Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century.

• Author: Kreyche, Gerald F.

By Zbigniew Brzezinski / Charles Scribner's Son's, 1993, pp. 240, $21.00

The National Security Advisor to the Carter Administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has given readers an eye-opening look at the problems of the geopolitical future. He begins by analyzing the immediate past and uncertain present. With the demise of the Soviet Union, leaving the U.S. as the only superpower, he suggests the nature of America's increased, but changing, responsibilities.

His contention is that the 20th century is pockmarked by the killing of nearly 170,000,000 through wars and pogroms against innocents. Since many of those slain were intelligentsia, there now is a leadership vacuum. The century also has witnessed the gargantuan struggle between totalitarianism and democracy and presently faces the emergence of Third World countries that are seeking to better themselves.

Brzezinski traces the roots of political consciousness to the French Revolution, which gave birth to nationalism, idealism, and rationalism. Coupled with widespread literacy, technological effects extending the Industrial Revolution, and the increasing urbanization of society, these have proved decisive for shaping the present world.

Throughout, he contrasts ideologies shared by communism (the Soviet Union and China) and fascism (Germany, Spain, and Italy) with the democracies of the West. The former, he terms "coercive utopias"; the latter, "permissive cornucopias." Communists and fascists replaced God and fundamental religious values with their own doctrines and leaders such as Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini. Ironically, using the Marxist argument to rebut its own charges, all contained within themselves the seeds of their own destruction.

Marxism, Brzezinski writes, had a...