U.S. fate is in U.S. hands.

• Author: Merry, Robert W.
• Position: TNI Interview: Zbigniew Brzezinski - Interview

No one disputes that Zbigniew Brzezinski resides within the circle of America's most brilliant and prolific foreign-policy experts. The former White House national-security adviser under Jimmy Carter has written or coauthored eighteen books, including his most recent, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Order, a probing analysis of America's challenges in a fast-changing world. Brzezinski is a counselor and trustee at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a senior research professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. The National Interest caught up with Brzezinski at his CSIS office for an interview about his book and the current state of the world. The interview was conducted by TNI editor Robert W. Merry.

In your book, you talk about the Atlantic West's grand opportunity for what you called a "new era of Western global supremacy" after the Soviet collapse. But it didn't happen. To what extent do you think this failure resulted from human folly, and to what extent was it a product of forces beyond the control of the Atlantic West or its leaders?

I think both. But the West was fatigued, and Europe, certainly, lost a sense of its global responsibility and became more provincial in outlook. That, in part, was connected unavoidably with the task of constructing something that was called, originally, the European Community, that led to the European Union (although the two names should have been in a different sequence, because the European Community had more coherence than the current European Union). And the United States embarked on a kind of self-gratification and self-satisfaction, almost acting as if it really thought that history had come to an end. We did not anticipate the new, novel conditions of the world that were emerging, I think, with increasing clarity, which I try to address in my recent book, Strategic Vision.

So these forces were pretty substantial, but to what extent did some of the decisions of that time--the Iraq War, for example lead to this result?

You know my views on the Iraq War. I think that it was a disaster. A disaster in the sense of undermining American legitimacy worldwide, damaging the credibility of the president and of the office of the president, and entailing costs for the United States, which were not insubstantial in terms of lives lost and people maimed, and enormous economically--all contributing to a more unstable Middle East. Because whether we liked Saddam Hussein or not, and he was obviously obnoxious, he was a strong source of containment of Iranian Middle Eastern ambitions. Today, a divided Iraq, an unstable Iraq, a porous Iraq is very susceptible to Iranian influence and, if need be, destabilization.

How do you think the world today would be different if we had not gone into Iraq?

Well, for one thing, the Middle East might be slightly more stable. And I had no objection to us going into Afghanistan, although I did urge our top decision makers to go in, knock out the Taliban, destroy it if we could, as well as Al Qaeda, and then get out militarily--not stay in for ten years with an ambition to build a modern democratic state within a medieval and fragmented society. So that's not been very beneficial, but at least that would have been only one conflict. But then we had two conflicts, both very costly and not particularly helpful either.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

You wrote recently about this consequential shift in the center of gravity in global power and economic dynamism, as you say, from the Atlantic toward the Pacific, and you also write that the West can maintain a powerful position in this new world. But isn't it possible that this shift will simply leave the West and America behind, irrespective of what we do?

It is certainly possible, but if it should happen, it'll be our own fault in the sense that it doesn't have to happen. I don't deny for a minute the vitality of the Far East, of Asia, but I'm also very much aware that major players there have internal difficulties and potentially very dangerous conflicts in dealing with each other. So we have lots of room for maneuvering, in that respect. But more importantly, for a long time they are not going to be superior to us in overall financial and social well-being, or in standards of living. But of course if we flounder, if we stagnate, if we wallow in crisis, they may get ahead of us.

And I am very worried about the fact that we in the United States have a financial system that has become increasingly speculative rather than productive, in which personal greed rather than social growth is the main motive of the players. We have a tax system that favors the rich to a degree that I think is...