Posted by: zanshin, 2008-11-23 02:20

Story

The American Mission?

William Pfaff, 2004-04-08 (Thursday), William Pfaff Blog
The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership by Zbigniew Brzezinski; Basic Books, 242 pp., $25.00


1. Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Choice is superficially an election-year foreign policy tour d'horizon, more sophisticated in analysis and recommendations, and certainly more statesmanlike in temper, than current writings by the Bush administration's supporters. It is a nuanced expression of the conventional wisdom among American foreign policy experts, and a condemnation of the self-defeating arrogance of the Bush administration's conduct during the past two and a half years.
"'Globalization' in its essence means global interdependence," Brzezinski writes. Therefore the American choice today is between attempting to create "a new global system based on shared interests," or attempting to "use its sovereign global power primarily to entrench its own security." The latter risks ending in "self-isolation, growing national paranoia, and increasing vulnerability to a globally spreading anti-American virus." There would even be a risk of the United States becoming a garrison state.


One might think there are other, wider possibilities for a United States uneasily enjoying its "unilateral moment" (as the neoconservatives put it), while seeing itself as "the indispensable nation...standing taller because it sees further" (as the last Democratic secretary of state said). However, Brzezinski implicitly rejects the notion that the United States might be better off if it modified its notion of national mission and concomitant aggrandizement of national power in acknowledgment of the good sense in George Kennan's counsel (in this journal over four years ago) that for Americans "to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world [is] unthought-through, vainglorious, and undesirable." Kennan added that "this planet is never going to be ruled from any single political center, whatever its military power."
[1] Brzezinski's book therefore needs to be considered at two levels. The first is within the political assumptions in which it has been written, undoubtedly shared by most American foreign policy analysts and political figures today. The second would take account of the skeptical perspective articulated by Kennan and question the assumptions widely held among American officials and experts concerning the desirability or happy inevitability, and benevolent consequences, of American global hegemony.

Following the cold war, Americans went through a period of some uncertainty about what our foreign policy should be. A cause around which the country could be mobilized was lacking. A certain consensus of concern formed around the related issues of nuclear proliferation, the existence of the so-called rogue nations such as Iraq and North Korea, and the problem presented by "failed" nations such as Somalia. This developed against a background of anxiety about the growing hostility of the Islamic states toward the US, coincident with Samuel Huntington's argument that a war between civilizations was on its way. The attacks of September 2001 brought uncertainty to an end. The Bush administration launched its "War on Terror," which despite President Bush's explicit denial that Islam was at fault, was widely and emotionally seen as resembling a war between civilizations, with Islamic militants taken as representative of much of Islam and the United States as champion of the West (uneasily followed by its traditional allies).

Many objected to the President's Manichaean proclamations ("with us or against us!"), the administration's hostility to international organizations, and its summary treatment of allies. Brzezinski is very perceptive about the curiously widespread and enduring fear caused in the United States by the attacks. Horrible as the attacks were, this reaction, he points out, was irrational:

At what point does even a justifiable national preoccupation with domestic security cross the invisible line dividing prudence from paranoia?... Total security and total defense in the age of globalization are not attainable.


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Nonetheless, a quasi paranoia was officially fostered following the Trade Center towers and the Pentagon attacks (and since), as was an intellectually incoherent elevation (as Brzezinski notes) by the Bush government of terrorism, a tactic or method of combat employed throughout the ages, to metaphysical standing as Terror, a phenomenon which American arms were expected to conquer.
Brzezinski deplores the administration's determination to disconnect the war it had declared from its political and historical sources. He writes that The US inclination, in the spring of 2002, to embrace even the more extreme forms of Israeli suppression of the Palestinians as part of the struggle against terrorism is a case in point. The unwillingness to recognize a historical connection between the rise of anti-American terrorism and America's involvement in the Middle East makes the formulation of an effective strategic response to terrorism that much more difficult.
Thus, he writes, an initial surge of solidarity with the United States that found expression in Europe and elsewhere just after the attacks waned as the Bush administration revealed its view of the struggle and of the appropriate response:

Culminating in the "axis of evil" formulation, the American perspective on terrorism increasingly came to be viewed as divorced from terrorism's political context. The nearly unanimous global support for America gave way to increasing skepticism regarding the official US formulations of the shared threat.
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Combined with the administration's treatment of its supposed allies and its attacks on the United Nations and other international institutions, this skepticism was responsible for the international isolation in which the United States found itself by the time it decided to invade Iraq.
The isolation has yet to be overcome, as the occupation of Iraq goes badly, mechanisms for a transfer of power to a truly autonomous Iraqi government remain controversial and unsettled, and the future of the American occupation and of Iraq itself becomes more confused and more ominous.




2. - Brzezinski considers the central practical problem in international society today a condition of geopolitical instability, located in what he chooses to call the "Global Balkans" (a phrase no doubt meant to enter the reductive vocabulary of current American foreign affairs discussion, alongside "clash of civilizations," "end of history," "Mars vs. Venus," and "old Europe vs. new" —all of them false). The Global Balkans extend from the undoubtedly unstable European Balkan states that emerged from the Serbian-instigated wars of Yugoslav succession (their present instability owing largely to the unresolved issue of Albanian irredentism), through Central Asia and on to Pakistan.
He says that the United States must stabilize and pacify this region so as eventually to cooperatively organize it. In the recent past (as he wrote in the winter issue of The National Interest, anticipating his book),

this remote region could have been left to its own devices. Until the middle of the last century, most of it was dominated by imperial and colonial powers. Today, to ignore its problems and underestimate its potential for global disruption would be tantamount to declaring an open season for intensifying regional violence, region-wide contamination by terrorist groups and the competitive proliferation of weaponry of mass destruction.
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Why is this area so dangerous? One might think it is because ex-Soviet Muslim Central Asia seems vulnerable to the same religious radicalism responsible for al-Qaeda. However, Brzezinski demurs on this point, describing as mistaken the American perception that "Islam" possesses or will acquire some kind of meaningful political unity, although he acknowledges that the American reaction to the 2001 terrorist attacks has provoked sentiments of solidarity between Asian Muslims and those of the Middle East, particularly on the Palestine question. "All the talk about 'terrorism with a global reach' cannot erase the national origins of the terrorists, the specific focus of their hatreds, or their religious roots."
The most important contribution to the Islamic mobilization that has occurred since the 1980s was undoubtedly the CIA's recruitment of Muslims to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, and later the Serbs in Bosnia. This helped to radicalize Westernized or partially Westernized young Muslims in the European and American diaspora, as well as Saudi and other Arabian Muslims, around themes of Islamic religious and political revival that have been around since early in the twentieth century.
The notion of revival through the fundamentalist restoration of a golden age is a common and recurrent theme in colonial and postcolonial societies.[2] It leads nowhere, since it offers no real solution to the contemporary political and cultural problems of Islamic society. As Brzezinski writes, nearly all religious societies "have experienced their versions of fundamentalist sectarianism, but in each case the dominant trend has been in the direction of political pluralism, through a progressive accommodation between the secular and the religious."
Hence, Brzezinski argues, the principal effect of the quasi hysteria about Islamic fundamentalism that has existed in some American circles since the Ayatollah Khomeini appeared on the international scene in 1979 has been to cloud American understanding. It has inspired a belief that the United States can and should "do something" about a familiar cultural phenomenon in socially backward societies.

Why, then, are the Global Balkans a source of danger? Instability and corruption in Russia's contiguous states, including Ukraine and Belarus, and in the Caucasus, Chechnya included, derive from former Russian (and later Soviet) imperial control, and it is not evident that the United States has much that is positive to bring to their situations. Islamic radicalism in the Caucasus, as in ex-Soviet Central Asia and Afghanistan, is parasitical upon nationalism, and is reactionary and isolationist in character.
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There are rich energy sources in the Caspian region, and Brzezinski notes that "strategic domination over the area, even if cloaked by cooperative arrangements, would be a globally decisive hegemonic asset" (although "vulnerable to Russian or Iranian mischief"). American political intervention in the area was launched under the Clinton administration, although what this will eventually contribute politically to a region largely under Russian domination for the last two centuries remains to be seen: one would think it unlikely to increase stability. The United States is in theory committed to the principles of market economics and free trade, which hold that political domination of an energy producer is less important than the workings of the marketplace in bringing together producers of Caspian oil, who need to sell, with Western consumers who need to buy, a phenomenon demonstrated in 1973 when the OPEC's politically motivated production boycott failed. However, theory does not always prevail in Washington over the seductions of hegemony.
Turkey and Iran are not unstable states, even if both are in institutional ferment. Afghanistan was not inherently unstable before the late 1970s, when a pro-Soviet coup in 1978 was followed by a US-induced Russian intervention in 1979 (and by all that followed).[3] Afghanistan had previously functioned as an amalgam of ethnic societies, tribally organized, with an agricultural subsistence economy, profiting from its position on ancient and essential Asian trading routes, while disputing with Pakistan the Pathan frontier territories. It currently would seem to possess neither the political nor economic vocation for globalization and market democracy, and the United States and NATO are having no great luck in stabilizing it on such terms.
Until the Afghanistan war, nothing taking place in Central Asia directly or indirectly threatened the United States, which was largely indifferent to the region (and ignorant about it). In ex-Soviet Central Asia one does not deal with progressive and sophisticated national elites of the kind that led the dynamic national movements of the European Balkans in the nineteenth century, disrupting the Ottoman and Hapsburg imperial systems. These are traditionally nomadic societies that have undergone mostly destructive Soviet efforts to modernize them. A critic may question what net advantage will be found in American efforts to "consolidate [their] independence" in a new American-led global system, as Brzezinski has already proposed for the ex-Soviet Caspian Basin states.



3. Brzezinski has never been a particularly good guide to the future in international politics, but he has been accurate in reflecting the conventional wisdom in each of the recent stages in the evolution of American policy. When he was wrong, nearly everyone else in the policy community was wrong in roughly the same way. Early in his career, in the mid-1950s, he and a colleague had the misfortune of publishing a book arguing the impossibility of change in Soviet-type states.[4] This was on the eve of the Polish October and the 1956 rising in Hungary.
At the end of the 1960s, when Russia was competing strongly with the US in its space programs, and it was common to think the Soviet Union a scientific and technological superpower, he published another work which said that the Soviet Union and the United States were evolving along converging lines toward a new form of "technetronic" superstate in which their science and advanced industry would leave everyone else far behind, including Western Europe and Japan.[5]
We know now that the gap between Soviet and Western industry was already enormous, and had been steadily widening since the 1950s. Western Europe was in the middle of what the French called Les Trente Glorieuses— the three postwar boom decades that produced rapid growth and enormous progress in Western Europe's industrial and living standards.
Brzezinski had plenty of company in his errors, but one must ask if he is any more reliable today when he says that

America's power is unprecedented in its global military reach, in the centrality of America's economic vitality for the well-being of the world economy, in the innovative impact of America's technological dynamism, and in the worldwide appeal of the multifaceted and often crass American mass culture.
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In fact, available American ground power is currently tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, without assuring stability in either place, and US naval and air power are all but irrelevant to Washington's frustrations. American economic vitality currently depends on Asian willingness to finance US deficits.
He says that Western Europe lacks the unity to act politically and that "Japan, once seen as the next superstate, is out of the race." China, despite its economic progress, faces political uncertainties, and in any case will remain a relatively poor country for years to come. "Russia is no longer in the running." He continues:

The argument that American power is uniquely central to world peace is supported by a simple hypothetical test: What would happen if the US Congress were to mandate the prompt retraction of US military power from its three crucial foreign deployments—Europe, the Far East, and the Persian Gulf?
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He answers by saying that the world would "plunge...almost immediately into a politically chaotic crisis." The result in Europe (which "cannot be secure without America,...cannot unite against America, and cannot significantly influence America without being willing to act jointly with America") would be a "pell-mell rush by some to rearm but also to reach a special arrangement with Russia." Europe would again become "vulnerable to internal rivalries and external threats...." The entire European political architecture would be endangered. "Traditional fears of German power and historically rooted national animosities would be quickly rekindled."
"In the Far East, war would probably break out on the Korean Peninsula while Japan would undertake a crash program of rearmament, including nuclear weapons. In the Persian Gulf area, Iran would become dominant and would intimidate the adjoining Arab states."

This is quite a barrage of alarming predictions. Are they convincing? Certainly an abrupt renunciation of the United States' commitment to the defense of NATO alliance members in Eastern Europe (and prospective members bordering (Russia) would cause dismay because it would be interpreted as an American invitation to Russian political or territorial demands on neighboring states. But surely this is not what Brzezinski is talking about.
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Otherwise, why should fifty years of European unification and peace collapse "pell-mell" because the United States decided on the "retraction" of its forces from Europe? Washington already has announced its intention to withdraw troops from the Balkans, the only place where they currently are an important stabilizing presence.
The US also intends to reduce the size and number of its bases in Germany and elsewhere in "old" Europe, and the Europeans who seem most alarmed are the shopkeepers and local businesses serving American bases. Brzezinski also surely knows, as does Donald Rumsfeld (whatever his threats last year to the Germans), that the United States is not going to shut its Western European bases or quit NATO for a very long time, unless forced to do so, since these bases, which today have little relevance to the security of Western Europeans, are essential to the United States.
They are indispensable to American strategic operations throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. NATO membership allows the United States to claim a political influence in European affairs. Washington insists that NATO is the model and potential basis for a consolidation of US–EU relations under overall American leadership. Without NATO, the United States, strictly speaking, has no more right to bases and troops in Europe than Germany or France has a right to station forces and possess military bases in the United States.
Brzezinski's threat of a "prompt retraction" of US military forces from Europe might even be greeted with relief in some countries, which face no foreign military threat and where the bases have increasingly become political embarrassments. US foreign policy (even before the war on terror) had lost much popular sympathy in Western European opinion, which was on the whole very strongly opposed, even in Spain, to last year's US intervention in Iraq. I am not aware of any serious Western European observer who would ascribe to US troop departures the drastic consequences Brzezinski describes. The withdrawal would cause much controversy and a number of short-term practical problems; but it would eventually bring a relaxation of existing tensions and—in my view —long-term improvement in the relations of the US and the EU.

As for a European rush to rearm: rearm against whom? Europe's resistance to persistent US pressures to increase military spending and buy new military equipment is not the result of European pacifism (or "cowardice" as some neoconservatives like to say). Rather, the Europeans have little enthusiasm for playing an expensive role as US military auxiliaries in undertakings that serve US rather than European foreign policy conceptions and interests.
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Today's Western Europe needs (and generally has) military forces that would allow it to deal with renewed trouble in the Balkans, conduct peacemaking interventions of the kind Britain recently carried out in Sierra Leone, France in the Ivory Coast and the Congo, and Italy in Albania (when post-Communist Albania was falling under Mafia domination). Beyond that, the European governments need to control their air space and coasts; and they wish to maintain basic professional military organizations, skills and assets that could be rapidly expanded in some (currently hard to imagine) military emergency.
So far as the war against terrorism is concerned, Europe's police and intelligence services have been conducting it very successfully, to American as well as European advantage. NATO now has six thousand soldiers or paramilitary police in Afghanistan, but nothing most Europeans have seen there or in Iraq inspires them to think that joining in new military interventions elsewhere in the Middle East or Asia will improve matters.
In Asia too, an argument can be made that withdrawing American troops and bases would in the long term have a constructive effect on America's relations with the nations where they now are stationed, and where they provoke political tension. US troops in South Korea surely are today more significant as North Korea's hostages than as guarantors of peace. In Japan, American forces are a political irritant, and while they spare Japan the inconvenience of having a foreign policy, that is not a condition that can be expected to last indefinitely, as China develops a more active policy, although an essentially defensive one (following its millennial traditions).

There is a fundamental issue here. Brzezinski identifies the United States as a "world-transforming society, even revolutionary in its subversive impact on sovereignty-based international politics." At the same time he argues that worldwide American activism and even military intervention are essential to its role as "the linchpin of global stability."
The contradiction seems obvious.
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It would be hard to argue that American activism has been a stabilizing influence in Latin America from the 1950s; in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s; in Afghanistan in the 1970s; or in Iran from before the Shah's ouster to the present day. Washington's tacit support for Israel's settlement of the Palestinian territories has been the opposite of stabilizing. One can make a parallel comment about the Clinton administration's drive to globalize world investment and trade by breaking down existing economic and regulatory structures, substituting export-dependent production for subsistence agriculture and artisanal industry in non-Western countries. The effect has been to undermine established social structures and encourage urbanization and cultural Westernization. It also has had some positive consequences, notably for Western investors, on whose behalf the policy was adopted, as well as on economic growth in a number of countries, at considerable (and now acknowledged) social costs. It has also been a deeply destabilizing force in many other parts of the non-Western world.



4. Brzezinski's book is a disappointing work in that its assumptions about the nature of contemporary international relations, and about the demands and ultimate objectives of American foreign policy, do not fundamentally challenge those of the Bush administration and those who support its general approach. A recent and comprehensive survey of American opinion, conducted by Notre Europe, a studies and research group headed by Jacques Delors and supported in part by the European Commission, concludes that the 2001 attacks were a "clarifying moment" in American opinion, producing a perceptible "long-term convergence of views amongst the American foreign policy elite...based on the strategies of preemption and democratic enlargement...on both sides of the political divide.[6]"
Brzezinski observes that the security the United States formerly found in geographical isolation and in alliance with Western Europe now is gone. New circumstances and technologies are responsible for new forms of insecurity. He contends that the United States is "fated to be the catalyst either for a global community or for global chaos, [hence] Americans have the unique historical responsibility to determine which of the two will come to pass."
If the US tries to dominate the world, he writes, we risk a destructive isolation of the United States from international society, and disorder abroad. If we choose "leadership," we can promote "the progressive emergence of a global community of increasingly shared interest with America at its center." His view nonetheless assumes that international society's inevitable development is toward political and economic institutions (and values) that today have their most advanced expression in American political society and the American version of market capitalism.
If, however, an American government refuses the responsibility of working to advance this outcome, this

could plunge the world into escalating anarchy, made all the more ominous by the dissemination of weaponry of mass destruction.
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A central question concerning the current presidential campaign is whether John Kerry, and if he should succeed, a new Democratic administration, would not only break with the Bush policy of preemption and intervention to "impose democracy" through regime change but might reexamine the essentially hegemonic ambition that underlies that policy.
Brzezinski condemns the domineering Bush method, which, as he says, "eventually mobilizes countervailing opposition." To him, the task is "to progressively transform America's prevailing power into a co-optive hegemony—one in which leadership is exercised more through shared conviction with enduring allies than by assertive domination." He is aware of the backlash against American power; hence his emphasis on converting clients to consensual allies. However he maintains that "the acceptance of American leadership by others is the sine qua non for avoiding chaos." This strikes me as Bush policy given a human face.
A different formulation of national policy might note that while international relationships are never simple, and power is an essential ingredient in them, justice as well as peace usually profits from a realistic acceptance of multiple (if unequal) national power centers, and of the inevitability of conflicting interests and values. The search for consensual American global hegemony, as for the "defeat" of terrorism and "victory" over evil, is a naive simulacrum of the serious armed utopianisms that were the curse of the twentieth century. One might even consider, as Kennan dared to do in 1951, as the cold war intensified, that national quality and success is ultimately determined by a nation's "spiritual distinction"—not a measure often cited in foreign policy discussions.

The ultimate criticism to be made of the position Brzezinski shares with many other foreign policy experts is that it ignores or denies the importance of what historically has been the principal force in international relations—the competitive assertion of national interests, founded on divergent values and ambitions among nations, assuredly including democratic ones.
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His argument presumes that such differences will find resolution in some version of an end of history, achieved through convergence with the United States. Brzezinski and those who share his views would seem to believe in what has been called the Whig interpretation of history: that history's purpose has been to lead up to us. The pursuit of national interest by other states produces the "global chaos" against which he warns. Condoleezza Rice made the identical argument, as in a speech last year to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, saying that policies based on balance of power are the road to war.
This position rejects both the classical Western view of history, which is not progressive, and the realist school of political philosophy dominant in past Western political thought, which traditionally has taken a disabused view of human nature and political possibility. The progressive view is a manifestation of hope, or of faith. It amounts to an ideology, teleological in nature. It denies the proposition that hegemony produces hubris, inviting the attention of Nemesis, ending in destitution.

The notion that the United States has an exemplary national mission has always been central to American political thought and rhetoric. In Woodrow Wilson's view (and that of many in the US today) this mission was divine in origin. Wilson (a president respected by today's notably secular neoconservatives) held that the hand of God "has led us in this way," and that we are the mortal instruments of His will —a view that has repeatedly found an echo in the discourse of George W. Bush. This sense of mission lies behind the American claim to an exceptional role in international society.
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Brzezinski argues that the practical consequence today of America's

global security role and its extraordinary global ubiquity [is to give the United States] the right to seek more security than other countries. It needs forces with a decisive worldwide deployment capability. It must enhance its intelligence (rather than waste resources on a huge homeland security bureaucracy) so that threats to America can be forestalled. It must maintain a comprehensive technological edge over all potential rivals.... But it should also define its security in ways that help mobilize the self-interest of others. That comprehensive task can be pursued more effectively if the world understands that the trajectory of America's grand strategy is toward a global community of shared interest.
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This belief that the United States has a unique historical mission—whether or not divinely commissioned—is not open to logical refutation. But an American policy that rests on a self-indulgent fiction must be expected to come to a bad end.

Every country has a "story" it tells itself about its place in the contemporary world. We are familiar enough with the American story, beginning with the City on a Hill and progressing through Manifest Destiny toward Woodrow Wilson's conviction we are "to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.... It was of this that we dreamed at our birth." The current version of the story says that this exalted destiny is fatefully challenged by rogue nations with nuclear weapons, failed states, and the menace of Islamic extremists. Something close to Huntington's war of civilizations has begun. National mobilization has already taken place. Years of struggle lie ahead.
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The "isolation" of the United States today is caused by the fact that its claims about the threat of terrorism seem to others grossly exaggerated, and its reaction, as Brzezinski himself argues, dangerously disproportionate. Most advanced societies have already had, or have, their wars with "terrorism": the British with the IRA, the Spanish with the Basque separatist ETA, the Germans, Italians, and Japanese with their Red Brigades, the French with Palestinian and Algerian terrorists, Greeks, Latin Americans, and Asians with their own varieties of extremists.
America's principal allies no longer believe its national "story." They have tried to believe in it, and have been courteous about it even while skepticism grew. They are alarmed about what has happened to the United States under the Bush administration, and see no good coming from it. They are struck by how impervious Americans seem to be to the notion that our September 11 was not the defining event of the age, after which "nothing could be the same." They are inclined to think that the international condition, like the human condition, is in fact very much the same as it has always been. It is the United States that has changed. They are disturbed that American leaders seem unable to understand this.
When American officials and policy experts come to Europe saying that "everything has changed," warning that allied governments must "do something" about the anti-Americanism displayed last year in connection with the Iraq invasion, the Western European reaction is often to marvel at the Americans' inability to appreciate that the source of the problem lies in how the United States has conducted itself since September 2001. They find this changed United States rather menacing. An Irish international banker recently observed to me that when Europeans suggest to visiting Americans that things have changed in Europe too, as a direct result of America's policies, "it's as if the Americans can't hear." A French writer has put it this way: it has been like discovering that a respected, even beloved, uncle has slipped into schizophrenia. When you visit him, his words no longer connect with the reality around him. It seems futile to talk about it with him. The family, embarrassed, is even reluctant to talk about it among themselves.

—March 10, 2004

Notes

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[1] Richard Ullman, "The US and the World: An Interview with George Kennan," The New York Review, August 12, 1999.

[2] See Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff, The Politics of Hysteria: the Sources of Twentieth-Century Conflict (Harper and Row, 1964).

[3] For which Mr. Brzezinski himself (at the time national security adviser to President Carter) has claimed responsibility, in an interview with the Paris weekly Le Nouvel Observateur (January 15–21, 1998). "The reality, secretly guarded until now, [is that] it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.... We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would."
This imposes a reflection on moral responsibility. An American initiative, made with the intention of weakening the Soviet Union, provoked Soviet intervention into what had been an internal coup in Afghanistan, and the US then armed Afghan resistance to the invaders. This resistance liberated Afghanistan, and also contributed to the "liberation" of the US from the Soviet threat, as it was meant to do. However, it should also be said that the Taliban came to power in the confusion and conflict following a war in whose origins the US was implicated and during which the US contributed to the development of the Taliban movement.

[4] Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Harvard University Press, 1956).

[5] Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era (Viking, 1970).[]

[6] Timo Behr, "US Attitudes Towards Europe: A Shift of Paradigms?," Research and European Issues, No. 29 (November 2003).

[7] There is speculation in some military circles that an attack on the US by terrorists using weapons of mass destruction might one day make military government necessary in the US. See General Tommy Franks, in an interview in (of all places) the lifestyle magazine Cigar Aficionado, as circulated last November 21 by the conservative Web news service Newsmax.com.

Comments


zanshin on 2008-11-23 03:01

See also Zbigniew Brzezinski response on this article,

Brzezinski's Thesis (link)


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2007-06-07The Global Weapons of Mass Destruction Threat: A Counter- Argument to the Western Interdisciplinary Viewpoint
2007-06-08Political Islam
2007-06-17More Smoke on the Horizon in the Middle East War Theater
2008-01-02Turkish accession to the European union: challenges and opportunities
2007-11-20The Neoconservative Moment
2008-05-17Planned US Israeli Attack on Iran: Will there be a War against Iran?
2008-04-18Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath
2008-03-03Us and Them -- The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism
2008-08-25The Worldwide Threat 2004: Challenges in a Changing Global Context
2009-05-08The Trilateral Commission -- Membership 2008
2007-06-18A PACKAGE DEAL FOR THE MIDDLE EAST
2007-06-22Symposium: Strategies of Death
2007-07-04Rising to a New Generation of Global Challenges
2007-07-24Highlights in the History of U.S. Relations With Russia, 1780-June 2006
2007-02-19Hating America
2008-03-03President Addresses Joint Armed Forces Officers' Wives' Luncheon
2008-04-04Interview: Lee Kuan Yew -- Part 1
2008-01-29THE WAR ON TERROR: FOUR YEARS ON; Taking Stock Of the Forever War
2008-06-18The Future of American Power -- How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest
2007-10-16The global Oil grab of 2007
2007-08-08The Global War on Terrorism -- The First 100 Days
2008-10-29Sarkozy, France, and Nato -- Will Sarkozy’s Rapprochement To Nato Be Sustainable?
2008-11-05Post cold war Indian foreign policy
2007-03-14Timeline of events in the Cold War
2007-03-18Between Europe And The Middle East: The Transformation Of Turkish Policy
2007-04-12A Conversation With Vladimir Bukovsky
2007-04-10Six Crises in Search of an Author
2008-06-11The History of the House of Rothschild
2008-11-09Blueprint for Change -- Obama and Biden’s Plan for America
2009-05-10Country Reports on Terrorism 2008 -- Chapter 4: The Global Challenge of WMD Terrorism
2007-03-01The “White” al-Qaeda and the Future of Europe
2006-12-18“Bush’s Dream”
2008-05-27Laptop Jihadi
2008-01-31THE NEW WORLD ORDER' -- A Critique and Chronology
2008-01-11After Iraq
2008-03-24Chalmers Johnson: “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic”
2008-05-14NATO at a Crossroads
2007-08-24The Challenge of Islam
2007-09-07Understanding the U.S.-Israel Alliance: An Israeli Response to the Walt-Mearsheimer Claim
2007-11-09HOW STUPID DO THEY THINK WE ARE?
2007-12-07A new Chinese red line over Iran
2008-10-11Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam
2007-03-13The Demography of Europe
2007-03-19Made in USA
2006-09-12The Nation That Fell to Earth
2007-07-01Democratic Realism -- An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World
2007-07-13The New York Times Surrenders -- A monument to defeatism on the editorial page
2007-11-16The Crisis Of Pakistan: A Dangerously Weak State
2008-04-13Holistic Integrative Analysis of International Change: A Commentary on Teaching Emergent Futures
2008-01-24A Moral Core for U.S. Foreign Policy
2008-02-23The Two Faces of Saudi Arabia
2008-06-03Some European Perspectives on Terrorism
2008-06-18The Age of Nonpolarity -- What Will Follow U.S. Dominance
2008-11-10The US's geopolitical nightmare
2009-02-11Renewing American Leadership
2009-05-08A Leadership Review of the Barack Obama Administration
2009-06-13Remarks By The President On A New Beginning
2007-07-04Renewing American Leadership
2007-07-02Zionist Plan for the Middle East
2007-06-17General Tommy Franks -- An exclusive interview with America's top general in the war on terrorism
2007-06-13Resource Wars - Can We Survive Them?
2007-06-07US missiles hit Russia where it hurts
2007-04-17Commission Adopts Resolutions On Combating Defamation Of Religions; Right To Development
2007-04-04The Next World Order
2007-04-04Breaking Ranks -- What turned Brent Scowcroft against the Bush Administration?
2007-02-18After Neoconservatism
2007-01-25Make War Your Friend, Part I
2008-06-10Impeach George W. Bush Resolution
2008-03-16Bush is an idiot, but he was right about Saddam
2007-11-22The United States’ new backyard
2007-12-22Clinton on Foreign Policy at University of Nebraska
2008-11-25A Secure Europe in a Better World -- European Security Strategy
2008-12-13Getting Away with Torture?
2008-11-10The Eurabian Revolution
2008-08-25The changes in the fight against illegal immigration in the Euro-Mediterranean area and in Euro-Mediterranean relations
2008-09-02Can The War On Terror Be Won? -- How To Fight The Right War
2007-01-24President Bush’s State of the Union Address
2007-03-14The Geopolitics of Energy: Speech given at the IP Week, 2007
2007-03-24Is the American Empire on the Brink of Collapse?
2006-09-29China -- PART 2: Tequila trap beckons China
2006-11-07TURKEY AND THE AZERBAIJANI OIL CONTROVERSIES: LOOKING FOR A LIGHT AT THE END OF THE PIPELINE
2007-05-15The New Demographic Balance in Europe and its Consequences
2007-06-06Nato’s Islamists
2007-05-31The Case for Bombing Iran
2007-06-01The Importance of Being Lucid
2007-12-22Iran - Nuclear Chronology - 2005
2007-11-16The Threat of Maritime Terrorism to Israel
2007-11-13The Deadly Embrace
2007-11-14The Case for the Amero: The Economics and Politics of a North American Monetary Union
2007-10-22The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn't Want You to Know
2007-10-23Torture in the Name of Freedom
2007-08-29President Bush Addresses the 89th Annual National Convention of the American Legion
2007-08-10Who Is Osama Bin Laden?
2007-09-28The Mega-Lie Called the "War on Terror": A Masterpiece of Propaganda
2008-03-23Dissecting the Danish Cartoon Controversy
2008-04-07Famine, food and fertilizer
2008-05-17The world health report 2007 : a safer future : global public health security in the 21st century.
2008-02-22Conversations in International Relations: Interview with John J. Mearsheimer (Part II)
2008-01-24The Three Rs: Rivalry, Russia, ’Ran
2008-01-21Stabilization and Democratization: Renewing the Transatlantic Alliance
2008-01-29Challenging a Unipolar World
2008-06-06Between the Rule of Power and the Power of Rule: In Search of an Effective World Order
2008-11-07Country Reports on Terrorism -- Chapter 2 -- Country Reports: Middle East and North Africa Overview
2009-05-10Country Reports on Terrorism 2008 -- Chapter 2. Country Reports: Middle East and North Africa Overview
2007-06-08Remarks at the Centennial Dinner for the Economic Club of New York
2007-06-05President Bush Visits Prague, Czech Republic, Discusses Freedom
2007-06-22Al Qaeda Strikes Back
2007-05-22Statements made by Democratic leaders about Saddam Hussein's acquisition or possession of WMD
2007-05-02Country Reports on Terrorism -- Chapter 2 -- Country Reports: East Asia and Pacific Overview
2007-05-03National Security Briefing == Presented to then-Governor Bush
2007-04-05"Promoting Democracy: A Progressive Foreign Policy Agenda".
2006-10-25US: world empire of chaos
2006-09-23Europe Learns the Wrong Lessons
2007-03-01ARAB COUNTRIES - GENERAL ANALYSIS
2007-01-25MIDDLE EAST - Timeline of recent developments
2007-01-09Despite their shoddy track record on Iraq analysis, O'Reilly trusts only "my military analysts
2006-12-03Baghdad Year Zero - Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia
2008-05-26The Failed States Index 2007
2008-07-05Symposium: Israel's Test
2008-07-15A war waiting to happen
2008-01-23Balochistan & the New World Order
2008-02-25Thicker than Water? Kin, Religion, and Conflict in the Balkans
2008-02-22Conversations in International Relations: Interview with John J. Mearsheimer (Part I)
2008-02-18The Next Christianity
2008-05-14Resisting the Empire
2008-04-29The Man Between War and Peace
2008-04-22A Warning to Africa: The New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy
2008-04-22The March to War: Israel Prepares for War against Lebanon and Syria
2008-04-23NATO and European Energy Security
2008-03-24Globalization And The Development Of Underdevelopment Of The Third World
2008-04-05The Coming of Eurabia
2008-03-14Aims and Methods of Europe's Muslim Brotherhood
2007-11-11The Next Act -- Is a damaged Administration less likely to attack Iran, or more?
2007-11-12NATO Expands into Arab South
2007-11-28Does the Future Belong to China?
2007-12-15Why We Should Oppose an Independent Kosovo
2008-01-08Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer Announces Top Risks and Red Herrings for 2008
2009-06-01Obama's Cairo Speech
2009-07-07President Barack Obama???s Moscow speech
2008-11-06Country Reports on Terrorism -- Chapter 2 -- Country Reports: East Asia and Pacific Overview
2008-10-12Operation Sarkozy : how the CIA placed one of its agents at the presidency of the French Republic
2008-10-11What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
2008-09-02Stoking Tensions, Risking Confrontation: A High Stakes US Gamble with Russia
2008-11-26Pipelines, politics and power -- The future of EU-Russia energy relations -- Energy geopolitics in Russia-EU relations
2007-04-02From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq
2006-09-17Triple-pronged Jihad -- Military, Economic and Cultural
2006-10-18The Clash of Cultures and American Hegemony
2006-11-07MAGHREB REGIME SCENARIOS
2007-05-17Rehabilitating US Imperialism
2007-06-22Rice Talks With Journal's Editorial Board
2007-07-08Bin Laden's Fatwa
2007-07-31The American Empire is Failing – A Good Thing for America and the World -- An Interview with Terry Paupp
2007-07-31Franco – Arab Ties Could Yet Survive Sarkozy’s U-Turn
2008-01-08The Manama Dialogue: Gulf security and Turkey
2007-12-29His Toughness Problem — and Ours
2007-12-29Russia, Iran tighten the energy noose
2007-11-20Whose War?
2007-10-30Michael Ledeen discusses the Iranian Time Bomb
2007-09-08Knowing the Enemy
2008-03-15Russia throws a wrench in NATO's works
2008-02-29Islamist Bubbles -- Beware the light at the end of the Islamist tunnel
2008-03-05The radical dawa in transition -- The rise of Islamic neoradicalism in the Netherlands
2008-04-24A Dissenter’s Guide to Foreign Policy
2008-04-16A Review of the Seminar ‘the Security of Energy Supplies: the Role of NATO and Other International Organisations’
2008-05-05Global Neo-Liberalism, the Deformation of Education and Resistance
2008-02-21The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Better
2008-02-24Strategy and the Limitation of War
2008-02-04Going bankrupt: The US's greatest threat
2008-02-04Arming the Middle East
2008-02-06The 2007 Irving Kristol Lecture by Bernard Lewis
2008-02-08The Fallacy of Grievance-based Terrorism
2008-02-08Assessing the Islamist Threat, Circa 1946
2008-01-31Israeli-Turkish military cooperation: Iranian perceptions and responses
2008-06-24Chomsky Speaks -- On Iraq, Iran and Norman Finkelstein
2008-07-22CSIS-SCHIEFFER DIALOGUE: OPENING STEPS FOR A DIPLOMATIC PATH BETWEEN THE U.S. AND IRAN
2008-11-2321st Century Strategies For Sustainability
2008-11-20'Eurasia and Europe should Cooperate against America' interview with Alexandr Dugin
2008-11-20The Cold Peace
2008-11-21The New Geopolitics
2008-08-25Securitarism, reproduction of disorder and erosion of democratic rule of law
2008-08-09Chasing a Mirage
2008-07-28Rome Diary: Italy's Leap Into The Dark
2008-08-01The Democrats & National Security
2008-10-13Letter to Chairman Rockefeller and Vice Chairman Bond
2008-10-15A mad scramble over Afghanistan
2008-10-11America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests?
2009-05-10Country Reports on Terrorism 2008 -- Chapter 2. Country Reports: East Asia and Pacific Overview
2007-07-04Grand Strategy for a Divided America
2007-07-10Muslims in Europe: Country guide
2007-06-19CNN LATE EDITION WITH WOLF BLITZER
2007-06-16African Gothic
2007-06-08Islam and Liberal Democracy: A Historical Overview
2007-05-02Country Reports on Terrorism -- Chapter 2 -- Country Reports: South and Central Asia Overview
2007-02-20Misplaying North Korea and Losing Friends and Influence in Northeast Asia
2007-03-14Sweden: Restrictive Immigration Policy and Multiculturalism
2006-11-19PREPARING FOR A NEW COLD WAR, Part 2 - Asymmetric challenge to the US colossus
2006-11-26Islam, Terror and the Second Nuclear Age
2008-02-06The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt -- Thoughts on the eve of battle in Iraq
2008-02-02A Statesman Without Borders
2008-02-22Three blind men confront the elephant that is this globalization era’s radical extremist reaction--and surprise! They all see a different beast!
2008-02-29The new wars of religion
2008-03-19The new liberal imperialism
2008-03-23Future Human Evolution -- Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century
2007-09-11Lessons from the Bloc
2007-08-12How the ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad
2007-11-01Noam Chomsky - Controlled Asset Of The New World Order
2008-01-10Daughter of the West
2007-12-10Timeline: the al-Qaida tapes
2009-06-07The Wages of Hubris and Vengeance -- The Future of Israel and the Decline of the American Empire
2008-10-18Enoch Powell and the Rise of Political Correctness in Britain
2008-11-07What Happens when Countries Go Bankrupt?
2008-10-26Afghanistan: the neo-Taliban campaign -- What Nato failed to understand
2008-08-07Brzezinski’s bunker
2008-08-21The Breaking Point -- A New Age of Torture
2008-09-13TERRORISM, HUMAN RIGHTS, SOCIAL JUSTICE, FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY: SOME CONSIDERATIONS FOR THE LEGAL AND JUSTICE PROFESSIONALS OF THE ‘COALITION OF THE WILLING’
2008-12-03Symposium: Iran: The Countdown
2008-12-27Opening Statement before the International Military Tribunal
2008-12-27Barack Obama: The Naked Emperor
2009-02-08One on One: 'With no likelihood of US use of force, that leaves Israel'
2006-12-04Afghanistan: No blood for oil - this time
2006-12-26The Great Game on a razor's edge
2007-03-05HOW BRITAIN'S ARMAMENTS FUEL WAR AND POVERTY
2007-03-21Chris Hedges: The Christian Right’s War on America
2006-10-13Interview Vali Nasr
2006-10-13Regional Implications of Shi‘a
2006-09-12The Bubble of American Supremacy
2006-09-05Afghan Symbol for Change Becomes a Symbol of Failure
2006-08-21Ask the expert: Bush’s foreign policy
2007-05-01Iran’s Nuclear Calculations
2007-05-10A Reporter At Large: In The Party Of God (Part II)
2007-05-10Six Nightmares: Real Threats in a Dangerous World and How America Can Meet Them
2007-06-12Current Problems in American Foreign Policy - A Talk Given to the Mount Holyoke Alumnae
2007-05-26The Power Elite's Use Of War And Debt
2007-05-27Infiltrating Bilderberg 2005
2007-06-18Israel-Lebanon conflict - timeline of events
2007-07-01Why the Future May Not Belong to Islam
2007-07-09Interview transcript: David Miliband
2007-07-09Her Jewish State
2007-08-05The End of Cowboy Diplomacy
2007-12-22Bush/Gore Second Presidential Debate October 11
2007-08-15President Delivers State of the Union Address
2007-09-24Betrayed -- The Iraqis who trusted America the most
2007-09-24Russia bolsters ties with Iran
2007-10-17Iran: Nuclear programme
2008-03-06"Victory Would be a Fata Morgana"
2008-02-12Third report on the Netherlands -- CRI(2008)3
2008-07-16Nations with vast oil wealth gaining clout
2008-06-27President Delivers "State of the Union"
2008-06-16The Fall of France and the Multicultural World War
2009-02-11The Great Crash, 2008 -- A Geopolitical Setback for the West
2009-02-02Freedom Beats A Global Retreat
2009-03-15Squaring the Pentagon
2008-12-14Use of the Veto on United Nations Resolutions by the USA
2008-12-15Pakistan’s Balkanization
2008-12-03Right at the Edge
2008-11-26Understanding the Beijing Consensus
2008-12-06Obama's War Cabinet
2008-09-13The Emerging Water Wars
2008-08-06Douglas Feith's War and Decision: Life in a Neocon's Parallel Universe
2008-07-28The Geopolitics of Iran: Holding the Center of a Mountain Fortress
2009-06-20The Secret Wars Of The Cia -- Part 2
2009-07-22Street Fighting Man
2007-07-16Will Iran Be Next?
2007-06-05'i Am A True Democrat' -- G-8 Interview With Vladimir Putin
2007-05-10Hezbollah, Illegal Immigration, and the Next 9/11
2007-05-01Can Europe Age Gracefully? - Part I
2007-05-02Country Reports on Terrorism -- Chapter 2 -- Country Reports: Middle East and North Africa Overview
2007-05-02Country Reports on Terrorism -- Briefing on Release of 2006
2007-05-05WHY IRAN WILL HAVE THE BOMB
2006-10-09The Emerging Russian Giant Plays its Cards Strategically
2007-03-31The Second Lebanon War -- It probably won't be the last
2007-04-02Reaction From Around the World
2007-03-15Mohammedanism
2007-02-20Russia's hudna with the Muslim world
2007-02-28Speech at the 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy
2006-12-18“Osama’s Dream”
2007-01-23Crusading in the Arc of Instability - George Bush's Crusading Scorecard (2001-2007)
2006-12-11Urbanizing War/Militarizing Cities - The city as strategic site
2006-12-16Revamping Us Foreign Policy, Part 1 - Full speed ahead, with menace
2006-11-22Full text: Vladimir Putin interview
2008-06-04A Peaceful Resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
2008-06-30Preparing the Battlefield
2008-07-09Shackled Warrior
2008-02-01Iraq: The Way Out -- Transcript
2008-01-31The Power Elite's Use Of Wars And Crises
2008-03-04The Last Days of Europe
2008-03-03Mead: Bush Administration Gets Improving ‘Grades’ in First Year of Second Term’s Foreign Policy
2008-04-05The Turkish Experiment with Westernization
2008-04-23Religious Extremism: Muslim Challenge And Islamic Response
2007-09-17Why We're Losing the War on Terror
2007-08-16Text: President Bush Addresses the Nation
2007-08-27Iran risks attack over atomic push, French president says
2007-12-20Press Conference by the President
2007-12-10Bilderberg 2007: Welcome to the Lunatic Fringe
2007-12-29European Union-Russia summit a diplomatic debacle
2007-12-29Globalization and Cultural Encounters
2007-11-12FETHULLAH GULEN AND HIS LIBERAL "TURKISH ISLAM" MOVEMENT
2007-11-13The new wars of religion
2007-12-03Sudan: Humanitarian Crisis, Peace Talks, Terrorism, and U.S. Policy
2009-07-19Turkey and Russia on the Rise
2009-05-11Riga Summit Declaration
2009-05-22The New Old-Time Geography of Conflict
2008-09-17Le Feyt Declaration - Peace in Iraq is an option
2008-09-07Terrorized by 'War on Terror'
2008-11-01The End Of Arrogance -- America Loses Its Dominant Economic Role
2008-11-11The Case for Restraint -- Ruth Wedgwood responds
2008-11-20Defining the “Post-Soviet Space”
2006-12-15The Israel Lobby
2007-01-18Annotate This: Escalation in Iraq
2007-02-19Chomsky on Iran, Iraq, and the Rest of the World
2007-03-14Review of Current Trends in U.S. Foreign Policy
2007-03-05PILGER: THIS WAR IS A FRAUD
2007-03-10Regime change is the reason, disarmament the excuse: An interview with Scott Ritter
2006-09-19THE AGITATOR
2006-10-25The new Great Game
2006-10-27What Went Wrong in Iraq
2006-08-21Why Bush should go to Tel Aviv - and confront Iran
2006-05-01Political Islam -- Forty shades of green
2006-05-01Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?
2006-09-03Transcript - President Bush's Speech
2007-05-03Timeline: Al-Qaeda
2007-05-14Timeline: Nato
2007-04-14Islamic Europe?
2007-04-25Gravy Train: Feeding The Pentagon By Feeding Somalia
2007-06-08Race and Slavery in the Middle East
2007-06-06G8: Issues and controversies
2007-06-12Globalizing Weakness: Is Global Poverty a Threat to the Interests of States?
2007-06-13Press Conference by the President
2007-05-30The great escape
2007-06-19George Soros – Bush America needs de-Nazification
2007-07-16The Lose-Lose War
2007-07-10Tariq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue
2007-07-15Viewpoint: Russia's missile fears
2007-08-02This Russian risk could yet dwarf our blunder on Iraq
2007-08-08Germany Left Out of Global Policy Loop
2007-12-02The Smart Way to Beat Tyrants Like Chavez
2007-12-02Follow the drugs: US shown the way
2007-11-07Blood borders -- How a better Middle East would look
2007-11-04While Pakistan Burns
2007-10-24CNN Larry King Live -- Interview with Vicente Fox
2007-12-27A Conversation With Benazir Bhutto
2007-12-28How Pakistan Works
2008-01-11The General in his Labyrinth
2008-01-06Press Conference by the President
2007-12-13Crisis of Faith in the Muslim World
2007-12-22Iran - Nuclear Chronology - 2006
2007-08-29Making America Safer by Defeating Extremists in the Middle East
2007-09-06Excerpts from an interview with Lee Kuan Yew
2007-08-14The virtues of the Mediterranean union
2007-08-13The Limits of Multiculturalism - The Dutch Labor Party and Islam
2007-10-04Open Fire
2007-10-08'I Am not a Warmonger'
2008-04-05Oil, Geopolitics, and the Coming War with Iran
2008-04-10Imperial Israel: The Nile-to-Euphrates Calumny
2008-03-24It Wasn't On Oprah or Fox News -- How Could Hillary Have Known?
2008-03-22Muslims, Democracy, and the American Experience
2008-03-04The Three Trillion Dollar War: Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Economist Linda Bilmes on the True Cost of the US Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
2008-01-30The two faces of Amis
2008-02-21'America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It' -- A review
2008-07-12Iran: The Threat
2008-05-31Israel at Sixty: Asymmetry, Vulnerability, and the Search for Security
2008-12-07Obama’s Speech in Berlin -- Transcript
2008-12-15New York Times Misleads on Taliban Role in Opium Trade
2009-01-19This war on terrorism is bogus
2009-03-21The First-World Debt Crisis In Global Perspective
2009-02-01Preventing and Resolving Deadly Conflict: What Have We Learned?,
2009-02-11The Myth of Grand Strategy
2008-11-11The Case for Restraint -- Niall Ferguson responds
2008-10-02U.S. Not Winning War on Terror -- Special Report
2008-09-20How We Misunderstand Terrorism
2008-07-28The Proposed Iranian Oil Bourse
2008-08-04Intensify the witch-hunt -- Making us safer is not the aim
2009-05-10Country Reports on Terrorism 2008 -- Chapter 3: State Sponsors of Terrorism
2009-05-10Country Reports on Terrorism 2008 -- Chapter 1. Strategic Assessment
2009-07-22Beyond Dependence: How To Deal With Russian Gas -- Policy Brief
2007-07-31CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer
2007-08-07Transcript: Bush news conference
2007-07-25Bush Still Doesn't Get It
2007-07-12Republic or empire: A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States
2007-07-08The Road Home - Editorial
2007-07-03Our Second Biggest Mistake in the Middle East
2007-06-19Comparing US & Palestine homicide rates
2007-06-17Gen. Wesley Clark Weighs Presidential Bid: "I Think About It Everyday
2007-06-28Outsourcing Torture -- The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program
2007-04-23Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s First Post-Soviet Leader, Is Dead
2007-04-15Race in Scandinavia
2007-04-12Humiliation of Muslims and the coming Siege of Vienna
2007-04-09Where Plan A left Ahmad Chalabi
2007-05-22We're Number One! America Leads the World in War Profits
2007-05-02Country Reports on Terrorism -- Chapter 2 -- Country Reports: Africa Overview
2006-09-09United States Secretary of State Colin Powell discusses recent concerns
2006-05-01How to Win in Iraq
2006-05-01Freedom and Justice in the Modern Middle East
2006-05-01THE SO-CALLED EVIDENCE IS A FARCE: FORMER GREEN BERET SAYS BUSH IS LYING
2006-10-26President Bush on Iraq
2006-10-27Dick Cheney’s Song of America
2006-11-14The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective -- Introduction and Summary
2006-10-03Transcript of a Press Conference on the World Economic Outlook Report
2006-10-04The Geopolitics of Natural Gas
2007-03-04Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists?
2007-03-15Highbrow Tribalism
2007-02-20Transformational Diplomacy
2007-02-26Which Will It Be America, Empire or Democracy?
2007-03-01President Bush Discusses Progress in Afghanistan, Global War on Terror
2007-03-30China vs Japan: FTAs, oil and Taiwan
2007-01-27My Worst Moment As a Lawyer
2006-11-18Globalization: The Long-Run Big Picture
2006-11-19PREPARING FOR A NEW COLD WAR, Part 1 - A war the West can't win
2008-05-31The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran and Its Aftermath: A Roundtable of Israeli Experts
2008-06-06Stumbling toward Eurabia
2008-07-07Bush and bin Laden
2008-06-27Daughter of the Enlightenment
2008-06-27The Wrong War -- Why We Lost in Vietnam -- Chapter One
2008-07-02The Story Behind George Bush's Lies -- What Scott McClellan (and Jay Rockefeller) Didn't Tell Us