Conducted by Harry Greene

Zbigniew Brzezinski is a counselor and trustee at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and cochairs the CSIS Advisory Board. He is also the Robert E. Osgood Professor of American Foreign Policy at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, D.C. From 1977 to 1981, Dr. Brzezinski was National Security Advisor to President Carter. His many books include Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower and The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership.

President Bush has been adamant that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, but while you have acknowledged that it is possible that Iran may be “seeking weapons or positioning themselves to have them,” you noted in an interview with CNN in September that “we have very scant evidence to support that.” Absent proof-positive of Iran’s intentions with their uranium enrichment program, what should be the United States’ plan of action?

I think the United States has legitimate concerns that the Iranians may be seeking to acquire nuclear weapons and may be positioning themselves to have them. Therefore, negotiating with Iran on this subject is perfectly appropriate and a legitimate undertaking for the United States to pursue. However, we cannot entirely ignore the fact that the Iranians have been publicly declaring that, one, they are not seeking to have nuclear weapons, two, that they do not want to have nuclear weapons, three, that their religion forbids them to have nuclear weapons. These assertions may be false, but they at least provide the basis for serious discussion, which we could initiate simply by indicating to them that we entertain suspicions as to their veracity, but that we would like to explore with them ways in which we could be reassured that what they are saying is actually true. I want to emphasize here that what they are saying is the very opposite of what the North Koreans have been saying. The North Koreans have said openly that they are seeking nuclear weapons, that they want nuclear weapons, at one point they even said they have nuclear weapons. In that sense, the Iranian problem is somewhat easier to tackle through serious negotiations, but I do want to emphasize that these negotiations have to be pursued in a way that encourages all sides to find a constructive outcome.

In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times from February 2007, you wrote that America’s best course of action was to “reaffirm explicitly and unambiguously its determination to leave Iraq in a reasonably short period of time.” How would the insurgency and the Iraq government respond to the setting of such a firm timetable for withdrawal?

I have also and subsequent to that, in my testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, suggested that the best way actually to proceed, if we made the determination to leave, the best way to proceed would be to then, one, to engage all Iraqi leaders, all those within the Green Zone but also those on the outside, including some with whom we do not talk, about a serious dialogue designed to jointly—and I emphasize the word jointly—set the date for America’s departure. I think that engaging the Iraqi leaders would certainly concentrate their minds on what has to follow after we leave. It would help us to identify those Iraqi leaders who would be prepared to stand on their own feet after we leave and those Iraqi leaders who would pack their bags and leave the moment we leave, and that we would be in a better position to make a joint determination as to approximately when our disengagement should take place. Secondly, once it was known in the region that we were acting in the foregoing fashion, and that we had indicated a desire to leave within a reasonable period of time, we would then be able more effectively to convene a regional conference of all of Iraq’s neighbors regarding the steps needed to stabilize Iraq after we have left, to the extent that some external assistance might be needed. We could also engage in such a conference perhaps some other Muslim states such as Egypt, Morocco, and Algeria, which might be in position to offer some peacekeeping forces if they were necessary. Last but not least, we could also fashion in the context of that two-pronged effort, some understandings, perhaps even regarding where some residual American presence might be needed for international reasons, for example in Kurdistan, as a way of reassuring not only the Kurds, but also the Turks and the Iranians, that Kurdistan will not be the source of major regional instability and new ethnic conflicts. In brief, once we are serious about leaving, there is still a major agenda to be pursued in order to make that departure effective and viable.

The conventional wisdom says that Senator Barack Obama has little foreign-policy experience when compared to rival Senator Hillary Clinton. I presume that you have a different view of things, since you have endorsed Senator Obama for president?

First of all, you know there is the problem as to what ‘experience’ really means. I do not see in Mrs. Clinton’s vitae much evidence of presidential experience. Your being the spouse of a president doesn’t mean that you have had actual experience in dealing with complicated international issues. Imagine if in the elections in 1960, the subsequently elected President John F. Kennedy, at the time a young senator from Massachusetts, was running against Mamie Eisenhower: would someone seriously claim that Mamie Eisenhower had more relevant “experience” to be president than John F. Kennedy? In brief, experience is not a very helpful term. What is important is some evidence of an instinctive grasp of what is historically important and what the foregoing implies for the kind of a role that America should be playing in the world. My view is that the United States has greatly handicapped itself over the last eight years, and that a very significant change in America’s global posture is needed if America is to regain credibility, legitimacy, and the ability effectively to lead. I think Obama has demonstrated by what he says and by his reactions particularly to the Iraq War that he has that instinctive grasp of history.

In your latest book Second Chance, you argued that the world is undergoing a “global political awakening,” the central challenge of which is “the worldwide yearning for human dignity.” What, more specifically, is this “global political awakening,” and what are its policy implications?

Its policy implications are that, first of all, for the first time in human history, humankind is really politically activated. That activation expresses itself in a variety of ways, some of them conflicting, some of them quite violent. In any case, what it means is that humanity can no longer be managed by a few leading states or dominated by a single empire. The world is now too complex, too volatile, for it to be subordinated to the will of a single very dominant power. That in turn implies a need for a much more historically sensitive stewardship of American foreign policy. It means that America has to have the ability to relate effectively to the conflicting aspirations that the politically awakened humanity now articulates and seeks. It has to be able to show both empathy and sympathy for those vast majorities of people in the world who are relatively deprived and in some cases absolutely deprived of the basic requirements of a decent life. That kind of an image, that kind of response to the new global realities can best come from someone who in some ways symbolizes them himself, and that is an additional reason why I support Obama.

In Second Chance, you also wrote that America’s leaders at the end of the Cold War squandered an historic opportunity to practice global leadership and reshape the world when America was, in your words, “globally admired” and “faced no peer, no rival, no threat.” Was it inevitable that America would fall from this vaunted position, given that, as you wrote elsewhere, “in the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state”?

No, I don’t think it was inevitable, and I certainly do not wish to suggest in my book that it was inevitable. Unfortunately it did happen, and it seems to me that one could engage in counterfactual historical analysis by pointing out what the alternatives at a given stage actually were. I tried to do that to some extent in my book where I assessed consecutively the performance of Bush I’s presidency, then of Clinton’s presidency, and then of Bush II’s presidency, and my assessment regrettably—and I really do say regrettably—is a very critical one. I think we have failed to take advantage of the opportunity that we had as of 1990.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt argue in their book The Israel Lobby that a group of powerful interest groups have discouraged U.S. policymakers from casting an critical eye on America’s Israel policy, a point that you felt was “food for thought,” according to an article you wrote in Foreign Policy in August 2006. Are you satisfied with their conclusion that the Israel lobby has had this kind of effect on American foreign policy, as well as their larger point that Israel today is of declining strategic value for the United States?

I reviewed their article when it first appeared; I have not read the entire book. My view then and now is that the discussion of the so-called “hyphenated” lobbies, or foreign lobbies, in the shaping of American foreign policy, is a perfectly legitimate subject. In my own experience in the White House, I have no doubt that a number of such lobbies do play an important role in articulating their specific positions and in gaining support particularly in Congress for them, and I would certainly list among them the Israel Lobby, the Cuban Lobby, the Armenian Lobby, the Greek Lobby, and before long I’m convinced we’re going to have a Hindu Lobby, a Chinese Lobby, perhaps an emerging Russian Lobby. So I think there is nothing wrong with raising the issue nor with discussing it. Their argument that the Israel Lobby has impeded peaceful solutions in the Middle East, I think, has some merit, especially since the most active Israel Lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is actually quite sympathetic to the more right-wing and more expansionist elements in the Israeli party politic. There isn’t really a more liberal and more peace-oriented Israeli alternative insofar as the lobbies in the United States are concerned. So I think it’s a perfectly legitimate issue to discuss, and it should be discussed without abuse and without immediately charging the people who have raised the issue with being anti-Semitic. I think that is a form of McCarthyism, which simply is not compatible with serious dialogue on a really complicated issue.

In 1979, you advised President Carter to grant covert aid to the Mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan, an Islamic fundamentalist group. Do you regret any part of this affair today?

Not at all. If we hadn’t done it, can you imagine what the situation would be like that we might be facing in that part of the world today? First of all, we wouldn’t have any Afghans who would be on our side; fortunately, a great many still are, that’s why there is an Afghan government in Kabul. So, first of all, that’s a factor. Second of all, if the Soviet Union had prevailed, we might still have a Soviet Union, which was then actively engaged in supporting terrorism and maintaining terrorist training camps arrayed against us. So I really fail to understand the meaning of the question as to having regrets. I don’t regret what transpired in the Soviet Union afterwards, and I certainly don’t regret having more Muslims on our side rather than having fewer Muslims on our side.

---