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« Back to Zbigniew Brzezinski main page    Transcript for: Zbigniew BrzezinskiThink Tank Ben Wattenberg - 'Zbigniew Brzezinski' TTBW 1225 PBS Feed date 9/9/2004 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) 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: Brzezinski at Large, This Week on Think Tank (musical break) WATTENBERG: Zbigniew Brzezinski, welcome to Think Tank. BRZEZINSKI: It’s good to be with you, 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. 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? 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. WATTENBERG: And this would be typical of a rogue state of somewhere. 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. WATTENBERG: You came to Washington - I was on the Johnson staff. I remember you coming down there occasionally as an advisor but then you - where - from where? From Harvard or from Columbia? BRZEZINSKI: Well - first of all - from Columbia but I also served on the Johnson administration. WATTENBERG: And then under President Carter you were the national security advisor. BRZEZINSKI: That’s right. I headed the national security council staff. WATTENBERG: What do you consider the high points and the low points of your career? BRZEZINSKI: Well if you’re talking of my political career so to speak... WATTENBERG: Yes. BRZEZINSKI: ... I would say the high points clearly were the defeat of the Soviet Union, the success of the policy of peaceful engagement, which I advocated and strategized, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Those were clearly the high points. More specifically some things such as Camp David, the first peace treaty ever between Israel and any Arab state; normalization of relations with China where I was very actively involved and in affect on behalf of the president, did it. And the low point clearly the debacle in Iran - the collapse of Iran. WATTENBERG: The hostages. BRZEZINSKI: The hostages, sure. Yes. Which I would have handled differently but I didn’t have my way. WATTENBERG: What would you have done? BRZEZINSKI: I would have tried to impose a military blockade on Iran. Also when we undertook the rescue mission, which I favored, openly. WATTENBERG: With the helicopters. BRZEZINSKI: The helicopters. And, which I thought had a high probability of success, but a reasonable danger of failure. I felt, and I said so, that if it fails we should immediately combine it with an air strike against Iraq so it becomes part and parcel of a larger... WATTENBERG: With Iran. BRZEZINSKI: Iraq - excuse me. I take it back. With an immediate strike, retaliatory strike, against Iran, so we could immediately say that our patience has run out; that we have taken military action to punish them. We undertook a rescue mission, of which unfortunately didn’t succeed, and if they harm any hostages our military strike is a preview of what will happen if they hurt anybody. In other words to obscure the failure and to begin to implement military pressure. That perhaps would have been risky, but I thought we should have done that. WATTENBERG: Given the circumstances I guess at the time and looking back on it in retrospect were we right in giving American support to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan? BRZEZINSKI: Oh, yes. Absolutely because don’t forget the invasion of Afghanistan happened in the wake and almost in the context of the collapse of Iran. Our position in the Persian Gulf was collapsing. If the Soviet Union had been able to get away with the success in Afghanistan, its sense of momentum - aggressive momentum - would have continued. Remember that at that time the Soviet Union was actively abetting international terrorism. There were scores of camps in the Soviet Union training terrorists and the problem we today confront with terrorism would have been vastly greater than it is if we still had a Soviet Union actively engaged in exploiting and abetting it. WATTENBERG: You were quite critical of - sort of - President Bush’s and the administration’s actions on homeland security, yet I mean, this obviously, 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. BRZEZINSKI: Yes, but harsh measures is not necessarily the most intelligent response. Harsh measures produce only harshness. 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. WATTENBERG: And your view sort of leans toward the latter. BRZEZINSKI: Well I think some aspects of the patriotic 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. If you are really interested in protecting everything, what you really need is much better intelligence. WATTENBERG: Yes. 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. WATTENBERG: And you are in favor of human rather than technological intelligence. You think that’s where we’re short? 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. 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 Americans. BRZEZINSKI: You know, it’s a lot more qualified than that, Ben. WATTENBERG: Yes. 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. WATTENBERG: We were what? BRZEZINSKI: 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 we declared here - 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. WATTENBERG: Did you support the war at that time? BRZEZINSKI: Well, let’s, um, you know, I can’t say yes; I can’t say no. 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 better do it together 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. WATTENBERG: But establishing...I mean I’m in favor of it also...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... 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 no 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. WATTENBERG: Well, but President Bush says you can’t sit back and wait for them to hit us and then say 'we’re going to get you'. The whole idea is we don’t want to get hit. I’m mean, that’s the idea of preemption. 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... WATTENBERG: He never used the word imminent. They’re very, very proud of that, I mean... 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 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 on that basis? WATTENBERG: And now, and I want to talk about that in a minute, 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. 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 oneself on what basis can a country attack another country if it isn’t threatened? You know, something - sort of half-baked theory of democratization - doesn’t give anybody a right to attack anybody. Otherwise we’ll have a situation of global anarchy if we keep acting like this. WATTENBERG: Well you mentioned - you mentioned it here - 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? BRZEZINSKI: Well obviously there has to be absolute peace between them. No violence, no terrorism. Demilitarization of the Palestinian state, etcetera, etcetera. WATTENBERG: If they’re not willing, I mean... BRZEZINSKI: Well... WATTENBERG: ... I mean so far they’re - they have not - they say they’re not willing to... BRZEZINSKI: Well the problem is each side has conditions for the other to meet without meeting their own conditions. 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: 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. WATTENBERG: I mean isn’t that what the so-called roadmap did? 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. 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, and you were quite a cold warrior when there was a Cold War. Explain that. I mean that’s where I got this thing that we started out with about the possibility of some great weapons of mass destruction situation coming upon us sort of - perhaps - rapidly. 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... WATTENBERG: But the terrorist who have hit us though have... BRZEZINSKI: They are people that we are unwilling and very hesitant about saying who they are. WATTENBERG: Well they’ve been - they’ve been Arabs. BRZEZINSKI: But they’re Arabs, precisely. '...' WATTENBERG: ...and not poor Arabs. You say somewhere that the problem with terrorism is it’s bred by poverty BRZEZINSKI: Well there is - some of them are middle-class Arabs. WATTENBERG: Yes. BRZEZINSKI: Some of them poor; some of them are middle class. WATTENBERG: Yes. BRZEZINSKI: And one was very rich. WATTENBERG: Yes. 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. 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 had the Syrians... BRZEZINSKI: Sure. WATTENBERG: ... had the Syrians against the Lebanese... BRZEZINSKI: Sure. WATTENBERG: ...and I mean there’s a whole - and you have Iraq invading Kuwait and Iran I mean. It’s not a... BRZEZINSKI: Well, look. That is nothing new. People all over the world kill each other. WATTENBERG: Right. Right. 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... WATTENBERG: Right. BRZEZINSKI: ...who are not therefore professional terrorists - you know, because they wouldn’t even know how to make a bomb. WATTENBERG: Now... 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. WATTENBERG: How do you regard the evolving American position on - on uh, 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 - is to go - this is our mission, which is to go about extending democracy. Is that an overstatement in your judgment? 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 of the position which was adopted earlier. Human rights was adopted, more or less, as the sort of flagship of Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy. But, one: one has to recognize that democracy if pushed too hard and artificially can produce a reaction which is very adverse. 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 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 a program I consider it to be an invasion WATTENERG: Looking at your work from another axis you come out in favor of something called shared national and international interests. And then 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 Brzezinsk of yore. BRZEZINSKI: Well, maybe I’m getting senile. WATTENBERG: No. The situation has changed. BRZEZINSKI: Pre-precisely. You’ve said it. You’ve said it. 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 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... WATTENBERG: ...including an international criminal court... BRZEZINSKI: Well why not at some point? WATTENBERG: ...that could put some of our generals - Tommy Franks - in jail or something. I mean... BRZEZINSKI: Look. First of all if you committed war crimes I wouldn’t weep if he was, but secondly that’s not going to happen and - immediately. WATTENBERG: Right. BRZEZINSKI: But as a longer-range objective, I think it’s absolute very sensible. We have all sorts of international rules that we accept - in a variety of areas...trade, civil aviation, 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. WATTENBERG: Thank you very much, Zbigniew Brzezinski, for joining us on Think Tank. And thank you. Please 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. 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