But the French president didn’t look at the pictures that Kennedy’s distinguished emissary had come to present. Although he detested Kennedy, de Gaulle pushed aside the pictures with the comment that an American president’s word was good enough for him to appreciate the situation.
For Brzezinski, it seems, the future is history that needs to be written by sane and wise people who listen to educated advice and who are not easily swayed by angst about the next election. The otherwise liberal Brzezinski had probably moved closer to the conservative Edmund Burke’s theory of representation — that politicians should be elected in order to do what they consider best for the country and their constituents. This, of course, is different from what most Americans, conservative or liberal, embrace, which is the mirror theory of representation — that politicians should mirror the views of their constituents as closely as possible.
It’s an unusual discussion for a very private man who much prefers to discuss policy alternatives to reflections about himself.
This is when Brzezinski, more interested in actual gains than in propaganda victories, began to devise his notion of peaceful engagement. It was containment plus. It was the rejection of what was jokingly identified in the West as the Soviet concept of peaceful coexistence: “what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable.” If Moscow was competing with the West outside the Soviet Bloc, Brzezinski seemed to be saying, the West should compete inside the Soviet Bloc.
I looked you up in Cambridge yesterday, but you were not there. Too bad because I would have liked to talk to you about the state of the world — otherwise known as the accelerating process of disintegration of American foreign policy.
Both men deny they saw each other as rivals during their Harvard years, and if there were ever existed some competition on Brzezinski’s side, Kissinger insists, it’s because it was “built into the system, in the sense that I was two or three years ahead of him as a graduate student in every job I got. I got the jobs that he wanted and deserved — I didn’t get them at his expense, but that sort of put him in an inherently competitive position with me and imposed the need to come up with some differences.”
Both went to Harvard and soon made a name for themselves by their intellectual and political acumen. In spite of their accents, both would ascend to the top of American society, lifted by the enormous needs of strategic expertise that came with America’s rise to globalism.
a Harvard Professor with the unbelievable name of Zbigniev Brzezinski, who reads Pravda with his morning coffee and delights in following the intricacies of Kremlin politics.
And if Kissinger came first, because, as he pointed out himself, he was older, it took Brzezinski to validate this now-familiar pattern of the academic intellectual turned Washington strategist and diplomat.
He had followed the perfect cursus honorum of the WASP elite — the Hill School, Yale University, the Skull and Bones society, and Harvard — and married well. A partner in the powerful New York investment bank Brown Bros, Harriman & Co., Robert Lovett was the embodiment of the foreign policy Establishment and its values: moderation, aversion to publicity and self-promotion, devotion to public service. He knew international affairs because of his business activities, and because he had served the US as a commander during WW1, a special assistant to Henry Stimson, an under secretary of state under Marshall, and finally as the fourth secretary of defense. Kennedy offered him not one but three secretary jobs in his administration: defense, state, or treasury — his pick. But Lovett declined, citing poor health, and recommended in his stead McNamara, Dean Rusk and Douglas Dilllon. All three were hired.
Such was the power and prestige of the Establishment, of the “wise men” who created the American world in the mid-20th century.
The old elite was naturally called to power through their connections and social hegemony; Kissinger and Brzezinski had to conquer their own positions — and they played by the new rules. They were ambitious, hardworking, and brazenly self-promoting, and they relied on three key developments of the post-war decades: the Cold War University; the rise of a gray zone between academia and policy making where media, policy organizations, and think tanks played key roles; and the increasing politicization in the selection of foreign affairs officials. They didn’t create these developments, but they were the first to take full advantage of them — and by doing so, they helped bring about the Washington we know today.
The Cold War University thus produced, starting in the 1950s, a generation of young men who were professionals, true experts of international affairs — rather than enlightened amateurs like the Old Establishment types — and who were policy oriented. But for the most ambitious ones, like Kissinger and Brzezinski, academia was not fully satisfying, and they aspired to get closer to power, to share a piece of the action.
Had I been given tenure at Harvard, I would have been delighted and I would have stayed. But then I was forced to think, what do I really want to be? I said to myself I don’t want to be crossing the Harvard yard year after year carrying a folder, lecture number 7, “joke used last year,” “class reaction,” with a tweed jacket. I want to influence the world, shape American policy. And New York was better for that.
The formidable platform for visibility, quality information, and useful contacts offered by the Council was complemented by the association of both Kissinger and Brzezinski with other think tanks.
But in order to get to the top positions of America’s foreign policy decision making, rather than being relegated to serving the Establishment in secondary jobs, success in another field was required — that of electoral campaign.
Kissinger and Brzezinski played the foreign policy adviser game early on, and with so much talent they became advisers to multiple candidates.
This crucial decision of late 1968 marked the true changing of the guard between the Establishment and the new foreign policy elite. Many were not quite expecting it, and even Brzezinski was caught by surprise:
“In 68, I worked for Hubert Humphrey, I was his principal foreign policy adviser. To give you a sense of how modest my expectations were, I thought maybe I might become Assistant Secretary of State for Europe. It never occurred to men when I was Humphrey’s principal advisor that I could be National Security Advisor. It was not in my sense of what was feasible in America at that time.”
But the formative experience of the new professional elite was the Vietnam War and the divisive 1960s, ushering in an age of ideology. Was the US and inherently imperialist country too quick to emphasize military force? Or was it a righteous nation betrayed by its liberal elite? Political divisions about the very meaning of the American experience in the light of Vietnam became paramount.
For all its fame and power, Kissinger remained an outsider to American society. His German Jewish background was essential for his rise to power, but it detracted from his public legitimacy.
Dear Mr. Harriman, I have been told by some friends that you expressed the view that my Polish background somehow disqualifies me from dealing objectively with the US-Soviet relationship. Since you are a blunt man, let me also say quite bluntly that I do not feel that Kissinger’s background disqualified him from dealing effectively with the Middle Eastern problem, nor do I think your background as a millionaire capitalist prevents you from dealing intelligently with the Soviet communists.
Of course, there also might have been a dose of calculation in their relationship. By receiving Brzezinski regularly, Kissinger ensured that his comrade would remain moderate in this public criticism, so as not to jeopardize his access to the administration, and that he would keep him informed of relevant developments and ideas. Brzezinski, by feeding memos, ideas, and advice to the administration, could get access to firsthand information and also have his specific issues of concern taken care of.
In the sharply penned article, Brzezinski stigmatized the triple predilection shown by the administration (read: Kissinger) for “the personal over the political,” “the convert over the conceptual,” and “acrobatic over architecture.” He charged that the administration’s diplomacy was unresponsive to the new global, rather than just international, challenges, especially North-South relations, and that the detente policy was a one-way street. It relegated the democratic allies and unduly elevated the USSR, while the US was not getting much in return on SALT negotiations, the Middle East, or trade.
In his thesis, Brzezinski sought to move beyond what he derided as the “paint job” approach to studying the Soviet Union, in which everything ended up “either highly red or snow-white” — either highly sympathetic or unremittingly harsh toward the USSR. At the same time, Brzezinski conceded, “It is not easy, in the present times, to write in an impartial manner on any topic involving the Soviet Union. One is quite liable to fall victim to his prejudiced, preconceived opinions.” Brzezinski’s way of avoiding such traps was to focus on the political functions of Soviet nationalism, noting in particular the integrative functions that Soviet patriotism served in the USSR.
The essay Friedrich prepared for the conference, a touchstone for future scholarship, enumerated five distinctive features of totalitarian societies: an official ideology, a “single mass party of true believers,” monopolies of both the means of violence and mass communication, and a “system of terroristic police control.”
In the process, Friedrich and Brzezinski dismissed the central concerns of other political scientists stressing the role of ideologies, governance structures, and links between politics and society. They placed little importance on totalitarian ideologies, calling them nothing but “trite restatements of certain traditional ideas, arranged in an incoherent way that makes them highly exciting to weak minds.” Constitutions and government structures — the focus of Friedrich’s aborted prewar project — were “of very little importance.” There was no society to speak of; the family constituted the only “oasis in the sea of totalitarian atomization.”
The Permanent Purge, as the title suggests, took the purge as the essence of Soviet totalitarianism. While some observers considered the purges paroxysms of chaos and irrationality, Brzezinski saw them as a “technique” used “for the achievement of specific political and socio-economic objectives.” Denunciations, similarly, were not the result of “the perversity of human nature” but a “calculated effort to realize ambitions of upward mobility.” Because purges were functional — serving political and economic needs, facilitating the rotation of elites, and providing individual opportunities for advancement — they would not disappear.
Given the eventual importance of this work to political scientists, it is worth noting that Moore’s vision of technical rationality happened within rather than in opposition to continued rule by the Communist Party. The nature of the party elite might change, but the party would not relinquish the reigns of power. Moore suggested that the imperatives of a modern industrial society existing in a complex international environment would not just encourage but even require such changes. These industrial imperatives would yield the demise of “totalitarianism” by rendering it into a less ambitious despotism — or perhaps into a more stable and rational form of single-party rule.
Brzezinski argued that the “new generation of clerks” who displaced Khrushchev in 1964 — nearly all of whom had risen in the hierarchy in the 1930s and 1940s as beneficiaries of Stalin’s purges — regarded “bureaucratic stability” as “the only solid foundation for effective government.” According to Brzezinski, the Soviet Union was “unique” in being “led by a bureaucratic leadership from the very top to the bottom,” resulting in an “extremely centralized and rigidly hierarchical bureaucratic organization” that was “increasingly set in its way, politically corrupted by years of unchallenged power, and made even more confined in its outlook than is normally the case with a ruling body by its lingering and increasingly ritualized doctrinaire tradition.” This lack of flexibility would “post a long-range danger to the vitality of any political system because decay is bound to set in, while the stability of the political system may be endangered.” In particular, the effort to maintain a doctrinaire dictatorship over an increasingly modern and industrial society would lead to degeneration of the entire system — a fate that, in Brzezinski’s view, could be avoided only if the bureaucratic Communist dictatorship were gradually transformed into a more pluralistic and institutionalized political system that would confront major domestic issues and accommodate the demands of key groups whose growing assertiveness would otherwise debilitate the regime.
The process of decay, he believed, would stem not from economic inefficiency or a projected slowdown in economic growth but from the smothering impact of an oppressive bureaucracy that wanted to keep ordinary citizens from having any meaningful say in the political arena.
The nationalities can claim such things as political autonomy, constitutional reform, a greater share of the national economic pie, and more investment, without it appearing that they wish to secede from the Soviet Union. History teaches us, be it in Algeria or in Indonesia or in Africa, that these demands will grow rather than decline. If they are not met or are suppressed, it is likely that the demands will become sharper and more self-assertive. If they are satisfied, they will grow with the eating. I frankly do not see how the central authorities in the Soviet Union will be able to avoid having a prolonged period of fairly difficult relations with the non-Russian nationalities.
Arguing that “Khrushchev’s fall provides an important precedent for the future,” Brzezinski underestimated the extent to which the Soviet system still permitted the leader of the CPSU to consolidate individual power, achieving a status as something more than simply primus interpares. Although a form of “collective leadership” did exist for the first several years after Khrushchev’s ouster, Brezhnev as the CPSU general secretary was always the preeminent leader and gradually removed his chief rivals, establishing a dominant position and dying in office after 18 years.
Some scholars argued that unless a Soviet-style regime was willing to impose repeated “revolutions from above” (as Mao was doing in China), new social stratification resulting from economic development would induce key individuals and groups to try to solidify their advantages, causing a gradual move away from proclaimed utopian goals.
Brzezinski credited the CPSU with the “unique achievement” of “transforming the most revolutionary doctrine of our age into dull social and political orthodoxy.” He contended that the Soviet political system, being “highly centralized but arrested in its development,” had come to be perceived within the USSR as “increasingly irrelevant to the needs of Soviet society and frozen in an ideological posture that was a response to an altogether different age.”
He emphasized the shortcomings of Soviet scientific research outside the military sphere: “The Soviet lag is unmistakable in computers, transistors, lasers, pulsars, and plastics, as well as in the equally important areas of management techniques, labor relations, psychology, sociology, economic theory, and system analysis.” Brzezinski concluded that the ideological-political centralization of the Soviet system, which stifle innovation and resulted in a high degree of intellectual conformity, had produced science policies that were at best “capricious” and at worst “catastrophic.”
Brzezinski saw a reversion to “militant fundamentalism under a one-man dictatorship” as “somewhat more probable than a pluralist evolution,” but he did not regard it as especially likely because a dictator attempting to consolidate a militantly ideological regime “would have to overcome enormous inertia and the collective stake of the party oligarchs in preventing the reappearance of one-man rule.”
Hough asserted that Soviet leaders necessarily feared that sweeping liberalization would stimulate the rise of separatist movements in the non-Russian republics and that this in turn would provoke a Russian nationalist backlash. The mere threat of such a development, Hough insisted, deterred Soviet officials from considering the option of genuine democratization. “Even if a Russian prefers democratization for himself, he must know — perhaps unconsciously — that such a development might well produce a major decline int he world position of Russia. One can well imagine the normal Russian reaction to the thought of the loss of so much of the country.”
Brzezinski argued that the long-standing dominance of the “Great Russian majority” in the USSR had created an intractable situation. Genuine decentralization would inevitably breed demands in non-Russian republics for equitable treatment, but central Russian control is so deeply embedded in existing arrangements that the needed corrective would require a massive upheaval. The result was a vicious circle, whereby the lack of reforms breeds national resentments, but reforms would probably nourish an even greater appetite among the non-Russians for more power.
Because public expectations in the Soviet Union had been steadily rising during the Gorbachev period, Brzezinski averred that a possible attempt to clamp down would create an “inherently explosive” and “potentially revolutionary situation.” This in turn led him to expect a progressive breakdown of order that could lead eventually to a coup at the center, undertaken by the military, with KGB backing.
A truly independent, culturally authentic, perhaps de facto neutral Central Europe. He emphasized that he was not proposing the elimination of the Warsaw Pact or the removal of Soviet troops: “When I say de facto neutral, I mean mainly neutral in substance but not neutral in form. This would emerge in the context of the continued existence of the alliance systems that define the geo-political reality of contemporary Europe.”
Brzezinski also understood well that merit alone does not bring advisors to the attention of prospective patrons or would-be presidents. You need to work the system — getting involve in networking groups, getting published, going to cocktail parties, developing connections, sending encouraging-notes to those on the rise, offering to help.
Carter’s campaign was as much a watershed in American politics as the foreign policies he and Brzezinski and the other members of the administration promulgated would be. The nation was numb in the aftermath of both Watergate and Vietnam. While few in the street would consider or articulate questions about American decline as academics might, people knew in their gut that something was deeply wrong, that this was not the America they had been raised believing in, and that much of the blame lay inside Washington, inside the Establishment — and in the Oval Office itself. Jimmy Carter was something altogether different. He spoke softly and simply of going the American people a government as good as its people. He was an unknown, and he seemed very different from most professional politicians.
As far as foreign policy goes, Mr. Kissinger has been the president of this country.
Not surprisingly, there was some discomfort with the system. It was a bureaucratic first strike of the first order. The system essentially gave responsibility for the most important and sensitive issues to Brzezinski, and the vague definition of what constitute crisis management essentially ensured that if anything came up that was important it could be claimed by the White House.
A few days later I left my job and went to the NSC. Upon arrival, I found this bloody letter I sent the week before. So, I did what a staffer should do: I wrote back — to myself, so to speak — and I explained on behalf of the President that I was very sorry about the fishermen but the national interest was really much more important. This was proof of the Washington adage “Where you sit is where you stand.”
Although all the charges ultimately proved untrue, it was Washington politics at its nastiest — and it can serve as a reminder to all present-day Americans that politics in the US has been a dirty business, going back to the lies and lie-driven scandals that swirled around Hamilton, Jefferson, and other members of Washington’s administration. Every generation says that it’s worse than ever and yearns for the civility of yesteryear. There was no civl yesteryear. As one former high official in the Carter administration said to me, “The stakes are too high for these guys to play clean — especially when they can’t win on the merits.”
Brzezinski had, I think, a much more apocalyptic view of the world and especially a different attitude toward the Soviets. And he is also a more confrontational individual. He is not necessarily abrasive — but more willing to push things hard on a personal basis. That is not to say he used his position as the last person to talk to the president improperly. At least, in formal terms, my belief is that he always correctly reflected other people’s views, gave his own, but didn’t try to force a compromise.
Nonetheless, I think his was a more confrontational personality. And he had a very fundamental difference with Vance in that he believed that concessions to the Russians merely encouraged them to press further, and he was willing to use almost any device or any other relationship with other countries to contain them. He saw relations with other countries in those terms.
Brzezinski suggested that a veiled public threat or a private threat to bom Qom or Iran’s oil fields should be given in case they killed hostages. Carter was not so convinced. “They have us by the balls.” However, Carter did ask his staff to examine the possibility of expelling students (something Walter Mondale later opposed — why would a great nation respond by “kicking out a few sad-ass students?), freezing Iranian assets, and stopping the supply of military spare parts: “Get our people our of Iran and break relations. Fuck ‘em!”
Concerned primarily by how it extended Moscow’s influence, he is not known to have studied China’s history, economy, culture and society. China would, nevertheless, have a profound impact on his thinking, career, and reputation.
In 1967, for instance, he warned that Beijing wanted the war in Vietnam to continue because it destabilized Southeast Asia, aggravated US-Soviet frictions, and tied down American and Soviet resources.
In a 1972 article he worried that Nixon and Kissinger were imagining that the Washington-Beijing-Moscow triangle would function like American relations with Europe and Japan, and that they were investing too much in relations with China and the Soviet Union to the detriment of relations with US allies in Europe and Japan. He feared they were unrealistic in their efforts to create a balance of power in Asia. And yet he gave them a passing grade B, for their policies toward China: good on trade and travel, slow to manage the UN issue properly.
For 2.5 hours Huang harangued him on the failings of the US, insisting that the Americans, by their actions in Cambodia, had forfeited the right to question China on human rights, a key Carter concern.
Deng had no objection to anyone expressing “hope” for a peaceful resolution of the issue. China, however, would never agree to a promise of peaceful resolution as a precondition for normalization.
The lesser issue was the matter of when to inform Chiang Ching-kuo that the US had shifted recognition form Taipei to Beijing. It was evident that Chiang and his government were in denial, that they were ignoring all signs that the Americans were distancing themselves.
Early in his career, Brzezinski’s colleagues in Soviet studies judged him brilliant and erratic — brilliant all the time, right about half the time.
Vance fought fairly; Brzezinski was a street fighter.
He was gentler with the Russians, including them along with China, Europe, and Japan among the four most important relationships of the US.
It was also true that Carter preferred to deal more with paper than with briefings because paper was more efficient, and he could accomplish more by reading than attending meetings. Some thought this made it easier for Brzezinski to manipulate the process since all the foreign policy papers and the summaries of NSC meetings were either generated by or passed through him.
In this process Brzezinski had one major advantage and one disadvantage. He had the capacity that neither Carter nor Vance had of placing international events in a strategic and a historical context that gave meaning to the importance of a particular decision; doing so, Brzezinski also gave Carter a sense of how individual decisions related to one another. The disadvantage was that Vance, like Carter, was a man of calmer and more liberal temperament and preferred to work through one issue at a time.
Zbig valued and actively sought out talent, wherever it was to be found, in an out of government (while disdaining ignorance and suffering no fools). Over many years, Zbig had built up his mental Rolodex of people who might, one day, help him serve the nation at a president’s right hand. Brzezinski’s NSC team was rivaled only by Kissinger’s — each team very small, very professional, very committed and competitive, and each adept at long-term, strategic thinking. They were the class acts of the White House national security apparatus throughout America’s top days as superpower.
Washington is full of intellectual bullies who shout at colleagues and staff. I had seen plenty of them in the Pentagon. Zbig was definitely not one of them. He was respectful and courteous. A colleague suggested that it would be hard to change his mind in a meeting unless it was one-on-one and that I should write him a memo, which I did. It came back the next day with check marks throughout, indicating that he had read it and accepted the points.
Zbig’s mind had an amazing ability to absorb great quantities of written material. All of us on the staff got back our “evening report” from the previous day with his marks, usually just checks, but occasionally a question or an invitation to call or see him. Later in life, when I led a large management team myself, I recognized that the evening report was an essential part of his management philosophy.
It’s a fact that people who are determined to fight for their own freedom end up winning respect and sympathy and even something more than that from the rest of the world. That’s a historical fact, not a statement of policy.
My cable would be read in Moscow before it even arrived in Warsaw. They read everything. They have direct access to our entire communications system.
There was a nighttime curfew and a ban on assemblies. Tanks and armed vehicles patrolled the snowy streets and enforced martial law with an iron fist. Jaruzelski justified the internal crackdown as the “lesser evil” — to prevent a much harsher Soviet invasion and “progressing economic ruin.”
The Polish leader confided in Brzezinski that he had two major life-defining moments. The first came as a young man when he left feudal Poland and saw the Soviet Union as a force of modernity and social justice. The more painful revelation had to do with what was happening in the late 1980s — when the grand promises of Marxism-Leninism were exposed as a cruel illusion.
We did not smash a single window pane, but we were stubborn, very stubborn, ready to suffer. We knew what we wanted. And our power prevailed in the end. I had known Brzezinski for many years. He is a very proud man who rarely displays his emotions. But that night I looked over at him and saw him wiping a tear of joy from his eye. It was a great moment.
I have been struck in listening to you, and in participating in our conference, by how different your process of thinking are from those of the US and the advanced countries of Europe. First, in advanced Western countries, practice precedes social theory. Here, social theory precedes practice. An intellectual construct — an abstract construct — literally determines policy. In the West, we make policy after the electorate expresses its preferences and by trying to figure out what will work to solve a particular problem. Second, I am struck by the preoccupation with Lenin. I am not saying that he was not an interesting man. But to keep referring to him, not only in the search for legitimacy, but also as a guide to policy is absurd. You make yourselves prisoners of the past. You cannot use Lenin as a basis for a comprehensive set of reforms. You need to find institutions that work and to stop worrying about whether or not Lenin would approve of them.
With the fading of confrontation in Europe, the importance of their military presence will diminish. As a result, the importance of other factors — such as ideology, culture, communications, politics, and economics — will rise. In every one of these areas, the US holds superiority — and a growing superiority — over the Soviet Union.
Transparently seeking to provoke his counterparts, Brzezinski commented that he continued to be struck by the contrast in the thought patterns of Soviet and Westerners: “The latter think pragmatically, and the former think ideologically.” He added that with this kind of thinking, the Soviet Union would never get to the point of solving its problems.
But Lenin created the preconditions for Stalin to emerge and, in fact, made it far less likely that someone different from Stalin would emerge to lead the Soviet Union. Leninism was based on three things — a dogmatic ideology, a totalitarian party, and terror. It is one thing to respect Lenin as a political analyst and activist and as a historical figure. But it is another when you ignore the fact that he was the founder of the gulag and that he killed thousands of people simply because they belonged to various ideologically defined classes. Until you renounce the legacy of Leninism, it will impede your reforms and will prevent you from making the necessary break with the past.
In the Brezhnev years, subordinates had to toe the line set by their superiors. At one point, Brezhnev had forcefully expressed an opinion on a foreign policy question. Then, turning to his aide, he said, “But we are democratic here. Do you have a different opinion?” After a pause, Brezhnev’s assistant answered, “Yes, I have a different opinion, but I don’t agree with it.”
By the end of Bush’s term, Brzezinski was regularly condemning the Iraq War in sweeping terms. “We were viewed by most people in the Middle East, particularly after WW2, as a liberating force. That gradually changed, to the point that we’ve become the new colonialists, particularly through our military intervention in Iraq, our one-sided support fro Sharon under Bush and a kind of generalized indifference to what is happening to the Palestinians.”
As Brzezinski tells the story, when the wily Begin began the game, he announced that it was the first time he had played since 1940, when his match was interrupted by his arrest by the Russian secret police. A little while later, Mrs. Begin wandered by and said, “Menachem loves to play chess.”
He assigns grades for Middle East peacemaking to the the Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II presidencies of “B-,” “D,” and “F,” respectively.
Brzezinski finds himself among fewer than half a dozen widely acknowledged American strategic thinkers. Along with Kissinger, George Shultz, and Scowcroft, Brzezinski is clearly a top-tier intellectual celebrity. Since the appellation strategic thinker rests to some degree in the eyes of the beholders, we can extend and perhaps bend Descartes just a bit: If people think you are a strategic thinker, therefore you are. Brzezinski therefore is.
His native intelligence and keen analytic facility ensured his eventual rise into the elite in the US, and his disciplined mind and work ethic guaranteed he would stay there.
Politics is an activity unsuited to the young. Everybody’s young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism. There are not obligations to be observed; there are no accounts to be kept.
Every strategic thinker has at least a few sartorial failures in his conceptual closet from earlier times; it goes with the territory. If one does not extend oneself, one cannot be meaningfully correct — one cannot in the sense we mean it here really be said to think at all. Human still grow intellectually and emotionally even in the third third of their lives, and the keen perspective that age often brings forth may still be recognized even in a society in which respect for elders is much lacking.
Owen Harries once quipped that if you want to be a sage observer of international politics, it is a good idea to start by not being an American, and by not being young.
Harries was not referring to American citizenship, of course, but rather to the natural intellectual misanthropies of being born into a political culture that, for various historical reasons, he considered mono-lingually insular to the point of self-absorbed, arrogant due to its self-avowed exceptionalism, Manichaean by way of secularized religious disposition, too prone to trust “grand” but ironically narrow theories as opposed to studied experience, and therefore, not coincidentally, impatiently and historically ignorant to boot. Above all, however, the problem with being an American is that Americans lack the instinctive sense of danger and the possibility of tragedy that, say, Polish, or Belgian, or Jewish, or Korean children acquire virtually at birth. They ave acquired so much confidence and optimism that it is difficult to get them to see the world as an intrinsically dangerous and differentiated place that ought to be approached with caution and restraint. If we flip this list of temperamental shortcomings, we get a reasonably serviceable checklist of virtues for any aspiring strategic thinker.
The opposite of insular, in this respect anyway, is to be capable of understanding multiple viewpoints. It is to understand what it means to be foreign and to be a foreigner. It means that making oneself aware of the underlying predicates of one’s own society so that those of other societies can be appreciated in context. It means, too, not making the mistake of unwittingly projecting one’s own frames of reference onto others.
The opposite of arrogance is humility. Humility is a critical characteristic of a genuine strategic thinker. A genuine strategic thinker understands the satyr of contingency in human affairs, the inability to vanquish structural uncertainty, and the limits of planning. Brzezinski has been categorical on this point: “global politics do not lend themselves to pat formulations and clear-cut predictions,” and he has long been a critic of abstract formal models that pretend otherwise.
Fortuity (fortuna) is a fickle dame. What happenstance gave, happenstance can take away.
His resolutely anti-Manichean attitude accounts for Brzezinski’s ability to have seen that the end of the Cold War was no time for complacency or excessive defense budget cuts, because the competitive nature of world politics was never wholly subsumed by the ideological dimension of the Cold War and would not therefore become extinct upon its termination. Geopolitics, he has always insisted, does not become obsolete. This dovetails nicely with Brzezinski’s most “un-American” trait: this capacity to imagine tragedy.
It is a hallmark of a temperamental realist to fear anyone who says with any sense of conviction that we should try doing this or that because “things can’t get any worse.” Things can always get worse, and they often do. There is no Pole born in the 20th century who does not know this in his or her bones.
A true strategic thinker is really a statesman, then, someone who is mindful of what is proverbially called the big picture that breaks through the ultimately artificial barrier between “foreign” and “domestic.”
A genuine strategic thinker needs to know what is going on at the Fed and the Treasury Department as much as he needs to know what is going on at the State and Defense Departments. More than that, a strategic thinker needs to appreciate changing social and cultural variables below the line of everyday political sight. It is not enough to know chronicle; one must know history in the true sense of the term: we are interested not only in what happened when but in what events tell us about human nature, and especially about human nature as it applies to politics and social conflict within and among peoples.
The trick here, of course, which few ever master, is to hone one’s intuition for how the various causal threads come together to form the whole cloth of reality. There is no formula to follow here, no foolproof equations or shortcuts that can be known. Mastery comes from an open orientation to the subject matter, in particular the ability to learn from one’s mistakes (or excessive enthusiasms) and to avoid the laziness inherent in too-quick-to-close analogical thinking.
Imagining what we can do all of this, and do it in simultaneous, harmonious balance, is — what is that handy speechwriter’s euphemism? — a challenge.
That said, someone has to postulate a winning scenario; someone has to think through what it will take to manage American fortunes effectively in the New World of the 21st century. Someone has to define the stretch goals.
However, whatever the differences in case-by-case prudential judgment, strategic thinkers do tend to agree on how to pose the question, for experience has taught them how to home in on core stakes and not be distracted by the peripheral, the emotional, or the telegenic in an age of media immersion.
You can’t please everyone (and you definitely shouldn’t try). Time will tell whose vision falls truest to the historical mark. As Chou En-lai famously said when asked his view of the French Revolution, so it is with any definitive assessment of Brzezinski as a strategic thinker: “It’s too soo to say.”
In important ways, however, Brzezinski remained an academic. He was always studious and precise. In lectures and in interviews, he spoke in perfect paragraphs. Much as he found “political science” empty of serious content, his policy analyses and advocacy grew out of serious and systematic scholarly study.
I said to myself, look Harvard is a better university than Columbia, just as Oxford is a better university than Sorbonne, but the Sorbonne is in Paris and Oxford is in Oxford. Harvard is in Cambridge and Columbia is in New York City. I would have been more of a scholar if I had stayed at Harvard, but I said to myself do I want 20 years from now to be walking across Harvard Yard wearing a tweed sport jacket carrying a folder with the latest adapted version of a lecture I had given over the years with the text of the opening joke with class reactions in brackets underneath and asking would that satisfy me?
With all respect to my other former professors, I judged it the best course I took in graduate school. The professor was challenging, the material totally new, and the students all thought they were the best.
Dr. Brzezinski pushed us hard for clarity of thought and expression on a series of strategic policy issues. We were on pins and needles to a degree beyond any other class — no one wanted to let him down, and he brought out the best in us. One teaching detail I recall an often cite was his insistence that our papers be no more than 2 pages long — horrifying for grad students being asked to shape policy approaches to big, mega issues. “If you cannot express the essence of your approach in two pages, no policy maker is going to read it, so do more thinking.”
He made clear at the outset that he would start classes on time and would not accept extensions — because that’s how things are in real life.
Where he differed was in his straightforwardness and courage in staking out positions. While Kissinger’s views on any given subject seem often driven by complex calculations on how he was to position himself with regard to the political winds blowing at the given moment, Zbig always said forthrightly what he thought, even when those views earned him considerable opprobrium.
According to the rules, I had two more minutes to verify this information and then an additional four minutes to wake up the president, go over the options in the so-called football, get the president’s decision, and then initiate the response.
We sat outside St. Peters. Some 60,000 people were there. When he walked out, he had a theatrical manner, he was charismatic. He raised his hands, and he reached out and said to this huge crowd, “Do not be afraid,” and then he gave his talk. In a way, with that one sentence, he touched on the ultimate mystery and sense of anxiety inherent in the human condition. This is so because we really don’t know who we are. We don’t know how long we exist. We don’t know what exists, if anything, beyond our physical existence. That’s the mystery of life, and it introduces elements of fear. And his message was “do not be afraid”; that there is something transcendental that gives more meaning and significance to your existence.
I said to him once that I’m a Catholic because I was born a Catholic, but if I was born in China I would have been a Buddhist. And to me, there are many ways to reach a sense of what is beyond us, and not just one. And I thought he would disagree, but he said, “No, you’re absolutely right.”
I met him in the 1950s when I was at Harvard, and I thought the world of him. I was greatly inspired by him when he became president, I found his Inaugural Address moving, I liked that special sense of vigor and enthusiasm that he injected into an America that seemed to be a little bit uncertain of itself, especially after the launch of the Sputnik. And I was profoundly shocked when he was shot. I remember that moment vividly, but I have to add that the more I learned about him later on, the more I became inclined to temper my enthusiasm for him. I began to see that he was much more manipulative, much more opportunistic, much more self-serving, much less guided by any profound code of conduct or standard than I had believed. So it was, in a way, a disillusioning reassessment.
State maintained that just as there is an American nation made up of people of different ethnic origins, there is a Soviet nation made up of people of different ethnic origins. I remember asking someone at State, “Do you happen to know what language the ‘Soviet nation’ speaks?” This is not America where we individually adopt the American version of English as a common language. We have become part of America as individuals, not as territorially inhabited nations subjected to rule from Washington.
He understood that for a variety of reasons global hegemony by a single power and particularly a Western power is no longer possible. There has been a shift within the global system, from west to east. The global political awakening we’ve witnessed in recent years has created a situation that is so volatile that America has to be both intelligent and appealing in order to be effective.
But it’s probably worse than that. At a critical juncture he failed to show that he had steel in his back, he failed to follow through. He spoke on the record and very sensibly about the settlements, but when a confrontation developed between him and Netanyahu, Obama caved in. That has contributed significantly to the general mess we now have in the Middle East.
I’m sympathetic to his dilemma; he didn’t want to jeopardize his reelection. Yet I also think that when really great issues are at stake, sometimes you have to take a chance and do what you think is right. We could be sliding to a really bad explosion, the consequences of which would be detrimental to our interests.
Obviously, there has to be some balance between our ability to promote what we might call an abstract good, on the one hand, and the necessity of promoting the national interest, on the other. It’s a long-standing dilemma that no one can resolve with any degree of mathematical precision.
I’d add one more dimension to it, domestic perception. Is it politically advantageous or fashionable to be doing this and so on? There is no simple formula, in every case you have to make a judgment: what is at stake? How useful is it to the national interest to promote human rights? How counterproductive may it become? And in every case the answer varies.
Useful is not necessarily the right word. I think it’s a fact of life that we’ll have a relationship with China; without such a relationship each of us would be worse off. Our interests wouldn’t be serve by a policy that was designed to prevent China from becoming economically and socially more successful. It’s a country of almost a billion and a half people, extremely intelligent and energetic; what conceivable benefit would there be in trying to make China weak, disorganized, and hostile?
Still, I certainly underestimated — in fact, not only underestimated but totally missed — the critical disconnect between Vietnamese nationalist aspirations and the Communist movement.