Out of Control.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob

Zbigniew Brzezinski is a busy man. Between "traveling, consulting, speaking, and teaching ," he required the help of no fewer than six research assistants to extrude his latest book, Out of Control. It reflects the pace of his life--harried, rushed, and at the mercy of deadlines.

At least one deadline is self-imposed. Brzezinski must hurry because the end is drawing nigh. The looming catastrophe--not environmental, but moral and political--renders lengthy research and contemplation a frivolous luxury. The outcome is a farrago of half-baked analyses which suggests an author, much like the world he seeks to describe, careening out of control.

His aim is ambitious. Each of his three theses-the significance of the failure of totalitarianism, the emerging geopolitical order, and the future of American foreign policy--might require a book of its own. Brzezinski himself declares in his introduction that Out of Control provides the capstone to his earlier books, Between Two Ages, Game Plan, and The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century. Where those works concentrated on policy prescriptions, Brzezinski now seeks to provide a sweeping philosophical grounding for American foreign policy.

Unfortunately, the sober tone and lucid prose of his previous works are scarcely in evidence. Brzezinski's philosophy, such as it is, consists largely of tirades against American sexual license and self-indulgence. His fulminations come closer to those of a crank than a geostrategist. Indeed, one of the most peculiar parts of Brzezinski's new book is his somersault from geostrategy to morality. In Game Plan, Brzezinski applies the terms "imperial system" and "empire" equally to the Soviet Union and the United States, thus stressing the fact that the confrontation between the two superpowers was morally neutral in character. (In an interview with National Interest in 1986, Brzezinski dismissed the belief that the United States stood for freedom as "a very American view.") There is something paradoxical about jumping from soft-pedaling the ideological character of the struggle between the superpowers to excoriating Americans for their lack of morality once the conflict has concluded. Finally, his book does in fact degenerate into foreign policy prescriptions that pack all the punch of a musty Foreign Affairs article. There is more foam than beer in this brew.

To be sure, Brzezinski's passages on the demise of communism form some of...