THE CHOICE: Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Call to Action

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book THE CHOICE: Global Domination or Global Leadership explains that U.S. global leadership is the only sane alternative to the Bush’s administration’s present plan of global domination!

A wise and experienced voice from the recent past has written a new book that challenges American leaders to understand and react to the changing nature of our place on the international stage.

Zbigniew Brzezinski was President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, and is now a trustee and counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a foreign-policy teacher at Johns Hopkins University. His new book, THE CHOICE: Global Domination or Global Leadership, gives us a bold and comprehensive explanation of the face of change and what America must do to claim the moral high ground in international affairs.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s left the United States as the sole superpower — and we were ill prepared to assume that awesome responsibility without considerable growing pains. To this day, through three successive presidential administrations, we are still arguing, debating, and occasionally bungling our way through this process of redefinition and self-awareness.

This is, after all, the democratic process in motion. But, as Brzezinski argues, it is also a prescription for inconsistency and inertia — elements our foreign-policy objectives can no longer afford.

The September 11th attacks shattered many of the post-Cold War assumptions about our role in the world and our strategic interests. But even more profound than this horrible event, globalization and the spread of American popular culture had already started this revolution. Our hegemony, in all of its ramifications, had already challenged us to rethink our most basic arguments about ourselves, our allies, and the threats that await us in this changing world.

September 11th made us realize once and for all that we are not universally admired, and that we are not immune to the gathering storms of hostility.

Brzezinski argues that our hegemony comes with a price we dare not ignore. While our democratic values are admired and desired in many corners of the world, our popular culture is not. It is often seen as overbearing and threatening to indigenous cultures. It often is interpreted as the force-feeding of democracy — political imperialism riding in on the coattails of Hollywood movies and American junk food.

The global economy and the Internet are two of the most efficient delivery systems of our popular culture — and the shadow of democracy that goes with it. We can do little to control these two dynamic enterprises.

But Brzezinski argues that we can — and must — get much smarter about deciding what message we, as Americans, want to include in this marketplace of ideas. Our hegemony, whether we like it or not, has elevated the expectations the rest of the world has for us. When we succeed, we rarely get the appreciation we deserve. When we fail, or retreat, the level of international disappointment — and cynicism — can be disproportional.

This represents the love/hate dichotomy on a grand scale. It’s the price we pay for victory in the Cold War; and it’s the price we must accept and manage if our future security is to be maintained and reinforced.

Multilateralism was the foundation upon which all of our 20th-century victories over totalitarianism were built. The cultivation of trusted allies served us well, and will continue to do so, even as we stand alone as the world’s preeminent superpower. This is especially critical now that we’re engaged in an international war with terrorist borderless enemies who hide deep within other cultures like parasites.

Brzezinski is disturbed that the Bush administration’s policies of unilateralism and preemptive war are taking us in the wrong direction and weakening us instead of making us more secure. Military might alone will never be enough to sustain a just and moral dimension to our hegemonic status, he argues. That’s a fool’s delusion and a prescription for endless distrust and perpetual instability.

In THE CHOICE Brzezinski makes a solid case for the absolute need for a vigorous revitalization of our network of democratic allies, with the United States providing energy, leadership, statecraft, and bold ideas instead of the arrogant simplicity and self-righteousness that has categorized the past few years of the Bush presidency.

Brzezinski believes that establishing long-term consistency in our international affairs and foreign-policy objectives is more important than ever. He recommends that a new department be set up within the National Security Council that serves as a central planning group and as a go-between for Congressional leaders involved in foreign-affairs legislation and the White House staff. Such a nonpartisan group (hopefully) would straddle different administrations, and help to sustain the consistency so necessary in these turbulent times.

Brzezinski also warns against the erosion of our basic freedoms in the name of security — the twisted logic of chipping away at democratic institutions in order to protect them. He is especially worried about aspects of the Patriot Act of 2001.

As the only remaining superpower on the world stage, and as the preeminent democracy, how we conduct ourselves, and how we assert our influence and prestige, will go a long way in defining us — and a long way in determining who will side with us and who will turn against us.

The Bush administration would be well-advised to listen to this wise and experienced voice. The reputation of our country is on the line — and as it goes, so goes our national security.

We cannot afford the luxury of simplistic black-and-white moralizing, of bully tactics and go-it-alone military adventurism. These are the values of a bygone era. It was called imperialism and it belongs in the dustbin of history right alongside Soviet-era Communism.

In THE CHOICE Brzezinski calls on us to get our act together, to set goals, to stick to them, and to present our values to the world as responsible stewards of democracy.

June 21, 2004 | Filed Under GFA