President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, talks to LARA MARLOWEabout the main foreign policy challenges facing the US today
AS NATIONAL security adviser to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 until 1981, Zbigniew Brzezinski dealt first hand with the three of most important foreign policy issues that today still confront President Barack Obama: peace between Israel and Arabs, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Afghanistan.
Dr Brzezinski was one of the first foreign policy experts to endorse Obama's candidacy for the presidency. That is one reason why his plea for Obama's foreign policy to move "From Hope to Audacity" in the current issue of Foreign Affairsmagazine carries such resonance.
In an interview at his office at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, the eagle-eyed Dr Brzezinski criticised Obama for demanding a freeze on Israeli settlements last spring, only to back down in September, and for squandering repeated opportunities to propose a coherent plan for peace between Israel and Palestinians.
The goodwill that Obama generated with the June 2009 Cairo speech is being frittered away, he warned.
Dr Brzezinski says it is unrealistic to demand that Iran must stop enriching uranium, though weaponisation might be avoided through an “accommodation”.
He opposes military intervention to stop the Iranian nuclear programme, and believes the wrong economic sanctions could be counter-productive.
But he recommends that the US should explicitly extend its “nuclear umbrella” to the Middle East, saying, “There is nothing in Iranian behaviour that suggests that they as a nation are suicidal.”
Dr Brzezinski says the National Security Council (NSC) – not the State Department – has played the dominant role in US foreign policy-making since McGeorge Bundy headed the council under presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
Obama has pushed the phenomenon to new heights, nearly doubling the NSC staff to 200.
Obama, Brzezinski says, “is clearly the principal strategist ”, but this “tends to weaken the strategic impulse, and perhaps leads to some over-estimation of what can be done, or to some under-estimation of the difficulties that have to be overcome, in either case producing somewhat disorderly retreat from positions taken earlier”.
Brzezinski believes Obama is ill-served by his advisers, particularly on the Israeli-Palestinian question. The demand for a freeze on Israeli settlements, and the subsequent climbdown, was an error, because Obama had no fallback position. It strengthened Israeli hardliners, while discrediting the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and the White House.
“I happen to think that . . . realises the strategic and historic dimension of the problem,” Brzezinski says. “But on the other hand I also have the feeling that he and some people around him think that he has had his fingers burned and that perhaps that’s a good reason not to do it again.”
Obama’s demand, made of Israel last spring, “was meant to be a sign of toughness”, Brzezinski says.
“It might have made tactical sense if there had been already an anticipated follow-up in the event of a negative response . But that was somehow strangely lacking . . . Someone must have originated that idea, unless the president thought of it himself. And if he thought of it himself, I wonder if anyone tried to dissuade him from doing it, on the grounds it would be unproductive.
“But simply to plunge into it, to raise it, to get others to back him publicly, and then to back down, was, I think, self-damaging, and showed a poor co-ordination between strategy, tactics and intelligence analysis. Surely no one told in advance that Netanyahu would line up, click his heels and say ‘Yes Sir’.”
The settlements issue was a “practical diversion” that prevented Obama from “focusing on the parameters of peace”, Brzezinski says.
In his Foreign Affairsarticle, he outlines a detailed, four-point plan which entails the Palestinians renouncing the right of return to what is now Israel in exchange for compensation; Jerusalem being shared as the capital of both states; borders based on those prior to the 1967 war, with some land swaps to avoid dismantling the biggest settlements, and US or Nato peacekeepers.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week created a stir, and speculation that the administration might be moving towards a more assertive policy, when she said: “Of course, we believe that the 1967 borders, with swaps, should be the focus of the negotiations over borders.”
Brzezinski says Obama missed at least three opportunities to put forward such a plan, at the UN General Assembly in September, in his Nobel lecture in December, and in his State of the Union address on January 27th.
Israelis and Palestinians have proven they are incapable of making peace on their own, Brzezinski says. The US president alone has the ability to make it happen. “You only do that by creating a groundswell of international and domestic support for your position,” he explains.
“The president can create a groundswell by virtue of the fact that he is the president. But he can only do so if he is willing to stick his head out and take the lead.”
If Obama had seized one of the missed opportunities to put forward a plan similar to the one espoused by Brzezinski, “there is no doubt he would have the instant support of the European Union, which in fact is now on record favouring that, late last Fall”, Brzezinski says.
“Beyond that, he would have the overwhelming support, probably quasi-unanimous, of the entire international community.”
Brzezinski believes Obama must put US-Israeli friendship on the line to achieve peace: “If I was an Israeli, I would like to have my cake and eat it too. If I can have total American support, and a stalemate in peace, why should I jeopardise any of that? But if it becomes clear that there could be some consequences for the good relationship with the United States, then I would think twice about it.”
Brzezinski’s cold assessment of the European Union is particularly relevant in light of Obama’s decision to skip the EU-US summit in Madrid in May. He calls the EU “a global economic power devoid of either military clout or political will” and says the Atlantic partnership “is necessarily limited to dialogues with” Britain, France and Germany.
But, he adds, Gordon Brown is on his way out, Nicolas Sarkozy is preoccupied with personal celebrity, and Angela Merkel gazes eastward.
In his Foreign Affairsarticle, Brzezinski warns: "How Obama handles these three urgent and interrelated issues – the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the Iranian dilemma and the Afghan-Pakistani conflict – will determine the US's global role for the foreseeable future."
If Washington fails to broker peace between Israel and Palestinians, if there is a military confrontation with Iran, and if the war in Afghanistan continues to escalate, he warns, it “could spell the end of the United States’ current global pre-eminence”.
Yet, in our conversation, Brzezinski expressed pessimism on the Israeli and Iranian fronts. Israel-Palestine is the issue “on which we have the greatest degree of direct leverage”.
“We are refusing to use our leverage in the Middle East, so we are sort of ‘waiting for Godot’. With the Iranians, the fact is you are dealing with a very unpredictable regime and you have to be super-careful not to unify the public with the regime. So, again, that limits our ability to be really effective.
“Of those three, the one we are most likely to solve satisfactorily within a reasonably predictable period of time is Afpak – Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Brzezinski says.
“That is the one . . . we are really able to apply our resources.”