Brzezinski on Wikileaks

By John Ballard

Those who have yet to read the Zbigniew Brzezinski interview in Der Spiegel have missed a good one.Here's a snip.

SPIEGEL: As National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, you tried to prepare Americans for a more multipolar world -- one with a stronger China and a weaker US. Americans did not like that idea and Carter was voted out of office after one term.

Brzezinski: That concept is now very much a reality when you look at the rise of countries like China and India.

SPIEGEL: And the American decline. Are Americans aware of that trend or does the fate of Carter await President Barak Obama should he openly address the issue?

Brzezinski: I am very worried that most Americans are close to total ignorance about the world. They are ignorant. That is an unhealthy condition in a country in which foreign policy has to be endorsed by the people if it is to be pursued. And it makes it much more difficult for any president to pursue an intelligent policy that does justice to the complexity of the world.

SPIEGEL: Yet the American right is still convinced of American exceptionalism.

Brzezinski: That is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.

I may be the only person who voted for Jimmy Carter in part because Brzezinski was his foreign policy adviser. I first learned of Brzezinski from footnotes in Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and was deeply impressed with his insights, so much so that I ordered his book Between Two Ages when it was published in 1970. Lest anyone think he is always maligning the country, read what he wrote at that time.

There is something awesome and baffling about a society that can simultaneously change man's relationship to the universe by placing a man on the moon, wage and finance a thirty-billion dollar-per-annum foreign war despised by a significant portion of its people, maintain the most powerful and far-flung military forces in history, and confront in the streets and abet in the courts a revolution in its internal racial relations, doing all this in the context of the explosion of higher learning and its rapidly-expanding and turbulent universities, of rotting urban centers, of fumbling political institutions, and of dynamically growing frontier industries that are transforming the way its citizens live and communicate with one another. Any one of the above aspects would suffice to transform values and self-image of a society, and a few might be enough to overthrow the system. All together, they create a situation that defies analogy to other societies and highlights the singular character of the contemporary American experience.
(Between Two Ages, America's Role in the Tecnetronic Era, p. 195)

That was forty years ago.
What a shame he has to watch such a country slowly self-destruct.