“History is much more the product of chaos than of
conspiracy.” —Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, quoted in
Hedrick Smith, “Brzezinski Says Critics Are Irked by His Accuracy,” The New
York Times, January 18, 1981
As winter turned into spring in 1976, various
relatives and friends mentioned to me a parishioner at my local Roman
Catholic church, St. Cecilia’s of Englewood, NJ. Nobody I knew had remarked on
him during his 16 prior years as a professor at Columbia University.
But
proximity to potential power, as foreign policy adviser to the presumptive
Democratic nominee for President, now made him an object of curiosity. “That’s Brzezinski,”
they whispered, pointing at a figure near the back of the church while trying
not to draw undue attention to themselves in the process.
That was my remote introduction to Zbigniew Brzezinski, who died yesterday
at age 89. I would learn shortly that he had raised his family (including
daughter Minka, now a morning-show fixture on MSNBC) in a Victorian house only
several blocks from my home.
But the psychic distance from that white-collar
area to my blue-collar neighborhood might as well have put him on the other
side of the moon.
By the time I entered Columbia myself two years
later as a freshman, my interest in him had strengthened. The
campus—particularly the school newspaper that I wrote for, filled with
political science majors and/or liberals—was now avidly following his
adventures in Washington, where he had gone, on extended sabbatical from the
university, to serve as National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter.
Soon, that service had
taken on all the aspects of an intramural mudfight, as Brzezinski’s hawkish
views clashed with the more dovish perspective of another university academic
now in the State Department, the Sovietologist Marshal Shulman.
In Washington, Brzezinski became more
familiar than he might have liked with the notions of “conspiracy” and “chaos”
that he discussed in the above quote.
Right-wingers (and a few left-wingers)
charged in the late Seventies and Eighties that a group that he had helped
establish, the Trilateral Commission (formed, in the wake of the 1973 oil
crisis, of prominent academics and politicians from North America, the European
Union and Japan with a strong orientation toward global economics), was a
secretive cabal out to rule the world.
At the same time, Carter Administration foreign
policy was increasingly regarded by large parts of the American public as being
rocked by chaos. Brzezinski battled internally not just against Shulman but
also against Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.
By the third year of Carter’s
Presidency, that internal sense of coming apart
was being mirrored almost nightly on the evening news, with OPEC generating a second American oil shortage in less than
a decade and American hostages being seized in Iran.
When he spoke to the New York Times Hedrick Smith, then, Brzezinski was being as
defensive as he was philosophical in leaving office.
He said what had annoyed
his critics was how often his vision of policy had been borne out. He derided “any
grand schemes regarding a new international world order,” noting that
policymakers were simply liable to be “overwhelmed by events and information.”
No policymaker, even the best, gets it right all of
the time, and Brzezinski didn’t either. He correctly predicted that the strain
of dealing with so many different nationalities would lead the U.S.S.R. to
collapse.
But in his eagerness to hasten that day, he backed the ill-fate attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages and supported financing the
mujahideen in Afghanistan in response to the Soviet deployment of forces there,
unknowingly encouraging the forces of radical Islam that have bedeviled the
U.S. in the Mideast these last two decades.
(It must also be said that, long before it became universally truth even in Democratic circles, this onetime "hardliner" warned that George W. Bush's Gulf War would turn out to be a "historic, strategic and moral calamity.")
Himself the annoyed target of political paranoids, Brzezinski
in 1981 couldn’t imagine a President who promoted both chaos and conspiracy. But
that is what life is like in the U.S. today.
The thoughtless blusterer once
derided memorably by Jeb Bush as the “chaos candidate” is now the Chaos
Commander in Chief, an executive who sows doubt in the efficacy and value of
the government he leads by screaming about nonexistent plots (e.g., about
President Obama wiretapping him).
To his credit, unlike other Cold Warriors who sought
to undermine Soviet Communism only to make their peace with Vladimir Putin, Brzezinski
before his death criticized both the Russian dictator and the American
President who has uttered nary a word of criticism of him.
He castigated the
Russian President's "thuggish tactics" and "thinly camouflaged
invasion" of the Ukraine in 2014, while this year scathingly dismissed
Trumplomacy: The president, he said, “has not given even one serious speech
about the world and foreign affairs.”
