to undertake the reforms necessary for the country to realise its Euro-Atlantic aspirations and to activate its participation in MAP. Ministers also reiterate their decisions at Bucharest and subsequent decisions concerning Georgia, welcoming the progress the country has made in coming closer to the Alliance and expressing their determination to intensify support for Georgia.

19 May 2016: Allied ministers sign the Accession Protocol, following which Montenegro has ‘Invitee’ status and starts attending North Atlantic Council and other NATO meetings.

5 June 2017: Accession of Montenegro

Ironically, NATO's "out of area" interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and the Middle East, especially Libya, not only served as a common mission that also brought NATO back from the kind of internal strife the Iraq War produced in the alliance. But those actions also helped to tarnish the image of Europe in the crisis area Brzezinski called the Global Balkans.

Even more ironically, the enlargement of NATO membership has brought NATO's value for the Europeans back towards its original purpose. The eastward expansion of membership met with serious resistance from Russia with Georgia in 2008 and then Ukraine in 2014. It's safe to say that the aspirations for NATO membership of Georgia and Ukraine are effectively on indefinite hold. The 2004 expansion included not only more countries from the former Warsaw Pact, but also the three Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Those three had previously been part of the Soviet Union itself, as had Georgia and Ukraine.

Foreign policy "realists," including the late George Kennan and Stephen Walt, warned that in the normal calculation of the Russian government, whether it was Putinist or liberal democratic or whatever else in its orientation, could be expected to treat the enlargement as a national security threat and start to push back against it. Remarkably, though, NATO leaders, including the Bush and Obama Administrations, seemed almost Pollyannish about that warning. In particular, adding Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania committed all other NATO countries to defend those countries in the case of any Russian aggression. But it has never been thought necessary to fortify those three countries as though a Russian invasion might be a likely event, much less an imminent one. And Western policymakers probably seriously underestimated what a dim view that Russian leaders took of NATO military intervention in the Balkans, especially in the Kosovo War.

And Russian strategists much surely be thinking out scenarios in which Russia seizes all or part of those three countries as a way to test the seriousness of NATO commitment to them. Are the US France, Britain, France and Germany prepared to go war with Russia over some occupied strips of land in the Baltic nations? What the Russians did in Georgia and Ukraine, which were aspiring NATO members but not yet part of the pact, were similar actions to that scenario.

Yet both Democrats and Republicans seemed to see NATO expansion as having political and military upsides with relatively small risks on the downside. Cold War triumphalism dulled the collective judgment of our policymakers in many ways.

In the 2002-3 crisis within NATO over Iraq, Russia was actually a political ally of the US in supporting the Iraq War. Vladimir Putin was already President of Russia. But Russia was cooperating with the on the war in Afghanistan, as well. (I've always wondered if there was an element of calculation there in which the Russians thought, yeah, let's allow the United States to learn what an intervention in Afghanistan can be like.) There was still serious tensions over issues like installation of "missile defense" in eastern Europe.

But there was no serious split between the US and the European allies over the need for solidarity in the face Russian aggression directly against NATO members. That was probably in significant part because the prospect of that kind of Russian military aggression wasn't considered a serious possibility.

After the Georgia crisis of 2008 and the Ukraine crisis, the latter including Russia's incorporating the Crimea as its own territory, have shifted those perceptions and calculations in significant ways. Now European leaders have to take into account that the Trump Family Business Administration with its dubious entanglements with Russian interests and its seeming hostility to European unity may not be as committed to supporting NATO allies against Russian pressure. And that's going to affect their willingness to cooperate with the US on "out of area" military and political actions.

This post is part of my efforts to understand the direction that US-European relations in the Trump Era. There are a lot of what-ifs that are difficult to ignore in thinking about NATO. In practical terms, trying to preserve NATO after the fall of the USSR and looking for a new mission for it was probably inevitable. But in retrospect, I have big doubts about the Kosovo War, which I supported at the time. And I think the NATO enlargement was probably not a good idea. Incorporating the Baltic countries directly into NATO and inviting Georgia and Ukraine to eventually join were mistakes, done with far too little realistic consideration of the consequences.

But kicking out the Baltics, for example, would be a dramatically different thing than not incorporating them in the first place. If the US government wants to drastically redefine its relationships to Russia and to oppose rather than support European unity, to do that while minimizing the downsize risks would be a very difficult political and diplomatic task. The Trump Family Business Administration is clearly not capable of pulling off something that complicated while minimizing dangerous disruptions. I'm particularly interested in how the European allies will attempt to minimize risk and damage to themselves while the current US administration attempts to do such a thing. And to do it in what would surely be a blundering way.

Warnings on the Afghanistan-Pakistan War

Zbigniew Brzezinski as Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor was one of the chief advocates and architects of US aid to the Afghan mujaheddin (aka, Muslim terrorists) to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Now he's warning against overcommitting American and NATO forces in that country (Brzezinski warns against repeating Soviet experience by Daniel Dombey Financial Times 07/21/08):

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former US national security adviser and prominent supporter of Barack Obama, has warned the Democratic presidential candidate that he risks repeating the defeat suffered by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Mr Obama has called for up to 10,000 more US troops to be deployed in the country, where the USSR once sent tens of thousands of soldiers only to suffer cataclysmic military failure.

But in an interview with the Financial Times Mr Brzezinski warned: "It is important for US policy in general and for Obama more specifically to recognise that simply putting more troops into Afghanistan is not the entire solution ... We are running the risk of repeating the mistake the Soviet Union made ... Our strategy is getting in deeper and deeper." (my emphasis)

At the Netroots Nation convention, sometime Obama national-security advisor Samantha Power was a participant in the War Pundits panel. In between sessions, I asked her if she thought, given the potentially huge demands of pursuing the Afghanistan War, if we really still had any vital interests there which would justify it.

She replied that she supported Obama's position that it was a necessary war because Afghanistan could again become a haven for Al Qa'ida terrorists and, she said, that was already beginning to happen. She mentioned that one of our advantages in Afghanistan is that we have other NATO troops actively participating. But she also said that Obama as President would need to recognize that he will have to articulate a clear strategy and convince the public that it's necessary.

At the War Pundits panel, a questioner also asked about the Afghanistan War. Power emphasized the point even more strongly about the need for a clear strategy in Afghanistan, saying that at this point we really don't have one.

I took her two answers together to mean that she thinks that presently the current administration has no sound strategy in Afghanistan, and that Obama has yet to articulate one, either. I didn't have the impression that she is an unreflective hawk on the Afghanistan War. She seems to recognize that it's a very risky situation and doesn't seem to imagine that there is some easy answer.

Dombey comments that Brzezinski "depicts himself as a supporter who has declined to join the Obama campaign because of his unwillingness to be kept quiet or on message during the duration of the election."

"This is a very dangerous period of time with very unpredictable consequences," he said, referring to tensions between Iran and Israel and the US. "You have three countries doing a kind of death dance on the basis of confusion, division and fear.

"If we end up with war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran at the same time, can anyone see a more damaging prospect for America's world role than that?" he asked. "That's the fundamental foreign policy dilemma at the back of this election. A four-front war would get us involved for years ... It would be the end of American predominance." (my emphasis)

The "end of American predominance" doesn't sound like an inevitably negative thing to me. Especially if "predominance" means that we are going to be fighting needless and even criminal wars of choice like the one in Iraq.

John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School warns about putting simple faith in "surges", i.e., escalation in the numbers of troops, to accomplish US goals in Afghanistan (War Is More Than Just a Numbers Game: Lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan Britannica blog 07/23/08):

Those who say we never had enough troops there [in Afghanistan] — a chorus that includes Senator Obama — miss the point that levels of violence there were very low for the first five years of our occupation. Indeed, we didn’t go over 10,000 troops in country until 2006. This hardly supports the idea that we have never had enough troops there.

And now that we have over 50,000 soldiers in Afghanistan [this apparently includes all NATO forces], the violence is flaring — in a few areas. Why? The reason is that the Taliban have generated much sympathy with the Pashtuns, who feel disenfranchised by the current government. The more troops we pour in, the more targets we’ll create for disgruntled tribesmen. A better solution would be to negotiate with the Pashtuns in ways that empower them, and to move US and NATO forces in country away from larger bases to an outpost network. Almost the same as in Iraq, except that the outpost network in this case will be more rurally based.

For those who still see greater numbers as the key to victory, let me just remind us all that the military mantra in Vietnam was the call for ever more troops. Well in excess of half a million soldiers at one point. And yet the situation continued to worsen. No, numbers are not the answer in irregular warfare. (my emphasis)

I'm not convinced about Arquilla's suggestion that creating an "outpost network" is the new strategy we need in Afghanistan.

But his post is a real reminder that the superficial chatter from the McCain campaigns and McCain's fan-boys and -girls in the national press about the alleged success of The Surge is distracting attention from what really happened in Iraq during 2007. Violence has receded to pre-2006 levels. But the increase in American troops had little to do with that result as it actually came about:

In Iraq, violence fell for two main reasons: 1) Al Qaeda over-reached in Anbar, alienating Sunnis and making them susceptible to dealing with us; and 2) We shifted some troops off of large operating bases to a dispersed network of small outposts, enabling us to deter violence or respond much more swiftly to it. I had been lobbying since 2004 for the adoption of this "outpost and outreach" strategy (see the discussion in Chapter 7 of my new book, Worst Enemy). It was great to see the immediate impact - a sharp drop in violence - of these changes.

That's actually a very incomplete summary of the reasons, too. The use of bribery in the form of payments to former Sunni insurgent groups played a big role, though this policy militates against the alleged political goals of The Surge to further internal political reconciliation.

Muqtada al-Sadr's decision to impose a cease-fire for much of 2007 on his JAM (Mahdi Army) was also a key reason for the relative decrease in violence toward the end of 2007.

And the really ugly side of that "success" that McCain and the Republicans certainly don't want to emphasize is that the sectarian violence has resulted in a large degree of "ethnic cleansing", although in Iraq it would probably be more accurate to call it "sectarian cleansing" or "religious cleansing". Juan Cole explains in A Social History of the Surge Informed Comment blog 07/24/08:

For the first six months of the troop escalation, high rates of violence continued unabated. That is suspicious. What exactly were US troops doing differently last September than they were doing in May, such that there was such a big change? The answer to that question is simply not clear. Note that the troop escalation only brought US force strength up to what it had been in late 2005. In a country of 27 million, 30,000 extra US troops are highly unlikely to have had a really major impact, when they had not before.

As best I can piece it together, what actually seems to have happened was that the escalation troops began by disarming the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad. Once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night and ethnically cleansed them. Shaab district near Adhamiya had been a mixed neighborhood. It ended up with almost no Sunnis. Baghdad in the course of 2007 went from 65% Shiite to at least 75% Shiite and maybe more. My thesis would be that the US inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods. (my emphasis)

The refugee problem which Cole mentions there has also been a major factor. The International Crisis Group issued a report dated 07/10/08, Failed Responsibility: Iraqi Refugees in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, which says:

A refugee crisis was feared before the coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003, but it came later than anticipated, and on a greater scale. It started not because of the military action, but two years later, when American efforts to rebuild the country faltered, violence escalated, and civilians became the targets of insurgent groups and sectarian militias. And while exact numbers are uncertain, the scale of the problem is not in dispute: today, Iraq’s refugee crisis – with some two and a half million outside the country and the same number internally displaced – ranks as the world’s second in terms of numbers, preceded only by Afghanistan and ahead of Sudan. While the security situation in Iraq shows progress, the refugee crisis will endure for some time and could worsen if that progress proves fleeting. (my emphasis)

It's worth keeping in mind that the two worst refugee crises in the world right now are in the two countries we're actively involved in "liberating": Afghanistan and Iraq.

And with the refugee problem already greater in Afghanistan and Iraq, what will it be like in Afghanistan after further escalation of the war?

Editor Katrina vanden Heuvel also calls for Rethinking Afghanistan The Nation Online 07/22/2008:

[I]t is troubling that as he shows sound thinking on Iraq, Obama also continues to talk about escalating the US military presence in Afghanistan. (This holds true not just for Senator Obama, but for most Democrats in Washington, who argue mantra-like that we need to leave Iraq in order to free additional troops to serve in Afghanistan.) Shouldn't serious thought be given to how Senator Obama's necessary agenda for healthcare and progressive economic reform might be sacrificed to yet another trillion-dollar war without end?

That's why I would urge Senator Obama to ... think long and hard about the dangers to his agenda – both domestically and internationally – of extricating the US from one disastrous war and heading into another. ...

Tags: afghanistan war, samantha power, zbigniew brzezinski

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

Iraq War critics: Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski was President Carter's national security adviser and was considered a hardliner on relations with the Soviet Union, then and later.

But he is also one of the so-called "realist" school, which puts him at odds with much of the present foreign policy. He recently gave an excellent speech on US foreign policy. Here's a sample (my emphasis).

Since the tragedy of 9-11 which understandably shook and outraged everyone in this country, we have increasingly embraced at the highest official level [i.e., the President] what I think fairly can be called a paranoiac view of the world. Summarized in a phrase repeatedly used at the highest level, "he who is not with us is against us." ...

The second condition, troubling condition, which contributes in my view to the crisis of credibility and to the state of isolation in which the United States finds itself today is due in part because that skewed view of the world is intensified by a fear that periodically verges on panic that is in itself blind. ...

We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States [the WMD fiasco]. That failure was contributed to and was compensated for by extremist demagogy which emphasizes the worst case scenarios which stimulates fear, which induces a very simple dichotomic view of world reality.

... I do not believe that [the need for] serious debate is satisfied simply by a very abstract, vague and quasi-theological definition of the war on terrorism as the central preoccupation of the United States in today's world. That definition ... theologizes the challenge. It doesn't point directly at the problem. It talks about a broad phenomenon, terrorism, as the enemy overlooking the fact that terrorism is a technique for killing people. That doesn't tell us who the enemy is. It's as if we said that World War II was not against the Nazis but against blitzkrieg.

But I'm not sure that the return to "bipartisanship" on foreign policy like that of the Cold War era that Brzezinski recommends is likely to happen any time soon.

Tags: iraq war, zbigniew brzezinski