How America allowed disorder to rule

Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower
By Zbigniew Brzezinski
Basic Books, $26.95

Think back to those balmy days after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of communism, the flowering of democracy in eastern Europe, an international community united behind the expulsion of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. No one much quarrelled when a distinguished political scientist wrote of the end of history and president George W.H.  Bush proclaimed the new international order. America was liked. The world seemed content to settle down to a benign US hegemony.

And now? Disorder rules. The US is trapped in an unwinnable conflict in Iraq, the Atlantic community has fractured, the Israel-Palestine conflict has festered and the US is challenged not just by rising powers in Asia but by a global tide of anti-Americanism. As this author puts it: “American leadership has lost much of its legitimacy, the worldwide credibility of the American presidency has been undermined, and the moral standing of America has been tarnished.” We are back at the beginning of history.

You will have gathered from the above that Zbigniew Brzezinski – Zbig to those who know him – is an unforgiving critic of the foreign policy pursued by the second President Bush. Back in 2002 and 2003, Brzezinski was among the most prominent members of the Washington foreign policy establishment to voice strong public opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Right then, he is coruscating now. This excellent short book, though, is about more than errors of the present administration’s foreign policy. George W. Bush certainly comes in for searing criticism, not least over Iraq and his one-sided approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict. But what makes Mr Brzezinski’s account interesting – and, in parts, intellectually demanding – is the sense it makes of the great swirl of shifting forces that set the context.

It has become a cliché that the world is going through a period of tumultuous political and economic change. The assertion, though, usually invites as much confusion as analysis as to the consequences. Mr Brzezinski, who a quarter of a century ago served as national security adviser to president Jimmy Carter, breaks through the fog to offer welcome clarity.

His starting point is the opportunity afforded by America’s victory in the cold war. Had someone tested global opinion in the early 1990s, he says, there would have been convincing support for the US as the most desirable steward of international security. All three presidents since then – the first President Bush as well as Bill Clinton and the present incumbent of the White House – bear some responsibility for the fact that this would not be the case today.

The first of these, Mr Brzezinski judges, got the tactics right in many cases but missed the big strategic opportunities – not least the potential for a Middle East peace settlement after the first Gulf war. He gets a solid “B” on the author’s report card. Mr Clinton, a fellow Democrat, inherited an America without a global rival and failed to grasp the chance to create a new framework for US leadership.

He was susceptible to an “enemy du jour” vacillation, giving the Middle East only occasional attention. This uneven approach to foreign policy merits only a “C”.

The “F” is reserved for George W – not just for Iraq in its own terms, but for the rupturing of the Atlantic alliance and the rise of global anti-Americanism. The administration had simply failed to understand that the “power to destroy” represented by unparalleled US military might did not, in a post-
imperial age, confer “power to control”.

Much of the criticism speaks, as it were, to the record – stating, albeit in harsher terms, what is fast becoming conventional wisdom. In parts it goes too far. Mr Brzezinski disparages democracy promotion. Yet to say that the Bush administration has not understood that democracy must rest on firmer foundations than the ballot box is not to refute the idea that it is the system of political organisation most conducive to human dignity. And foreign policy, as the author appears to concede, does need a moral impulse.

So does America have the second chance that gives Mr Brzezinski the title of his book? Well, yes and no. There can be no return to the early 1990s, not least because of the anti-western character of a “global political awakening” in the developing world. Anti-westernism has become “an integral part of the shifting global demographic, economic and political ­balance”.

That said, the next president does have an opportunity. No other power has the global reach to play the role that America can potentially occupy as the fulcrum of the international order. Mr Brzezinski is right to say that the most likely alternative to a constructive US global role is chaos.

What that requires of Mr Bush’s successor is both confidence and humility. The confidence to quell the fear of the world among American voters that has been nourished by Mr Bush’s response to September 11 2001; and the humility to accept that others are due a role in remaking the global order. And the alternative? A future for the US as a powerful but fearful democracy in a politically antagonistic world.

The writer is an FT columnist