Zbigniew Brzezinski
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski; born March 28, 1928) is a Polish-American political scientist and geostrategist, who served as a counselor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966–68 and was President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor from 1977–81. Brzezinski belongs to the realist school of international relations, standing in the geopolitical tradition of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas J. Spykman...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth28 March 1928
CountryUnited States of America
Too rich to be relevant to the world's poor, [Europe] attracts immigration but cannot encourage imitation. Too passive regarding international security. Too self-satisfied, it acts as if its central political goal is to become the worlds most comfortable retirement home. Too set in its ways, it fears multicultural diversity
With the more endowed nations constrained by their own higher technological capacity for self-destruction as well as by self interest, war may have become a luxury that only the poor peoples of this world can afford.
Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.
We should seek to cooperate with Europe, not to divide Europe to a fictitious new and a fictitious old.
To increase the zone of peace is to build the inner core of a stable international zone.
Let's cooperate and challenge the administration to cooperate with us because within the administration there are also moderates and people who are not fully comfortable with the tendencies that have prevailed in recent times.
We need to ask who is the enemy, and the enemies are terrorists.
Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam.
We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.
I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the Khmer Rouge. The question was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him. But China could.
If they had them, and they were armed to the teeth with them, why didn't they use them? ... If they didn't use them and hid them, that means they were deterred. And how do you hide all of these hundreds and hundreds of weapons with which they're armed?
Maybe we're better off with him sitting in New York at the U.N. than with him having an important post either in the State Department or in the National Security Council in the White House, actually shaping American policy.
Doing it all by ourselves on our terms, ignoring the rest of the world, shouting loudly that if you're not with us, you are against us, is not going to be a very successful policy,