U.S. scales of power

THE CHOICE: GLOBAL DOMINATION OR GLOBAL LEADERSHIP

Zbigniew Brzezinski

Basic Books, $25, 242 pages

Zbigniew Brzezinski is worried. And that’s an instructive thing. His problem: Since America is now the lone superpower, how will it manage that power for its own and the world’s benefit?

To use his terms, will the United States become a Superpower Plus or a Superpower Minus? It seems that under both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations we have been headed for the minus column, if we are not there already.

First, let us take a moment for defining the terms. A Superpower Minus, says the author, is America without real friends or allies — only temporary coalition members assembled on an ad hoc basis. Just why it is that America can assemble any allies, no matter how temporary, on that basis is something of a mystery. After Spain’s effective withdrawal from Iraq, the question becomes even more pertinent.

As for a Superpower Plus, this is an America most Americans feel quite comfortable with, that is, a nation that leads but also consults with more or less permanent friends and allies who share deeply held values and institutions.

NeverthelessMr. Brzezinski, a former national security adviser, is no naive multilateralist and cannot be attacked on those grounds. In “The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership,” he carefully spells out, for example, precisely what Europe needs to do in order to qualify as a working partner of the United States so that its views are not simply brushed aside, as opposed to its current role of irritating nag on the sidelines whose advice can (and frequently should) be ignored.

Most encouraging, the author takes no easy, partisan cheap shots at the Bush administration for its alleged sin of ignoring Europe. European complaints about American indifference, he notes, came at a time when George W. Bush was no nearer to the White House than any of us.

Furthermore, a more pliant, respectful America that accepts the lowest common denominator of Atlantic consensus, Mr. Brzezinski wryly observes, may not be the America that Europeans want after all — come the next life-threatening crisis.

And as he notes, after the fall of Communism, there is plenty in the world to worry about above and beyond today’s bete noire, terrorism. Mr. Brzezinski gives the reader as good a tour d’horizon of the world’s problems as is possible in a handful of pages.

He presents the problem of Iran, for example, which defies simple solution. That nation may be a member of the infamous “axis of evil,” but what exactly does one do about it? Or Pakistan, surely the most unstable nuclear power on the planet. Or the Central Asian states that have escaped Soviet dominance — for what? The author’s microscope examines Russian-Chinese relationships: One can safely forget about an anti-American Sino-Russian alliance.

This may be all a little too much to absorb — every trouble spot from Kaliningrad to Kashmir — but for those who still think that foreign policy doesn’t matter anymore or wish the Cold War had never ended, this is a most useful corrective.

For those who are interested in either Africa or South America, however, look elsewhere. These two continents are for all practical purposes ignored — as scores of Atlanticists have done since time out of mind.

In “The Choice,” Mr. Brzezinski also critiques the view that an assault or war on terrorism must now be the central organizing principle of American foreign policy. In the furor over the war on Iraq (was it justified?), the author gets back to what the debate should be about.

The polemicists on both sides of this argument would be well advised to heed Mr. Brzezinski. The betting, of course, is that won’t happen, but it won’t be the author’s fault if they are sucked into a debate that is often pointless, or involves some agenda other than the nation’s well-being.

Roger Fontaine served on the National Security Council staff during the first Reagan administration.