After the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Bush administration, he says, moved quickly to construct a new vision of national security founded in unchecked American military might and built with pre-emptive attacks. In invading Iraq with no evidence of any threat to U.S. security, he says, the Bush administration squandered the good will of countries that would have otherwise been America’s natural allies. With “The Choice,” Brzezinksi offers a competing policy. Rather than adopt what he calls a “you’re either with us or against us” stance, the United States should engage its allies to build an “increasingly formalized global community of shared interest.” The very expression “war on terror,” he argues, is a nonsensical phrase in that it is impossible to wage war on the concept of terrorism, a tactic stripped of context. The Bush administration would more effectively adjust to this new era of insecurity, he says, if it were to drop the good-versus-evil rhetoric and address the political circumstances that gave rise to terrorists’ grievances.
Brzezinksi, now a trustee at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a professor at Johns Hopkins University, recently spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Brian Braiker about America’s choice. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: You criticize the Bush administration for a propensity to be domineering, yet you also argue that “the acceptance of American leadership is the sine qua non for avoiding chaos.” Isn’t that what the Bush administration is saying?
Zbigniew Brzezinski: Not really. I believe that leadership, when you are preponderant but not omnipotent, has to be consensual. In other words, there has to be a shared diagnosis of what is happening in the world and some shared strategic direction. The strongest party can influence both, but even then it cannot impose it on others. What I fault the Bush administration for is its semitheological and semidemagogic concentration on terror as the central defining phenomenon of our time. And then in the wake of doing that I also fault the Bush administration for in-effect saying to the rest of the world, “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.” That is a prescription either for forcing others to simply obey others or for generating hostility toward us.
You write that the Bush administration makes a mistake in divorcing terrorism from its political context, which has the effect of isolating the U.S. But the last terror attack was on Spain, not the United States.
There’s no denying that the attack on the Spaniards was because of their support for us and therefore its motive was ultimately the hatred of America. What I want us to do is address some of the basic problems of the Middle East if we are to undercut, and then more effectively eliminate, the terrorist threat. We can’t do it if we just talk about “terrorism” or “terror” as if it was some abstract, generalized, unified global evil.
Was Spain’s recent election, then, a rejection of Bush’s foreign policy?
In a way, yes. But it occurred in circumstances which are particularly unfortunate because on the one hand by [subsequently] removing troops from Iraq, the terrorists were certainly unintentionally encouraged. On the other hand, there’s no doubt that it was Spanish support for America at a time when America was viewed as no longer credible, no longer reliable and as extremist and demagogic that this act of terrorism occurred.
You write that the U.S. inclination “to embrace even the more extreme forms of Israeli suppression of Palestinians” is a case in point of the Bush administration’s “unwillingness to recognize a historical connection between the rise of anti-American terrorism and America’s involvement in the Middle East.” How would you characterize the U.S. response to Israel’s recent assassination of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin?
I think that the U.S. failure to realize that extremist actions by Israel are helpful neither to American security nor ultimately to Israel’s long-range security is deplorable. It reflects the absence of any strategic sense of purpose in the promotion of some sort of progress toward peace in the Middle East. It simply leaves the Israelis and the Palestinians in a kind of mortal embrace in which neither side sees any prospect for a constructive peace. Only the United States, in my view, can articulate an appealing vision of peace and link it explicitly to the Roadmap. Instead we talk vaguely about the Roadmap; we avoid defining the peace. We, in a sense, say “tut-tut” whenever there are massive acts of violence.
And a year into Iraq, is the world more or less secure?
Well the war on Iraq was launched on the grounds of [presence of Iraqi] weapons of mass destruction and with the added argument that it will help eliminate terrorism and promote the Israeli-Palestinian peace. In fact, there were no weapons of mass destruction. The war on terrorism probably has been set back because there are many more hostile terrorist groups now than there were a year ago, according to the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, and the Palestinian peace process is literally in shambles.
But Saddam is gone. Isn’t that a positive development?
That may be a personal satisfaction, but the political effects are disproportionately negative. One could add to the foregoing if you talk about costs: 4,000 Americans killed or maimed, probably about 10,000 Iraqis, alienation of our European allies and a massive intensification of hatred for Americans around the world and especially in the Arab world.
What effect does Richard Clarke’s book and testimony before the 9/11 commission have on Bush’s credibility on the world stage?
I think Bush’s credibility has been hurt already before these revelations. They essentially strengthen the question marks regarding it. But that is very unfortunate because American leadership worldwide is dependent on our credibility. When President Kennedy faced the Cuban missile crisis, he sent [former secretary of State] Dean Acheson to Europe to talk to [French President Charles] de Gaulle to tell him there are Soviet rockets with nuclear weapons targeted on the United States, and the U.S. would use force to remove them if necessary, which means massive nuclear war between the West and the East. When he finished making that presentation, Acheson said to de Gaulle, “Let me now show you the evidence.” De Gaulle responded by saying “I don’t want to see your evidence. I trust the president of the United States. Tell him we stand with him.” Would any foreign leader do that today? Probably not. That’s an actual detraction from our power.
Will Europe remain a U.S. ally?
I think it should; I think it can. I think we ought to engage Europe in a serious strategic dialogue in which we examine more carefully what we can do together regarding the Middle East. And I think if we were intelligent, we could strike a bargain in which we would obtain more European support and money and arms in Afghanistan and Iraq where Europeans are active. Eventually [the U.S. would police] a Middle Eastern peace settlement in return for a much more rapid devolution of responsibility to the [United Nations] in Iraq and a joint American-European overt explicit definition of the outlines of the formula for peace settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
But would a route like that be palatable to the American public?
I think if the American public was told in a little more depth and a little less demagoguery about the risks that we’re facing as a consequence now the massive and largely solitary American involvement in a huge area from Suez to Xinjiang inhabited by 550 million people, and the American people were also told if we are not more active politically, we would be facing more terrorist attacks. I think the American people would support it.
Do you hope to see that sort of debate play out in this year’s presidential election?
The purpose of my book in fact is hopefully to contribute in some minor way to a serious strategic debate about foreign policy and eventually maybe again to some restoration of bipartisanship in the making of foreign policy. For the first time since World War II American foreign policy has been shaped by extremists of the right. I’m not interested in extremists of the right being replaced by extremists of left. I would like some serious return to bipartisanship.
In fighting terror you recommend addressing the political circumstances that gave rise to terrorists. Is there a way to address terror’s political roots without legitimizing terror?
Of course. You destroy the terrorists; you eliminate them. You also undercut the political problems that generate them. The British are doing that in Ulster. Everybody else who has been successful whether it’s been in Italy or Germany has done that. We did it with the Black Panthers in this country. We didn’t engage in a policy in an indiscriminate assault on the entire black community. On the contrary, we tried to make it clear that the days of discrimination and racial prejudice in this country are over while at the same time dealing with the terrorist phenomenon.
You write that Europe must realize that “its security is even more inseparable from global security than America’s.” How so?
Because we still have much more military power and we’re still more remote. Look again at Spain. It was relatively easy for the terrorists from North Africa to penetrate Spanish society, which still enjoys some benefits of semi-isolation. But I do emphasize in my book–and this is a very important point–that the days of national security for America are over forever. From now on national insecurity is the new reality, and the only way we can cope with it is by working with others and mobilizing others in a credible way and we cannot be leading if we’re misleading.
