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« Back to Zbigniew Brzezinski At Large, Part One main page    Transcript for: Zbigniew Brzezinski At Large, Part OneThink Tank with Ben WattenbergZbigniew Brzezinski, At large, Part 1 TTBW 1207 PBS feed date 2/26/2004 Funding for Think Tank is provided by: At Pfizer we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. (opening animation) BEN WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Today, Think Tank is joined by one of the significant voices in American foreign policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Dr. Brzezinski served as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, where he played a key role in the 1978 peace accord between Israel and Egypt. He has been a principal advisor on foreign policy and intelligence issues to successive American administrations. Now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, Dr. Brzezinski is the author of many books, including The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives and his just published book The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership. The Topic Before the House: Zbigniew Brzezinski at Large, Part 1. This Week on Think Tank BEN WATTENBERG: Zbigniew Brzezinski, welcome to Think Tank. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: It’s good to be with you, Ben. BEN WATTENBERG: I have been reading your new book, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership. In fact, I stayed up late last night reading it. It is a very good book, with your characteristic linear thinking, but quite gloomy. And let me go through a couple a the items: ...first you say, you pretty well predict, a major catastrophe from weapons of mass destruction-literally, as you put it, an end-of-the-world scenario; an Armageddon, and pretty soon. I mean, you say a generation or two, I think. I mean, we’ve had now almost sixty years since Hiroshima and we’ve kept the genie in the bottle. Why do you say that? ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well, first of all, I don’t predict it. And that’s a very important point. What I do say is that it’s now feasible, it’s technically feasible. That is to say we’re reaching a stage in mankind’s history in which means of destruction available to people, to states, or even to groups, are getting to a point in which one could unleash forces that would destroy a country, maybe an entire civilization. BEN WATTENBERG: And this would be typical... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: And this is... WATTENBERG: ...of a rogue state somewhere. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well a rogue state, or some sort of a conflict or a provocation. You know, unfortunately things in the world are never black and white; they’re usually much more ambiguous than that and therefore one of the major themes of the book is that American unilateralism, or American domination, does not suffice to avoid these dangers. That America has to exercise a leadership that commands support, that inspires others, because if it doesn’t then these kinds of dangers could become reality. So I repeat, I do not predict an apocalypse by any means. It’s not a pessimistic book but it is a book, which says a certain danger now has manifest and we have the obligation to avoid it. BEN WATTENBERG: You say that even the American global model of democracy and equality, of which you approve most elegantly, I guess in diplomatic terms--I guess that’s some of the so-called soft power-but, in any event, even that model you say gets people to hate us. Or may get people to hate us. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well, it’s connected first of all with feelings of envy which unfortunately are a very natural human condition and secondly with the danger that some of our acts will intensify resentment and magnify, even ignite hatred against us. BEN WATTENBERG: Are our actions to help encourage the formations of new democracies? ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well I wouldn’t put it quite that way. I think there is in our reaction to the acts of terrorism committed against us and in this undifferentiated proclamation of the war against terrorism, which often is equated with war against fundamentalist Islam and sometimes the word fundamentalist even gets forgotten so it’s Islamic terrorism, runs the risk of creating a counter reaction which galvanizes enormous hatred and focuses it on us. So these are the kinds of things we have to be very alert to, given the fact that without us the world becomes unstable. But if we’re not very careful how we exercise our leadership we can become the object of a lot of the potentially increasingly dangerous violence that now is at a stage at which can become massively destructive. BEN WATTENBERG: You were quite critical of President Bush’s and the administration’s actions on homeland security. Yet I mean, as you know, the acts of 9/11 were unprecedented. What are you supposed to do except take harsh measures? It was an attack on our homeland, and as you point out bigger and better ones, bigger and worse ones, may be coming right down the line at us. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Yes, but harsh measures is not necessarily the most intelligent response. The harsh measures produce only harshness. In other words you want measures that are effective; that deal with the problem. Go back historically for a minute, and I know you’re a great student of history. You know, we took harsh measures in the past - the sedition acts, the interment of the Japanese. BEN WATTENBERG: And we cut off immigration... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: ...some of the hysteria in various stages of our history. They were harsh, but they weren’t necessarily effective. So harshness is not a justification. What worries me about some of the measures taken essentially are two things. One: are we really running the risk of crossing the borderline between prudent but constitutionally responsible reactions and panicky and maybe not even fully constitutional/quasi constitutional reactions. And that’s a serious problem. BEN WATTENBERG: And your view sort of leans toward the... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well, I think some aspects of the Patriot Act give me pause. Secondly, I’m not sure that throwing money at a security problem, and creating a huge security bureaucracy, is the response, because ultimately you can’t protect everything and you are just spending a lot of money trying to protect everything which means that you’re really spreading yourself thin and you create an atmosphere of anxiety, which the enemy can abet even by stimulating periodic alarms. What, in my view, is a far more effective response... BEN WATTENBERG: I mean these groundings of these flights from Europe to America is a tremendous economic blow to us, even though nobody did anything except maybe make a phone call or do some e-mailing. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: And it may be even deliberately... BEN WATTENBERG: Right, right. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: ...because these people are not stupid and they’re beginning to see us issuing these alerts or having electronic signs over the highways, like on the beltway around Washington, where you see signs flashing at you,'report suspicious activity'. What does that say to the population? It stimulates anxiety; it doesn’t do anything to the enemy. BEN WATTENBERG: And yet... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: But there is one more point... BEN WATTENBERG: Go ahead. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: ...about protecting everything, namely, if you are really interested in protecting everything, what you really need is much better intelligence. BEN WATTENBERG: Yes. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: And one of the things I argue in my book is that for every ten bucks spent on homeland security, one buck spent on better intelligence is a much better deal. BEN WATTENBERG: And you are in favor of human rather than technological intelligence. You think that’s where we’re short? ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I think our technological intelligence is very good. I know for a fact that our human intelligence is very poor and I think what happened with regards to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq illustrates that dramatically. Iraq was a country that was actually pervasive. You could penetrate it - permeable. We knew just very, very embarrassingly little and that’s been an embarrassment to the United States and to the administration. BEN WATTENBERG: And yet we were on record as saying they had them and Chirac and the French were on record as saying they had them and the Russians were on the record as saying - I mean there’s this long list which you’ve seen. Everybody thought it. It wasn’t just the Americans. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: You know, it’s a little more qualified than that, Ben. BEN WATTENBERG: Yes. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: First of all, the others who were saying it were also saying 'let’s check it out. We have time. The inspectors are looking and let’s see what they say.' And they don’t seem to be finding anything. Maybe there’s something to that because the record in the past was pretty good actually. So they are far more patient than we. Secondly, don’t underestimate the impact on others of us proclaiming that the Iraqis have them. Because the fact of the matter is that historically we were trusted. When Kennedy said to the world, 'there are Russian missiles with nuclear weapons in Cuba', everybody believed us because we had a record of credibility. So when President Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, all of them flatly said they have weapons of mass destruction, everybody was inclined to believe them. I was too, although I became increasingly skeptical. BEN WATTENBERG: Did you support the war at that time? ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I believed we had to do something about Iraq and I said that immediately after 9/11. But I also argued very strongly that we with others, emulate what we did in ’91 - that is to say build a genuine alliance to act if necessary but impose pressure on them through the U.N., and there’s no need to rush because the evidence for an imminent danger is practically nonexistent. That was my position. But what we need to do, in my view, is to have much better intelligence if we want to have more security, not spend forty billion dollars a year on homeland security which as all these false alarms indicate is very manipulable. BEN WATTENBERG: But establishing human intelligence in countries - in authoritarian, autocratic dictatorships, where you can lose your life pretty easily--this is a long-term project. This is not something... let’s get a thousand human intelligence people... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well of course. Of course. We should have been doing this for years. I have felt for a long time now that this is an area of weakness and we are paying the price. But there’s an alternative to it. You know, if we’re going to position ourselves strategically into a posture in which we preempt on suspicion - I repeat, preempt on suspicion - we’re going to isolate ourselves totally in the world; we’ll destroy our credibility totally - it’s badly damaged already - and we’ll precipitate reactions against us that are going to be seriously dangerous to our security. BEN WATTENBERG: Well, but President Bush says you can’t sit back and wait for them to hit us and then say 'we’re gonna get you'. The whole idea is we don’t want to get hit... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: So you , in other words if I suspect you’re about to hit me... BEN WATTENBERG: Yes. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Yes, but if I suspect you’re about to hit me, I should hit you right now? I mean, you know, at some point suspicion has to be founded on something. It can’t be simple as the president now says 'Well he was a madman.' Before we had a theory of an imminent danger. He has weapons; he’s about to attack us. Later we said... BEN WATTENBERG: He never used the word imminent. They’re very proud of that. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Look, he said we are confronted with a mortal danger - those are the words. 'Mushroom cloud' was used to justify going to war. He has weapons that are the most destructive mankind has ever devised. Those are the actual quotes. Now after that they said, well, he didn’t have them but he had the intent. Now we say he was a madman. So shifting from hard evidence to presumption of intention and now to some psychological analysis. Are we going to go around attacking countries... BEN WATTENBERG: Well, and... BRZEZINSKI: ...on that basis? BEN WATTENBERG: Now, we’re making the case that the establishment, even of a partial democracy in Iraq would have been worth the cost of this war, because it could change the whole Middle East. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well if it changes the whole Middle East, if it leads to some genuine stability, yes. But that requires moving not only on Iraq; that requires addressing actively the Palestinian/Israeli problem; it requires some movement in relations with Iran; it requires some gradual evolution in Egypt and Saudi Arabia because it’s precipitous. It’s going to be hurtful to our interests actually but I don’t see that happening and even then one has to ask ones self on what basis can a country attack another country if it isn’t threatened? You know, some sort of, half-baked theory of democratization doesn’t give anybody a right to attack anybody. You know, otherwise we’ll have a situation of global anarchy if we keep acting like this. BEN WATTENBERG: Well you mention frequently in the book getting some kind of an Israeli/Palestinian compromise. Now I understand, I think, what you want from the Israelis, which is to give up the settlements, but what are the Palestinians supposed to do as their share of the compromise? ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well obviously there has to be absolute peace between them. No violence, no terrorism. Demilitarization of the Palestinian state, etcetera, etcetera. BEN WATTENBERG: If they’re not willing, I mean, so far they say they’re not willing to... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well the problem is each side has conditions for the other to meet without meeting their own conditions. I read an essay recently by someone who described both the Palestinian and the Israeli leaderships as failed leaderships. And I think that really catches the essence. Each side is locked into a kind of perspective, which condemns them to mutual antagonism that can only get worse and worse. For the Palestinians: increasing poverty, humiliation and suffering. For the Israelis: a garrison state, in which democracy becomes a fiction, in which Israel is made to look like apartheid South Africa. These are horrible perspectives for both. And unless the United States steps in and really pressed for a breakthrough towards peace and articulates a concept of peace that’s more or less fair and balanced... BEN WATTENBERG: I mean isn’t that what the so-called roadmap did? ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: No, the roadmap only outlines how to get there. But since each distrusts the other, each is sort of inclined to trip the other up while moving forward. We need something like the Geneva Accords, which is that very detailed blueprint for peace contrived by some Israelis and some Palestinians, so that both sides would know where the roadmap is leading. Then you have a chance of getting there. BEN WATTENBERG: You have written in this as I said very interesting book that what we are up against now is more difficult than what we faced in the Cold War. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well, I don’t think it’s a, you know, a very unique insight of mine. Simply during the Cold War we knew who the enemy was and we pretty much what the enemy has. And we increasingly understood what makes the enemy tick. I don’t think we know now who the enemy is. Look at the way it’s defined - terrorism is the enemy. Well, first of all, that’s kind of an absurdity because terrorism is a technique; it’s not an entity. Second we don’t really know who the enemy... BEN WATTENBERG: But the terrorist who have hit us though ha-have... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: They are people that we are unwilling... I’m very hesitant about saying who they are. BEN WATTENBERG: Well, they’ve been Arabs. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: But they’re Arabs, precisely... BEN WATTENBERG: ...and not poor Arabs. You say somewhere that the problem with terrorism is it’s... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well there is...some of them are middle class Arabs. BEN WATTENBERG: Yes. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Some of them poor; some of them are middle class. BEN WATTENBERG: Yes. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: And one was very rich. BEN WATTENBERG: Yes. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: But the point is we have hesitated to do that because we prefer to have the sort of vague notion of terrorism around the world. In fact, you’re quite right; most of the terrorists are Arabs. The problem is the Middle East. The problem is our presence in Saudi Arabia after ’91; the persistence of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and our identification with it, and us seen as being very partial. The problem is the legacy of colonialism - British, French - and now, seemingly, ours, and in a sense by extension Israeli. All of that is the problem. BEN WATTENBERG: I mean, the Arabs have done pretty well at killing each other off even without the Israelis. I mean, you have the Egyptians versus the Yemenis and the Libyans and you have the Syrians... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Sure. BEN WATTENBERG: ...against the Lebanese... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Sure. BEN WATTENBERG: ...and I mean there’s a whole...you have Iraq invading Kuwait and Iran, I mean. It’s not a... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well, look. That is nothing new. People all over the world kill each other. BEN WATTENBERG: Right. Right. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: What is of interest to me is if they try to kill us. And I think what we have the problem - and this is where I come back to the point I made - is we define the problem broadly and vaguely; we don’t want to focus specifically on who the enemy is and we know very little as to what the enemy can do. And we talked about that because of poor intelligence. Take Al Queda. We talk about Al Queda all the time. Every morning when I put on the news there’s always some 'expert' quote, unquote, on terrorism talking about Al Queda and terrorism. We don’t really know. Most Americans today think that Al Queda is some disciplined, well-organized underground terrorist activity. Ashcroft talks about fifty thousand trained terrorists. It’s probably at most fifty thousand people who went through basic training... BEN WATTENBERG: Right. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: ...who are not therefore professional terrorists, you know, because they wouldn’t even know how to make a bomb. BEN WATTENBERG: Now... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: The point is we have this kind of vague notion of who the enemy is and yet the potential threats are in fact quite serious because of technological dynamics and what this means in terms of the possibility of the infliction of destruction. BEN WATTENBERG: How do you regard the evolving American position on defending and extending human rights and democratic values around the world? In 2003 President Bush gave three big speeches. One at the American Enterprise Institute; one at the National Endowment for Democracies and one at Buckingham Palace, I guess where he really said this is our business, this is our mission, which is to go about extending democracy. Is that an overstatement in your judgment? ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I wouldn’t say it’s an overstatement. Of course everything depends on how it’s done. In a sense it’s a continuation, you know, of the position, which was adopted earlier. Human rights was adopted more or less as the sort of flagship on Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy. So... BEN WATTENBERG: And those of us who worked with Scoop Jackson like to think that it was... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: And Scoop Jackson wasn’t president... BEN WATTENBERG: Right... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: ...but was very much pushing it. Absolutely. Yes, so in a sense it reflects a certain American propensity. I think there’s a lot to it. But one has to recognize that democracy if pushed too hard and artificially can produce a reaction which is very adverse. To take an extreme example, if we imposed somehow democracy on Saudi Arabia today and you had an election in which Prince Abdullah was running against Osama bin Laden, who would win? Or in Egypt if Mubarak and the Muslim brotherhood were competing openly, who would win? So you have to create... BEN WATTENBERG: You think Osama and the Muslim brotherhood would ... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well it very well might because unless the conditions are mature and there’s stability, responsibility, civic consciousness, extremism tends to surface. Democracy can be very, very doctrinaire and intolerant. You have to create a constitutionalism; you have to create the liberal institutions; you have to give people dignity. I mean I’m a little worried for example when I hear some people in the Bush administration say 'no settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians until the Palestinians are a full democracy.' Because that means they remain occupied. If you’re occupied, you’re denied political dignity. You cannot have democracy without political dignity. You have to have a sense of your own freedom to become democratic. So if democracy becomes an excuse for doing some of the things we need to do in the mean time then I don’t consider it to be a program I consider it to be an evasion. But if one is talking more generally about encouraging democracy, constitutionalism, liberalism, yes. BEN WATTENERG: Looking at your work from another axis, you come out in favor of something called shared national and international interests. And then you also mention the possibility - you say we’re not ready for global government now but it’s something that we might be ready for in a generation or two. And you support the international criminal court. This is not sort of the Brzezinski of old. This is a different perspective on the world, I mean, it doesn’t sound like the hawkish Zbigniew Brzezinski of yore. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: We have defeated the big challenge... a conspiracy, a totalitarian doctrine, an effort to impose uniformity in the world. We won. But we’re now faced with the prospect of global chaos if we’re not careful and we are living in a world which technology makes totally interdependent. And that means either we’ll all suffer some calamity because of interdependence or we create some community of shared interest. It will not be world government, but eventually we’ll have to move towards more and more global institutions that’s just the logic of history, of technological dynamics. And if we can lead it and infuse it with our values - democracy, constitutionalism and so forth--we’ll be performing... BEN WATTENBERG: ...including an international criminal court... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Well, why not at some point? BEN WATTENBERG: ...that could put some of our...General Tommy Franks in jail or something. I mean... ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Look. First of all if he committed war crimes I wouldn’t weep if he was, but secondly that’s not going to happen and not immediately. BEN WATTENBERG: Right. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: But as a longer range objective I think it’s absolutely very sensible. We have all sorts of international rules that we accept - a variety of areas...civil aviation, trade, and so forth. So why not military conduct at some point? This is not a prescription for tomorrow, but as an indicator of longer range trends, yes. I think that’s the only alternative to global chaos. BEN WATTENBERG: Okay, thank you very much, Zbigniew Brzezinski, for joining us on Think Tank. And thank you. Please remember to join us in a future episode for part two of our conversation with Zbigniew Brzezinski. And send us your comments via email. It’s what makes our show better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. (credits) We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036. Or e-mail us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS on line at www.pbs.org, and please, let us know where you watch Think Tank. Funding for this program is provided by: At Pfizer we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. This is PBS. 21 Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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