Zbigniew Brzezinksi interviewed by Jonathan Power

Indeed during that period, he was seen as the voice that gradually dissuaded Carter of his own more pacific inner convictions. He was responsible for the confrontational tone of accusations against the Soviet Union’s failings on the human rights front, while at the same time playing down the human rights abuses in friendly countries such as Iran and Pakistan. He was the prime White House voice for secretly arming the mujahidin to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan even before the Red Army invaded. It was he who persuaded Carter to block Vance’s instinct to complete what the Soviets wanted – a further freeze on nuclear arms – and instead go for the more demanding course of arms reductions, which badly upset Moscow.

At the same time, he was the only one in the foreign policy apparatus who had worked out a full vision of where he wanted America to lead the world. He was the philosopher-king of the White House. Thus it was he who persuaded Carter that it was possible to bring peace to the Middle East and engage an immense amount of energy in successfully reconciling Israel and Egypt. He saw more clearly than most the importance of the United Nations and encouraged Andrew Young in his remarkably creative and highly unusual ambassadorship to that body.

Today he has a powerful advisory role in the presidential bid by Barack Obama and has emerged as President George W. Bush’s most searing foreign policy critic.

JP: Was the Cold War necessary.

ZB: It certainly took place – that’s part of the answer. What were the alternatives to it in the late 1940s, early 50s? Was it avoidable? Perhaps with a more enlightened Soviet leadership and a somewhat less anxious Western leadership. But there’s no conclusive way of answering that question.

JP: Do you feel that the famous Kennan memo was misused by a lot of influential people in the American foreign policy establishment.

ZB: I don’t think it was misused but after a while the notion of containment acquired a rigidity and a militaristic emphasis that was certainly not intended by Kennan. If I may refer to my own writings in the late 50s and in particular in the early 60s, I advocated a policy of peaceful engagement because I felt that the Communist system, although strong physically, was very weak in terms of social support and economic activity. Therefore a more flexible Western policy would have been a more effective Western strategy for waging the Cold War. Many of those who criticised me believed in containment largely defined purely on the military dimension.

JP: Was the end of the Cold War creatively used.

ZB: The opportunity was not entirely used well. We could have done more to engage and perhaps entangle the new Russia in a relationship with the West, which would have had the effect of reducing some of the increasingly dominant nostalgia for an imperial status that is being evidenced by the Kremlin. But again, it’s one of those inherently tentative answers. We have no way of knowing whether an alternative historical course would have been successful.

JP: Looking back and reflecting on how you felt at the time, was NATO expansion a good idea.

ZB: I think it was a necessary idea. Therefore politically or historically a good idea. One can easily imagine these days the kind of tensions that would dominate Central Europe in the absence of their NATO membership. All one has to do is to look not only at the most recent frictions between Russia and Estonia but even more dramatically at the threats, embargoes, even military gestures that Russia has been employing against Georgia. Look at Russia’s involvement in Ukraine, including the energy embargo. Clearly membership in both NATO and the European Union has created a more stable relationship and potentially more cooperative relationship between Central Europe and Russia.

JP: Wasn’t there a commitment made by Secretary of State James Baker to Gorbachev not to expand NATO.

ZB : I don’t believe that’s right. I believe there was a commitment not to deploy NATO forces in Eastern Europe. I don’t think- but that’s easily checked- that there was any explicit commitment that the NATO alliance itself would not be expanded.

JP: But didn’t the US take advantage of Russia whilst it was weak in the Yeltsin years.

ZB: I think the US took advantage of a situation in which some decisions had to be made on the future status of Central Europe. In the absence of clarity on where Central Europe belonged – what is it identified with – we would probably have now had serious problems again today in the middle of Europe.

JP: In my interview with Arbatov, he makes a strong point about the overriding influence of the military-industrial complex on the Soviet leadership. Would you make the same criticism of the military-industrial complex here.

ZB: President Eisenhower raised the issue, and the very use of these words is a complement to him. In the West, there has been and still is a military-industrial complex that in current stages in history still exercises a significant, more significant and less significant, role. It’s an important facet of reality, absolutely. More important in the West than in the Soviet Union, I don’t know. I rather suspect it was more important in the Soviet Union largely because the economic base was much narrower and the proportion of military spending to GNP was much higher.

JP: Is there a danger that Russia might become a military adversary once again.

ZB: I rather doubt it. For one thing, to be a military adversary of the US on a global scale Russia would have to have some sort of a mission, a global strategy, maybe ideological reason. That strikes me as rather unlikely. But there may be tensions between the US and Russia. That’s conceivable. In some respects, it has manifested itself on some narrow fronts right now. Beyond that, Russia’s capabilities are much lower than they used to be. Russian society expects more for itself in socio-economic development, and it’s more difficult to deny it in the context of the relative access of Russia to the outside world and the outside world’s access to Russia. In brief, the kind of total mobilisation that the Soviet system could impose on Russia and the motivation for it would be much more difficult to legitimate in the absence of a compelling, overarching, ideological justification.

JP: So you don’t get nervous when you see this war of words that Putin cranked up at the Munich conference last year and the row over the installation of missiles defences in Central Europe? You don’t see these as divisive breaks between the two countries.

ZB: To some extent they may be but I’m not particularly worried because I think the harm they do is essentially to Russia alone. It delays the process of Russia’s eventual association with the West and increased identification with the West. I consider that those processes in the longer run are inevitable and beneficial to Russia. This posturing by Putin – which on a more primitive level is illustrated by his appearance this summer, his torso bared – it seemed to be a kind of childish machismo. It seems to me that Putin has actually done damage to Russia’s international position. But I don’t think that he has done anything that gives cause for serious worry.

JP: Was it a mistake after the end of the Cold War not to bind Russia into a closer relationship with the EU.

ZB: More could have been done to create a greater sense of identification between Russia and the West, in particular in the Yeltsin era. But one has to qualify that by noting that there it is an open question whether Russia as a society was ready for it. This was a period of great confusion in Russia, of great uncertainty, considerable humiliation, so that it might not have been easy to fashion something that would have lasted in the longer run. However, I do make the point that more should have been tried in the early 1990s.

JP: Don’t you think that Russia is an integral part of Western civilisation.

ZB: Yes, so is Ukraine, JP: You can’t compare Ukrainian writers, poets, composers, painters, playwrights with the greats of Russia.

ZB: That’s not the issue. The question is which society is more European in terms of its mores. More so Ukraine than Russia. The Ukrainians have shown a great deal of ability to deal with diversity without recourse to arms. The Russians have a much greater propensity to solve political problems by force. But I think both societies partake of the Christian heritage, and the Christian heritage is very much connected to the European heritage. Of the two societies Ukraine smells more, smacks more of Europe than Russia. But it’s a marginal difference.

JP: Would you like to see both those countries inside the EU within the next generation.

ZB: I have often said if Ukraine moves to the West and becomes a member of the EU and NATO, Russia is far more likely to follow suit than if Ukraine does not.

JP: So it should be an ambition of the EU to beckon to Russia to come into Europe on certain conditions, within say the next twenty years.

ZB: Twenty years is maybe too soon but one cannot be too sure of that because the pace of history has certainly accelerated. I have given speeches about a Europe that extends from Portugal on the Atlantic to Vladivostock on the Pacific. But when that will happen I do not know. However I do know if Ukraine doesn’t move to the West or is prevented from moving or is excluded by the West, Russia’s involvement with the West will be much more delayed and there will be a higher probability of a nostalgic attempt at imperial restoration.

JP: Both superpowers still maintain a formidable arsenal of nuclear weapons. How can the momentum towards nuclear disarmament be restored.

ZB: By stopping proliferation. That is the sine qua non…

JP: I thought big power disarmament was the sine qua non to having leverage on the would-be proliferators!

ZB: Up to a point. But most proliferators are doing it not because they’re planning to engage in war with either the US or Russia but because of either some designs against a neighbour or their fears about the neighbours. I don’t think we can contemplate a real halt to the existence of nuclear arsenals without getting proliferation under control.

JP: You don’t agree with Arbatov that there will be no credibity in dealing with the likes of Iran until there is a greater degree of nuclear disarmament by the big powers.

ZB: I don’t agree with it. There has to be some resolution of the Iranian problem and we can’t wait for that until there has been genuine disarmament by the US and Russia.

JP: Looking at it from the Iranian point of view, it’s a question of credibility. Why do the big powers need these massive stockpiles.

ZB: That’s a fair point in an argument. However, as a matter of reality, we know that at this present stage there’s not going to be a massive American and Russian disarmament but at this stage there’s a concrete problem to be resolved with Iran. Hopefully, in the course of the next several years, progress will be made with Russia and America. But if we’re going to wait for resolution of the Iran problem until there’s genuine Russian American disarmament, you’re more likely to end up with a nuclear-armed Iran.

JP: If you and Jimmy Carter were back in the saddle now, would you be saying exactly that.

ZB: I would think so, why not.

JP: In your latest book, Second Chance, you’re very critical of both Presidents Bush and also of Clinton.

ZB: Bush I had a unique opportunity to resolve one major regional problem and to set into more motion a bilateral solution to another problem. The regional problem was peace in the Middle East. He didn’t exploit to the full the opportunities he had after the expulsion of Saddam from Kuwait, particularly in regard to the Palestinian–Israeli problem. Secondly, while he was extremely effectively diplomatically in dealing peacefully with the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, he didn’t set in motion or define any larger vision which might somehow or other have captivated the Russian mind and given Yeltsin and his team a greater sense of confidence that they could be part of the West. In some degree of extenuation, it’s a fact that he was probably thinking of doing some of these things in a second term. He never got a second term.

Clinton was too mechanistic and too self indulgent in terms of the national mood at a time of great opportunity for America. But also the American electorate voted for a Republican Congress, which proceeded to reduce taxes on the rich and made American commitment to the global commonweal more rhetorical than real. My chapter on Bush II is entitled ”Catastrophic Leadership”. He had a truly comprehensive misreading of the historical moment, a truly appalling distortion of reality, which was demagogically propagated in order to mobilise American support for an unnecessary war. And in my mind, there’s a continuing risk that the scope of that war may be enlarged still even before Bush’s departure from office.

JP: In what sense enlarged?

ZB: In the sense that the continuing conflict in Iraq, which quite evidently Bush has decided to bequeath to a successor rather than terminate, creates the risk, war being inherently dynamic, that there may be some collisions, flashes, provocations, a clash with Iran, perhaps some terrorist act in the United States, which can credibly be blamed on the Iranians. Al Qaeda stated not long ago that such a collision between America and Iran will be very much in its strategic interest. There are others even in this country and elsewhere who are advocating some form of a showdown between Iran and America. Hence, in some unforeseeable fashion, there’s the risk that the ongoing conflict in Iraq could expand into an Iranian-American collision, and that would set in motion additional, unexpected factors, thereby bogging America further down in that part of the world, to the detriment of American national interests and to international peace in general.

JP: If his successor were a Democrat, how would you advise the President to halt this.

ZB: I would urge the President to set in motion steps designed to bring that war to a political conclusion and to do so without too much delay, precisely because any ongoing conflict is inherently dynamic and in the internationally unstable condition of the Persian Gulf it could embroil us in a collision with Iran. The next president should proceed with haste to 1) start talking to Iraqi leaders, all of them, not just those in the Green Zone, about jointly setting a date for American disengagement. That will focus Iraqi attention on dealing with their domestic, internal conflicts in a more responsible fashion. Or at the worst in a more conclusive fashion. 2) Use the fact of an American- Iraqi dialogue termination date as the point of departure for approaching all of Iraq’s neighbours about regional talks about assisting Iraqi security problems upon on our departure. Every one of their neighbours, including Syria and Iran, has a stake in Iraq not exploding. And beyond that try to engage other Muslim countries – Morocco, Egypt, Algeria etc. – in being willing to assist post-occupied Iraq with some military security. And last but not least, some major international effort, probably using the UN to that end, to undertake a really large scale rehabilitation of Iraqi society, which has been very badly hurt by this war. And I would parallel the foregoing with a more serious effort to negotiate with the Iranians and secondly with a more sustained determined effort to push Israel and the Palestinians to a real peace and not just an unsustainable armistice.

JP: In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Barack Obama said ”the US must lead the world once more”. Surely, as the Bush era comes to a close, the one thing we’ve learnt is that it doesn’t work with just America leading the world. It has to be a group effort.

ZB: Well, yes and no. The way I’d put it is that the US is and potentially still will be, if it does the right things, preponderant in foreign affairs. But one should not confuse preponderance with omnipotence. I think leading really means that the US is probably the critical catalyst for effective international cooperation. No one else can really do it. With our role in the world, our resources, we’re so decisive. That’s just a fact of life. There’s a choice between leadership and domination.

JP: The Neo-Conservatives used 9/11 to put forward the notion that the US must use its political and military power in a highly assertive way. Although the cause of the Iraq war has sobered the government, the centre of gravity in American foreign policy discourse is still shifted well to the right of what it used to be.

ZB: I’m not sure I agree with that. I agree with the beginning formulation of what you’ve just said. The Neo-Cons exploited 9/11, relying on highly effective demagoguery in which, sadly, the President played a leading role. But I think that the reaction against the war means that the pendulum will be swinging back towards the middle. At what pace is hard to predict. And much depends on whether a Democrat wins the presidency.

JP: Who will have the courage to put 9/11 in some sort of perspective? It wasn’t the worst thing that has ever hit or hurt America.

ZB: I’m not going to argue that point. The scale of the carnage was as high as Pearl Harbor. What was unique about it was that it was part of the intimate experience of the overwhelming majority of the American people because of television, maximising the effect psychologically. But I think a number of the Democratic candidates, Edwards and Obama, have been quite explicit in their criticism of the simplistic and distorted use of the term ”global war on terrorism”. That’s certainly a gross oversimplificication of what is involved in the wake of 9/11.

JP: The nearest we ever came to a comprehensive peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians was under Clinton at Camp David, yet Barak’s own foreign minister said that if he were Arafat, he would have rejected the proposals as being too vague. How do you evaluate Camp David.

ZB: I don’t agree with you that they were the closest ever to success. I think Camp David I under Carter came much closer because something very substantial did follow from it. That was the first peace treaty ever between an Arab state, Egypt, and Israel. It later made possible the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, which means no possibility of a united Arab war against Israel.

The Clinton-Barak-Yarafat negotiations never came close to a breakthrough – in part for the reasons you mentioned, but also the proposals were vague, no maps and the proposals were qualified to such an extent that it would have been very difficult for Arafat to embrace them in an unqualified fashion. I think he was clumsy in creating the impression that he was rejecting them, whereas in fact he was stalling. The American public didn’t even understand that the negotiations were continued after Camp David was over.

JP: The US press did a horrendous rubbishing job of Arafat. What got into the media here.

ZB: Don’t forget it was connected with the elections here. It was also connected with the Israeli elections. The whole effort became politicised in different ways. It was exploited in different ways by Barak one way, by Sharon the other way. Gore was also involved in his campaign. He wanted to be elected and didn’t want a controversy with the Israelis at this stage.

JP: Why is the American media, which is so well staffed with clever thinking people, so simplistic in a situation like this.

ZB: They probably didn’t fully know what was going on. It was all a question of briefings, which were controlled and dominated largely by the American and Israeli side. Also, there was very little real paperwork involved. A lot of it was purely verbal. So that made it possible to give particular spins to what was going on.

JP: Looking over your political life, do you believe in the ability of the American media to deal with serious issues in a serious way? Or have you become cynical about it.

ZB: I have over time become rather more cynical but I can’t really point to a media elsewhere that’s superior. Maybe it’s inherent in the internal culture of the media world to simplify. I guess it’s probably necessary and inevitable. But at some point simplification becomes distortion.

JP: I find a great resistance to getting thoughtful dissent into print without being accused of being a radical or an anti-American. In my network, which is the International Herald Tribune, owned at different times by the Washington Post and the New York Times, there seems to be a great wall of resistance to publishing what doesn’t go with the flow of the moment.

ZB: That’s true. But beyond that there’s the fundamental problem that most problems involve much more complexity than can be meaningfully reduced into something that’s digestible by the public. The mass media serves the masses and that’s an inherent problem in the whole process.

JP: Let’s return to Iran – the enmity goes back to your time, Carter’s time. You made the mistake of letting your natural worries on the taking of hostages get blown up by the media out of all proportion. This was the root of all the bad feeling between the US and Iran. Secondly, after the 1997 election in Iran, Clinton, fearing Israeli and Iranian lobbies at home, chose not to reach out more positively to a more moderate Iranian president. It seems that America has not played its Iranian cards in a clever way.

Zb: That’s probably sadly true. I think you’re more correct in your diagnosis of the Clinton failure to exploit an opportunity than in your emphasis on the hostage crisis. The hostage crisis after all did create a very legitimate grievance for the US. The real problem was the fall of the Shah and was related to a problem that at the time was not well understood in the US – the legacy of the American overthrow of Mosadeq in the 1950s. It was then that the US embarked on a course that led over time to a collision with rising Iranian nationalism. We were probably manipulated more than we still realise by the British in the decision to remove Mosadeq – because Mosadeq’s real quarrel was with the British and not with us. But then after we overthrew him, we stepped in there on a large scale. We became the beneficiaries of the oil bounty because the British didn’t regain their prominent position. We supplanted them. Then we became the target of Iranian nationalism.

When the challenge to the Shah arose, we procrastinated too long, I have to say. I think we should have fished or cut bait much more quickly – either making a clear choice to support the Shah in some effort to repress the opposition, to prevent Khomeini from coming back, and then later on embarking on the road to reforms. Or alternatively, we should have dumped the Shah very quickly. Instead we tried to steer a middle course, which created ambiguity with the results that were….

JP: But you were the architect of that! ZB: I was one of the co-architects. I favoured the former course. Others favoured the latter course. The combination of the two was not very productive. We face the same dilemma right now in Pakistan. We don’t like a military dictatorship but are we sure that the populism perhaps tinged with Islamic fanaticism will be better? Is it going to be possible to have dual power in Pakistan between President Musharraf and Prime Minister Bhutto or is it going to be the first phase of a showdown between them that may produce a totally unpredictable Pakistan? I must say I don’t envy the dilemmas the present decision makers confront, because as I recall, with the unfolding crisis in Iran it was very difficult to be absolutely and categorically certain that one choice was clearly better than another.

JP: Mitt Romney in Foreign Affairs wrote recently that ”radical Islam’s threat is just as real as that posed before by the Nazis and the Soviet Union”. Isn’t this attitude leading us down a very dangerous path? It’s a well-voiced opinion not just in Republican circles but further afield among other influential Americans.

ZB. Yes, Senator Lieberman embraces it too. It’s a false narrative which capitalises on the historical ignorance of the American people. And to say what Romney has been saying, or Giuliani has been saying or Lieberman is saying is to imply that somehow or other a Third World country that’s under-industrialised with relatively meagre military resources is the same threat as the most advanced industrial European society with the most modern army in the world posed in 1939, or that a mighty Soviet Union, the ideological carrier of a globally appealing ideology, increasingly armed with nuclear weapons, posed to the US in the 1950s and 60s. A candidate who says that kind of stuff either thinks, probably correctly, that the American people are not that well informed – in which case he’s demagoguing – or he’s stupid enough to believe it himself. In which case it offers a compelling argument as to why such a candidate should not be president.

JP: Is there any way of improving the knowledge base of the American electorate or have you given up on that.

ZB: If we have a Platonic society! In this country then we could impose some obligatory exams for presidential candidates which if they failed to pass would disqualify them automatically!

JP: You don’t think, as Brecht once said, it’s time to change the people.

ZB: Well that’s very ambitious. I’d be satisfied with a change in the candidates! JP: In your book you talk about this area of the world we’ve been talking about as a kind of global Balkans which could become the swamp from which America is unable to extract itself. That’s a fearful conclusion from a wise old man like you.

ZB: I think the Iraqi war has the dynamic potential for becoming something much bigger. And there are still some people in the administration of the Neo-Con persuasion who seem to be tempted by what I believe is a suicidal inclination to compound the Iraqi problem by some sort of military action against Iran.

JP: What about China? There have been a lot of voices lately about its increased defence expenditures and ambitions. How do you read China.

ZB: If we blow it, then obviously China will be probably the most influential of the influential but not dominant world powers. The Chinese – and I’ve dealt with them a lot – are patient, prudent and surprisingly well informed. They have an imperial tradition that allows them to take advantage of opportunities without overreaching. In that sense, if we falter they’ll inherit some of the benefits of our discomfort, but they’re not going to push the envelope in the foreseeable future. They do have monumental domestic problems which we tend to underestimate because of the glamorous, glittering veneer of Shanghai and many other cities. The reality is a massively retarded infrastructure, a great deal of poverty and backwardness, and that will take a long time to overcome successfully, stably and without some major domestic collisions.

JP: America risks becoming a huge gated-community self isolated from the world, you’ve said. What leads you to this conclusion.

ZB: Surely you know what does. The question is will it continue or get worse. That depends a great deal on what we’ve talked about. It also depends a great deal on whether there are some terrorist strikes in the US, how the country reacts to them and especially how the leadership reacts to them. One of my indictments of President Bush is that he has fostered a culture of fear in this country rather that diminished it. And I view the responsibility of leadership to be the fostering of confidence. As Roosevelt said in another context, ”we have nothing to fear but fear itself”. Bush acted as if the maxim postulated the very opposite.

Translated by Phil Holmes