World View:In a comprehensive critique of George W Bush's war in Iraq and a warning of the dangerous course it could take in Iran, Zbigniew Brzezinski says it has been an historic, strategic and moral calamity for the US. The war was undertaken on false pretences and driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris. It has undermined US global legitimacy, especially in Europe, where years of patient effort will now be required to restore US credibility, writes Paul Gillespie.
Put forcefully in testimony to the US Senate's foreign relations committee on February 1st and in an article for the Los Angeles Timeson February 11th, Brzezinski's case is taken up and put in a wider context in his book published this week, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of the American Superpower. It goes against the grain of much commentary confined within the parameters of established US thinking on the subject.
Brzezinski was national security adviser to Jimmy Carter from 1976 to 1980 and has been since then a strategic theorist of US superpowerdom, influential during the Reagan, Bush and Clinton years and now from his academic perch at Johns Hopkins University. His speciality is grand geopolitical strategic analysis, with an engaging if brutal candour about the facts of power and interests in today's world. This often puts him at odds with leaders of the Democratic party he supports, notably on the Iraq war, which he has opposed.
Such realism is exemplified by his reply to a question put by the Nouvel Observateur in 1998, on whether he regretted supporting the Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, which he justified because they drew the Soviet Union into a Vietnam-like quagmire in 1979.
"What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the cold war?" A similarly candid theme runs through Brzezinski's three books published over the past 10 years. In his 1997 work, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, he spelled out what would be required to maintain this power for the next generation by purposeful management of the other major states. If the emergence of a direct challenger was to be prevented, the US would have "to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep subsidiaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together". The book is full of shrewd political insights and crisp judgments about how these hegemonic objectives could be achieved on the "Eurasian Balkan" chessboard.
In The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership, published in 2004, Brzezinski is more worried that the US will pursue the former not the latter path. If its foreign policy relied primarily on the unilateral exercise of sovereign power, along with a self-serving definition of emerging threats, this could bring "self-isolation, growing national paranoia and increasing vulnerability to a globally spreading anti-American virus. An anxious America, obsessed with its own security, could find itself isolated in a hostile world."
He extended the Balkan analogy globally to include south and southeast Asia, where most of the world's political injustice, social deprivation, demographic congestion, oil, gas - and Muslims - are concentrated. The major alternative to such a scenario, he argued, is a strengthened transatlantic partnership between the US and Europe through the EU and Nato.
Brzezinski has long advocated EU and Nato enlargement to consolidate the end of the cold war and create a new relationship with Russia. He sharply criticised the Bush administration's dismissal and mishandling of the European relationship. This should rather be complementary, allowing the US to be globally preponderant, but not omnipotent, by harnessing the EU's soft power without provoking it into a dangerous strategic rivalry.
Brzezinski's criticisms of the Bush administration's policies are much sharper and harsher in his latest book. This is largely because he argues that they have fulfilled his earlier predictions by gratuitously undermining US legitimacy and credibility around the world left in place by Bush snr and Clinton.
"Though in some dimensions, such as the military, American power may be greater in 2006 than in 1991, the country's capacity to mobilise, 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."
Europe and other regions have been alienated - as shown in successive opinion polls. This, if not corrected, could dramatically affect US standing, since "if American policy were universally viewed as arrogantly imperial in a post-imperial age, mired in a colonial relapse in a post-colonial time, selfishly indifferent in the face of unprecedented global interdependence, and culturally self-righteous in a religiously diverse world, the crisis of American superpower would then become terminal".
So if a new Democratic president emerges from next year's election, he or she has a huge task to reverse the trend.
Brzezinski, in his Senate testimony, painted an alarming picture of how Iran could provoke just such a terminal crisis: "If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran; culminating in a 'defensive' US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan." pgillespie@irish-times.ie