When a Leader Missteps, a World Can Go Astray
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
03/06/07 "New
York Times" -- - In the months before the American
invasion of Iraq, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security
adviser to President Jimmy Carter, was one of the few members of
the foreign policy establishment (along with Brent Scowcroft,
former national security adviser to President George H. W. Bush)
to speak out strongly about the dangers of going to war
unilaterally against Saddam Hussein, and to warn, presciently it
turns out, of the possibly dire consequences of doing so without
a larger strategic plan.
In August 2002, as the current Bush administration was already
hurrying toward an invasion, Mr. Brzezinski cautioned that war
“is too serious a business and too unpredictable in its dynamic
consequences — especially in a highly flammable region — to be
undertaken because of a personal peeve, demagogically
articulated fears or vague factual assertions.” In February
2003, just weeks before the invasion, he added that “an America
that decides to act essentially on its own regarding Iraq” could
“find itself quite alone in having to cope with the costs and
burdens of the war’s aftermath, not to mention widespread and
rising hostility abroad.”
In his compelling new book, “Second
Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower ,” Mr. Brzezinski not only
assesses the short- and long-term fallout of the Iraq war, but
also puts that grim situation in perspective with the tumultuous
global changes that have taken place in the last two decades. He
dispassionately analyzes American foreign policy as conducted by
the last three presidents — George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and
George H. W. Bush — and he gives the reader a sobering analysis
of where these leaders’ cumulative decisions have left the
United States as it now searches for an exit strategy from Iraq,
faces potentially explosive situations in Iran and North Korea
and copes with an increasingly alienated Europe and an
increasingly assertive China.
Mr. Brzezinski’s verdict on the current president’s record —
“catastrophic,” he calls it — is nothing short of devastating.
And his overall assessment of America’s current plight is
worrying as well: “Though in some dimensions, such as the
military, American power may be greater in 2006 than in 1991,
the country’s capacity to mobilize, inspire, point in a shared
direction and thus shape global realities has significantly
declined. Fifteen years after its coronation as global leader,
America is becoming a fearful and lonely democracy in a
politically antagonistic world.”
“Second Chance” is, in some respects, a continuation of the
author’s earlier books “The Choice: Global Domination or Global
Leadership” (2004) and “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy
and Its Geostrategic Imperatives” (1997), which examined the
responsibilities and perils of global leadership facing America
as the one superpower in a post-cold-war world. As in those
books, Mr. Brzezinski employs a brisk, no-nonsense style here,
using his erudition in history and foreign policy to lay out his
views succinctly. A confirmed realist (a school of thinking
willfully dismissed by the idealists and ideological hawks in
the current Bush administration), the author writes with a keen
understanding of the ways in which military or political actions
in one part of the world can affect developments in another
region, as well as a shrewd appreciation of the fallout of a
global zeitgeist that is increasingly anti-imperialist,
anti-Western and anti-American.
What this book does most strikingly is remind the reader just
how drastically things have changed since the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. At
that point, Mr. Brzezinski writes, America was “globally
admired” and “faced no peer, no rival, no threat, neither on the
Western front nor the Eastern front, nor on the Southern fronts
of the great cold war that had been waged for several decades on
the massive Eurasian chessboard.”
A mere decade and a half later, he argues, the United States is
“widely viewed around the world with intense hostility,” its
“credibility in tatters,” its military bogged down in the Middle
East, “its formerly devoted allies distancing themselves.”
Although Mr. Brzezinski holds the current president, George W.
Bush, most responsible for undermining the United States’
“geopolitical position” and for misunderstanding “the historical
moment,” he also points to misjudgments and missed opportunities
on the part of his two predecessors in office.
Mr. Brzezinski gives the first President Bush high marks for
handling “the collapse of the Soviet Union with aplomb” and
mounting an international response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion
of Kuwait “with impressive diplomatic skill and military
resolve,” but says he failed to “translate either triumph into
an enduring historic success.”
The senior Mr. Bush, Mr. Brzezinski says, neither used
“America’s unique political influence and moral legitimacy” to
help transform Russia into a genuine democracy, nor used the
victory in the first gulf war strategically to press for an
Israeli-Palestinian accord and help transform the Middle East.
In the dozen years that followed, the author goes on, perception
of the United States’ role in the Middle East steadily
deteriorated, as America “came to be perceived in the region,
rightly or wrongly, not only as wearing the British imperialist
mantle but as acting increasingly on behalf of Israel,
professing peace but engaging in delaying tactics that
facilitated the expansion of the settlements.”
In Mr. Brzezinski’s opinion, Bill Clinton deserves credit for
setting forth parameters for a Middle East peace settlement at
Camp David II, for expanding and consolidating the Atlantic
alliance and for helping to stabilize the Balkans. But in the
end, he contends that Mr. Clinton’s “casual and politically
opportunistic style of decision-making was not conducive to
strategic clarity, and his faith in the historical determinism
of globalization made such a strategy seem unnecessary.”
By 1995, Mr. Brzezinski goes on, America’s “global status was
probably at its peak,” but a “multiplicity of complex”
situations that had surfaced in the wake of the cold war’s end
had metastasized: “As a result, the global totem-pole atop which
Clinton stood tall rested on shaky ground.”
Though the terrorist attacks of 9/11 wrought a moment of “global
solidarity with America,” Mr. Brzezinski writes, the Bush
administration’s swaggering unilateralism and “neocon
Manicheanism” would turn a moment of opportunity into “a
self-inflicted and festering wound while precipitating rising
global hostility toward America.” Indeed, he argues that the
Iraq war “has caused calamitous damage to America’s global
standing,” demonstrating that the United States “was able
neither to rally the world to its cause nor to decisively
prevail by use of arms.”
Further, he says, “the war in Iraq has been a geopolitical
disaster,” diverting resources and attention from the terrorist
threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan, even as it’s increased “the
terrorist threat to the United States” by fomenting resentment
toward America and providing “fertile soil for new recruits to
terrorism.”
This precarious situation, Mr. Brzezinski says, means that “it
will take years of deliberate effort and genuine skill to
restore America’s political credibility and legitimacy,” placing
enormous importance on the diplomatic and strategic skills of
the next president “to fashion a truly post-cold-war globalist
foreign policy.”
“Nothing could be worse for America, and eventually the world,”
he writes at the end of this unsparing volume, “than if American
policy were universally viewed as arrogantly imperial in a
postimperial age, mired in a colonial relapse in a postcolonial
time, selfishly indifferent in the face of unprecedented global
interdependence, and culturally self-righteous in a religiously
diverse world. The crisis of American superpower would then
become terminal.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Click here
to comment on this and other articles
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
