Une parole franche

Zbigniew Brzezinski: From Grand Chessboard to Obama Advisor. Part Three

 

By Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

 

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The onset of contrition

 

The U.S. presidential election of the year 2000 was in good part fought over the future direction of foreign policy, with candidate George W. Bush calling for a trimming of the sails. Bush appeared to side with a traditional ‘Jacksonian’ strand of centrist thinking, which had been deeply critical of American military interventions under Bill Clinton in furtherance of human rights and other soft causes. The climate was so propitious to a return of ‘realism’ that Henry Kissinger came out of semi-retirement and published his own volume of advice to the new Prince.

 

However, the events of September 11, 2001 brought about a cardinal change in the thinking of the President and his security and foreign policy team around a crudely formulated ‘war on terrorism.’ A new national security strategy was put in place in 2002, setting out the principles of pre-emptive war and unilateralism which justified and explained America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. President Bush put the nations of the world on notice that they were either ‘with us or against us,’ a theological crusade against an axis of evil was launched, and the hubris implicit in American post-Cold War triumphalism was exposed in a bullying foreign policy which abandoned all pretence at diplomatic niceties and generated enormous ill will towards the country in foreign capitals.

 

Brzezinski, the realist, rejected the policies of George W. Bush, because they violated the rules of statecraft and his own warnings on the finite nature of U.S. resources and the need to enlist others to maximize the effect of American actions. Moreover, a great many of the specific policy recommendations for managing relations with Europe and the Far East which Brzezinski had advanced in The Grand Chessboard fell among the broken china as the United States prioritized formation of its ‘coalition of the willing.’ Relations with traditional close allies soured over French and German unwillingness to support a military campaign for ‘regime change’ in Baghdad without cover of legitimacy from the United Nations Security Council. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld strove to drive a wedge between squeamish Old Europe and the dynamic and supportive New European states like Poland which generously contributed troops to the U.S. coalition. In the Far East, great pressure was applied to the Japanese to raise their level of participation in other related American military operations (logistics for the Afghanistan effort). Eventually this led to formation of a U.S.-Australian-Japanese axis in the Far East which worked directly counter to the strategic partnership with China which Brzezinski had urged. However, I am getting ahead of events.

 

Brzezinski was among the minority of foreign policy specialists who came out against the invasion of Iraq both before and after the United States brought down Saddam Hussein. He was quick to appreciate the damage, actual and potential, to his painstakingly designed architecture of international relations and he acted. In 2004 he published his response to American unilateralism: The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership

 

As John Inkenberry aptly put it in his review published in The New York Times (“Books of the Times” section, March 30, 2004), Brzezinski planted a flag on behalf of the Democratic Party opposition to stand against George W. Bush’s vision of security. Ikenberry also indicated that the key contribution of The Choice may lie elsewhere than in its conceptual strength, which he faulted.

The central thesis of the book was that the US should stand by its traditional orientation to Europe in the West and China/Japan in the East and not be distracted by coalitions of the willing nor turn its entire foreign policy around the issues of war on terrorism, which are insufficient to guide foreign policy. Brzezinski condemned unilateralism because it might precipitate an anti-American turn in East and West, encouraging local pan-Asianism and pan-Europeanism with America being squeezed out of Eurasia.

 

I would maintain that the book’s real contribution to the debate was linguistic.As I noted here earlier, in his 1997 master work Brzezinski had imbibed fully the ambrosia of ‘primacy,’ ‘dominance’ and ‘empire.’ Now he learned to watch his p’s and q’s much better and his language becomes almost, if not quite contrite.

 

In general, the controversy aroused by the Bush Doctrine shook loose the various strands of conservatism and patriotic posturing which had become almost indistinguishable in the second half of the 1990s. Hard and fast Neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz moved to one side, cheering on a benevolent U.S. domination of the international scene in unapologetic unilateralism. Progressive Democrats, on the other hand, now took up Brzezinski’s call for American leadership, which remains to this day the new politically correct term for consensual hegemony. Meanwhile, Jacksonians and ‘realists’ remain marginalized as in the two decades before George W. Bush.

 

Now let us move on to Brzezinski’s latest monograph, Second Chance which I will supplement with related items from Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy, published in 2008, in which he is jointly featured with Brent Snowcroft in a free flowing question and answer format.

 

Both books provide an affirmative answer to the question: can an old dog learn new tricks? From his renown as hands-on fighter in the trenches of Washington and polemicist of note in the past, Brzezinski emerges here as an even-tempered observer who is generous in his appraisals of adversaries as well as friends and colleagues – with the possible exception of President George W Bush, whose thinking he obviously does not hold in high regard. Throughout the book, Brzezinski reasons with his reader rather than lectures him.

 

One reason for the change in style of his writing has to do with the perspective. Second Chance is a primarily a work of history rather than futurology or strategizing. It looks back at the past fifteen years since the end of the Cold War and explores how each of the three presidents of this period– George W. H. Bush (Sr), Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (Jr) – responded to the historic window of opportunity to transform the world in circumstances of American worldwide hegemony. Conversations is largely a document in the memoir genre of personal recollections.

 

In general, he concludes that whatever each president achieved in office, none exploited successfully the unprecedented power which the United States enjoyed in the world during their mandates.

 

Bush Sr was a master of foreign policy when he came to office and succeeded in managing very well the major issues which developed on his watch: the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Central Europe and the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union beginning in late 1991; and the Iraqi invasion of Kuweit. However, he lacked the vision to move beyond competent management to a transformational role which was there for the taking in both instances.

 

Bill Clinton acceded to the presidency without any strategy for foreign policy, believing in the benevolent determinism of globalization which would guide the world to a safer harbor over time. In his second term, when Madeleine Albright ran the State Department and Brzezinski’s counsel carried some weight, the Clinton presidency was given purpose in foreign policy by NATO enlargement. However, it largely missed any opportunity to bring Russia into a constructive relationship or to bring about a comprehensive settlement in the Middle East as it became bogged down in the president’s domestic woes with Congress and the impeachment proceedings against him.

 

The sitting president imposed self-inflicted wounds on the body politic and set back the cause of American leadership.

 

Brzezinski explains these developments in terms of the differing personalities, skills and outlooks of the presidents themselves and also in the different strengths and weaknesses of the American people which their policies addressed.

 

Brzezinski has nearly 20-20 vision looking back into the past. Though I have remarked earlier that he was prophetic in calling out in 1997 certain relatively obscure issues which became very important ten years later such as Ukrainian membership in NATO, this was to a certain extent a self-fulfilling prophecy given that Brzezinski himself was not an idle bystander in some scholarly ivory tower; he himself set in motion the wheels of political expectations which later matured.

 

I say ‘nearly’ perfect vision on the past, because there is an astigmatism which must be acknowledged, namely his tendentiousness with respect to continuities or discontinuities of policy under the various administrations. Brzezinski is quick to pick up the continuity between the Defense Planning Guide document of 1992 under George H.W. Bush (Sr). and the unilateralist, preventive war policies of Bush, Jr. both in terms of outlook and implementers, since the middle level authors of the working draft under the father later reappeared as high Defense Department and National Security Council officials under the son, and its main sponsor, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, served as Vice President in the administration of George W. Bush.

 

What he willfully overlooks is the continuities in policy of all three presidents in their pursuit of U.S. hegemony and the proliferating American military interventions abroad during the entire period.

 

The basic point of the narrative is missed opportunities and a concluding reaffirmation that the United States would have a ‘second chance’ to fulfill them if its next president learned from the errors of the recent past. Along the way Brzezinski provides a lot of very interesting material answering questions which I posed at the start of this four part analytical article on his post-Cold War thinking..

 

Is Brzezinski anti-Russian?

 

First of all, Second Chance and, still more, the book of Conversations which came out a year later provide very useful information bearing on the author’s view of Russia.

 

One may ask, of course, what is the relevance of that question to his general strategic recommendations for U.S. foreign policy. Zbigniew Brzezinski is very widely traveled and totally conversant with the issues and personalities of most of the world’s countries. He also has spent a large part of his professional life accentuating the positive: the need to concentrate on improving America’s relations with its main allies in Europe and the Far East or the need to show differentiated and kindly treatment of the East European subject countries in the Soviet bloc rather than dwelling solely on confrontation with and containment of the USSR.

 

And yet Soviet studies were his core expertise, as is true of the entire U.S. foreign intelligence community in the period up to the September 11, 2001 attacks, and many of his policy recommendations in a great variety of areas have in one way or another reflected his reading of Russia. In the past that was justified by the worldwide standoff of the two powers in a bipolar world. But it is all the more true today, long after the demise of the Soviet Union, when a ‘resurgent’ and resentful Russia has emerged as the most vocal opponent to U.S. hegemony on the world stage.

 

 

So is Brzezinski anti-Russian or not?

 

We already indicated that his seminal work The Grand Chessboard left us uncertain whether his recommendations on the way forward for Russia were delivered in good faith. What do his last two books contribute by way of clarification?

 

There is in Second Chance a fairly lengthy discussion of bad, at times illegal behavior by American and other Western advisors to the Yeltsin government in the 1990s which compounded the problem of theft of national property by the oligarchs. Western malfeasance contributed to the 1998 financial melt-down in Russia ending in default and all of this irrevocably associated the reformers and their Western backers with chaos and pauperization in the mind of the broad Russian public.

 

In this text Brzezinski is not saying anything which one would not find in “Who Lost Russia?” – the memoirs of his adventures in Russia as speculator and philanthropist during the Yeltsin years published by George Soros in April 2000.* (*See my blog article “George Soros on the Russian Problem: When Sour Grapes Turn Rancid,” La Libre Belgique, February 18, 2009). However, Soros later changed sides and has in recent publications decided to pin the blame for Russia’s turn to authoritarianism on Vladimir Putin rather than on the misdeeds and meanness of Western governments during the 1990s. It is very much to Brzezinski’s credit that he has remained true to the historical record and holds to account the U.S. government under Bill Clinton as well as private American consultants who let down Russia’s democrats.

 

However, at the very same time Brzezinski repeats and amplifies his attention to Russia’s ‘imperial nostalgia’ as the principal impediment to improved relations with the West. I do not deny that such nostalgia once existed, particularly in the early 1990s when the newly created Russian Federation was embarking on a search for its national identity. However, by the turn of the millennium, the question of the national mission statement had long been solved otherwise and without reference to any resuscitation of an empire.

 

It is disappointing that Brzezinski stubbornly refuses to see the present day reality of Russia. Instead he trots out Vladimir Putin’s famous remark that ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest calamity of the 20^th century’ as proof of such nostalgia in today’s leadership and as an even worse indication about the nature of the regime: according to Brzezinski the phrase means “Leninism-Stalinism has been swept under the carpet and not exorcised.”

 

Because the very same quotation from Putin is regularly used by Robert Kagan and the Neoconservatives generally these days to demonstrate the ‘values gap’ between the West and Russia and to justify arms length dealings instead of rapprochement, it is worth taking a short time out to consider what Putin’s remark truly meant.

 

To begin with, interpretation of the phrase need not be literal In the broader sense, the end of the bipolar world following the collapse of the USSR was and remains a ‘calamity’ for the West as well as for Russia. The American worldwide hegemony and hubris made possible a war of aggression against Iraq and dramatically changed the perception of the United States in the community of nations from peacemaker to the single greatest threat to world peace.

 

However, there is no need to be too clever about all this. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the removal from power of the Communist Party in the Russian Federation was a nearly bloodless revolution which left both persecutors and their progeny and victims and their progeny on the political and social stage of Russia. In this context of widely divergent and passionately held views about the country’s past, present and future, Vladimir Putin’s government maneuvered from one side to another, as most any skillful statesmen would, allowing memorials to be built to those who had been repressed and also honoring the institutional traditions of those responsible for the abuses while proceeding step-by-step in consolidating not only Russia’s unity of state power but its transformation into a young democracy and market economy.

 

The legislative electoral campaigns of late 2007 and the presidential campaign of the spring 2008 which gave the Kremlin party control of the State Duma and Mr Dmitry Medvedev the presidency were waged around an extremely modest and achievable platform of improving the daily life of the vast majority of the population and feeling of national pride to the point where Russians would no longer dream of emigrating, would be content to marry and raise children in their communities.

 

One very recent example of the complexity of the way Mr Putin and the Russian leadership is dealing with the wounds of the past came up just last week when it was announced that the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation has placed Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s master work, The Gulag Archipelago, on its official syllabus for teaching Russian literature to 12 and 13 year olds across the land. This decision occurred in response to a request of the author’s widow, Nadezhda Solzhenitsyna, made privately to the Prime Minister at a recent meeting. Callers given air time on a talk show of the BBC Russian Service on the day following this announcement revealed by their remarks the highly divided opinion of the general Russian public over the suitability of Gulag as a text for secondary school students.

 

The country’s foreign policy under Sergei Lavrov has been built upon the traditional principles of Realpolitik, namely the defense of the economic and strategic interests of the nation-state and support for Russian business and private persons abroad. Economic interests include, of course, defense of market share in the growing European energy markets by, on the one hand, retaining its status as predominant customer for gas from its Central Asian neighbors and on the other hand retaining secure transit of its gas through the neighboring countries to the West, Ukraine and Belarus. Neither preoccupation can be characterized as ‘imperial’ or ‘nostalgic’ in the sense meant by Brzezinski.

 

 

In Conversations, Brzezinski expands on the question of Russia’s alleged nostalgia for empire. He tells us that Putin wants to subjugate states like Ukraine or Georgia since they are geopolitically critical to its dream of empire. In his view Russia seeks to dominate Ukraine to pursue a Slavic Union and must humble Georgia because it is essential to rule the Caucasus

 

It is regrettable but I must say that Brzezinski’s remarks about Ukraine and Georgia are humbug. No Slavic Union is on the political agenda of the Russian Federation today. Ideologies and big ideas of all kinds are not part of the national program, which is fixated on personal prosperity. And as for the Caucasus, the Russians are clearly concerned to keep the peace in their own republics of Ingushetia, Dagestan and Chechnya, which are indeed critical to their domestic tranquility lest Russia experience the centrifugal forces once again which nearly led to chaos in the 1990s. Georgia has been a distraction and a nuisance at the level of external security only because of American support for an unstable local potentate, Mr. Saakashvili, in defense of oil transit pipelines built across his nation as part of Brzezinski’s strategy directed against Russia..

 

In the years since the completion of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan which Brzezinski helped to negotiate during the Clinton administration, natural developments within the Central Asian and trans-Caucasus region have done more to establish economic pluralism there than all of Washington’s geopolitically motivated meddling. The China factor has been of major importance in changing how Russia deals with its ‘near abroad’ to the south economically and politically. More recently Iran and Turkey have exercised their own pull on Central Asia as energy consumers. Pakistan and India are looming on the horizon. All are looking after their private commercial interests and none has need of prodding from Washington to act on behalf of high geopolitical considerations under American tutelage.

 

And as we close out the issue of Russia’s alleged ‘imperial nostalgia,’ it is essential to highlight a lesson of a different sort which is completely in line with realist theory about the behavior of all nation states, whatever their internal social and political structure: all without exception behave ‘imperially’ when given a chance. It is irresponsible of Brzezinski and betokens double standards not to allow Russia’s claims to a ‘privileged relationship’ with its neighbors of the ‘near abroad’ and to ignore the revived imperial ambitions of Sweden, Poland, Turkey and other former ‘master nations’ to Russia’s southern and western borderlands.

 

These are the parties which waged wars over the same flat spaces for centuries until each was defeated by the forces of Moscow. It is simply remarkable how the peaceable, neutrality-loving Swedes rediscovered their rapacious Viking genes once the Baltics were free again for their economic colonization. It is equally amazing how quickly humble Poland took the lead in fomenting the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and championing the cause of democracy in still enslaved Belarus, Imperial Poland entices guest workers from the poorer countries to the East whose highly trained medical personnel and unskilled labor fill the vacancies created in Polish towns by its own brain drain and exodus of plumbers to France, the UK and Ireland. Poland from the Baltic to Black Seas is the revived ambition of Mr Brzezinski’s former homeland.

 

For its part, Turkey unrolled an ambitious campaign of pan-Turkism in the Central Asian republics largely focusing on commercial investments and cultural centers. But the respective republics were at the time preoccupied with their own power struggles and image problems, so that the Turkish approaches bore few fruit and were ultimately discontinued. It is depressing to observe how American advisors in the region today, following the lead of Mr Richard Morningstar, are trying to revive Turkey’s allegedly stabilizing mission in Central Asia. My point is simply that Russia’s interest in maintaining close, even privileged relations with the countries on its borders should not be an argument against its full integration into the institutions of European security and trade given that the entire region is already an open marketplace for competing forces of attraction.

 

 

However, let us move on. The question of whether Zbigniew Brzezinski is anti-Russian was given a thorough airing in Conversations. Moderator David Ignatius, whose views are well to the right of center in American politics, nonetheless acted on his best journalistic instincts when he probed several of Brzezinski’s policy positions about Russia that strain the onlooker’s credulity. [page 172 ff] Can Brzezinski really mean what he says?

 

Ignatius began by asking about the wisdom of continuing the policy of NATO expansion: “How would we feel if a potential adversary advanced into Mexico or Canada? What should a wise policy towards Russia be?”

 

Brzezinski insisted that NATO’s expansion eastward into Central Europe Soviet Bloc countries had not caused trouble, saying “…by and large, [they] have a much better relationship today with Russia than ever before, Poland particularly. So I don’t think the expansion of NATO has been disruptive, quite the reverse.” And as for Ukraine and Georgia, Brzezinski said the point was to keep open the option for the future.

 

Ignatius then had another go at it, asking rhetorically: “Zbig, how many times can you poke a stick in Russia’s eye without their fighting back? We’ve gotten in the habit, through the years of Russian weakness under Yeltsin, of poking them a lot and getting away with it. Isn’t that period ending.”

 

But Brzezinski would not be moved. He reiterated the position we saw him set out in 1997 in The Grand Chessboard, namely that if Ukraine moved towards the EU and NATO that would prod Russia to do likewise. And Brzezinski also held to the time lines he sketched out a decade earlier: Russia in his view still has to undergo a long and painful evolution towards democracy, so that its joining with the West remained ‘a very long range goal.’

 

These passages suggest that somewhere around 1997 Brzezinski either stopped looking closely at what is going on in Russia and in the neighboring states on its borders or succumbed to self-delusion. The only other explanation, still less attractive, is that he is prevaricating.

 

Like a bloodhound on the scent, Ignatius later asked Brzezinski what he thought of the Russians generally, to which he received the following stunning response: “..I like Russians. I like to be among Russians. You may be surprised to hear that I fit in very well, and most of them are very warm towards me, because I often dislike the same things they dislike in their own country.”

 

The last remark is a fine clarification of the type of Russians with whom Brzezinski may be expected to meet. They are almost certainly the self-appointed fighters for democracy, people who in the Soviet days would have been labeled ‘dissidents.’

 

Very few Westerners would have wanted to live under a government run by former Soviet dissidents, people who by definition had to be mad to stand up against a totalitarian regime. Their successors today, the human rights defenders and anti-Putin campaigners are not an easy bunch to get along with either as we may read between the lines in Brzezinski’s further remarks:

 

“It’s sometimes said that the Russians are among the most saintly and the most evil of peoples at the same time. There’s no doubt that some of the human rights activists in Russia are prepared to put everything on the line, to sacrifice everything. They do it with a commitment that is beyond one’s capacity to even remotely equal.’

 

Saintly and evil. Love – hate. Brzezinski went on to round out his impression of Russians in words that are an indictment of his qualifications as objective area specialist:

 

“And then there’s this tradition of insensitivity to suffering, a willingness to brutalize people…I often think that that brutality is the product of the semi-animalistic level of peasant life, which breeds the feeling that you can mistreat animals and that human beings are no different.”

 

Brzezinski simply has no ‘feel’ for his subject matter. He is taking us to the level of discourse of the chap at the next bar stool. He is also being unashamedly elitist. The only mitigating factor is that further on in the same book he acknowledges that certain ‘backward, traditional farming regions’ in his native Poland also have ‘almost a peasant culture.” But there he speaks with the voice of a hereditary petty Polish nobleman.

 

© Gilbert Doctorow 2009

 

See continuation, Part Four

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This four-part article devoted to Zbigniew Brzezinski forms part of a collection of essays on America's most influential political scientists and their writings about international affairs in the post-Cold War period published during the years 1993 – 2009. Publication of the collection in the United States is planned for late 2010. Visitors to this site may wish to consult other chapters already issued here as blog articles on the dates indicated below:

Henry Kissinger, From Diplomacy to Does America Need a Foreign Policy?   09.02.2010

Francis Fukuyama, From the End of History to After the Neocons, 30.11,2009

Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Smart Power, 10.08.2009

Can Common Sense fix what is wrong with American foreign policy? Leslie Gelb and Power Rules, 03.06.2009

The History Wars…A review of Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams and a bit more, 20.04.2009.

Samuel Huntingon and The Clash of Civilizations, Parts One and Two, 03.02.2009.