Brzezinski: America's “Credibility in Tatters”

Zbigniew Brzezinski has a new book out, “Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower,” and the NY Times has a look at it in tomorrow's edition.

The news here is not really what is said - we've heard it all from others - so much as who is saying it. Brzezinski is one of the grand old realists who have been so sidelined by the Bush administration's neocon think-tankers the last six years, and who have a powerful position, giving events, to say they were right all along.

But some of this is going to leave a mark.

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.”

...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.”

...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.”

...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.”

Although I think Brzezinski has the last three presidents cold, he's wearing rose-colored glasses if he thinks America was “globally admired” in 1989. He's right that the US was without equal in power and wealth then, but few outside the United States ever thought that a unipolar world was a good idea. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" and all that - and by 1989 various players were already thinking about how and when the American megapower could be constrained by checks and balances. It was a major motive behind calls for closer European union, for example, as well as behind China's beginning experiments in mixing communist politics with capitalist economics in Hong Kong. Outside the radical right, Reagan seemed to me at the time to be incredibly unpopular abroad. In fact, America and its ways were less popular in the UK during the early '90's than they were in 2002 and I doubt if many other nations fared differently.

Moreover, seeds of what was to come had already been sown in '89. That was the year Russia left Afghanistan and the US, instead of working to put the mujahideen back in their box, left it's toys scattered all over an impoverished and wartorn land to learn even greater radicalism in the face of adversity. It was the year the US invaded Panama to depose a drug-trafficking dictator but few outside the US forgot that it had trained and installed said dicator in the first place. In turn, that gave rise to socialist leaders like Chavez of Venezuaela who believed they knew from the first not to trust the US.

Still, Brzezinski's analysis of current afairs is spot on, however much he may have a Golden Age view of his glory days. And as I said, some of what he writes will leave marks.