I wrote an article on Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski for The Intercollegiate Review in 1985. I bring this article to your attention only because it behooves us to gain an in-depth understanding of his potentially pernicious influence on American and Israeli foreign policy and decision-making. At stake is nothing less than the national security of both countries.

Before citing the most relevant passages of the aforesaid article, the reader should remember that Brzezinski, a Harvard alumni and political scientist, served as President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser. One does not have to read Mr. Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid to know that Carter was an anti-Semite. Brzezinski has earned the same reputation.

In August 2007, Brzezinski endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, issuing this charming statement: “What makes Obama attractive to me is that he understands that we … have to relate to a variety of cultures and people.” Obama is an explicit moral and cultural relativist. His idol, Prof. Brzezinski, served as an advisor to Mr. Obama, who has said of Brzezinski that he is “one of our most outstanding thinkers.”

Outstanding or not, Brzezinski has voiced the anti-Semitic canard that the relationship between America and Israel is the result of Jewish pressure. He also signed a letter demanding an American dialogue with Hamas, whose charter openly calls for Israel’s destruction.

In a September 2009 interview with The Daily Beast, Brzezinski was asked how aggressive President Obama should be in insisting that Israel not conduct an air strike on Iran. Brzezinski replied: “We are not exactly impotent little babies. They [the Americans] have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?” This was interpreted by commentators as approving the downing of Israeli jets by the United States to prevent an attack on Iran. But there is more here than meets the eye.

Obama’s syrupy attitude toward Iran, a tyranny, is consistent with his Islamic sympathies. It also conforms to Brzezinski’s anti-ideological approach to foreign affairs. Long before he became Carter’s National Security Adviser, Brzezinski rejected what he termed the “black-and-white” image of the American and Soviet forms of government. “This image,” he scornfully declared, “is held by traditional anti-Communists.” Brzezinski deplored anti-Communism as “a relic of the Cold War, of the age of ideology.”

Brzezinski not only rejected the “black-and-white” image of the United States and the Soviet Union; he rejected the very notion of “good” and “bad” regimes! Brzezinski is simply a cultural and moral relativist, and the same relativism stamped Barack Obama’s mentality.

Relativism permeates academia and influences America’s anti-ideological approach to foreign affairs under Obama’s presidency. Hence, it rendered Obama all the more inclined to appease despotic and terrorist regimes and even to downplay the use of the term Islamic terrorism!

As a cultural relativist, Brzezinski denies the existence of objective norms by which to determine whether the ideas and values of one nation or group are intrinsically superior to those of another. This logically entails cultural egalitarianism, which has profound political consequences. His cultural relativism’s logical and psychological tendency makes Brzezinski “a man without a country” — which may also be said of Mr. Obama, who repeatedly apologized for America’s superiority in world affairs.

Too much is at stake for me to be less than brutally frank about Brzezinski. Steeped in cultural relativism while earning his livelihood in a pluralistic and egalitarian country like America, Brzezinski finds it convenient to use multiculturalism as his working principle on the one hand and equality as his primary value on the other. These are precisely the ingredients of his anti-ideological foreign policy, which dominates the American State Department! Casting logical consistency aside, Brzezinski, like Obama, has harbored a rather benign attitude toward the PLO, a consortium of terrorist organizations committed to Israel’s destruction.

Let us probe even deeper, for what I am saying about Brzezinski applies to countless American academics and policymakers tainted by cultural relativism. This doctrine has impacted the minds of several generations of students at all levels of American education.

Brzezinski views history through the lens of Marxism, which, despite its atheism, has much in common with Islam. Both Marxism and Islam reject the idea of the nation-state. In fact, neither Marxism nor Islam recognizes international borders, prompting both to be expansionist and militant creeds with global ambitions.

Brzezinski’s systematic deprecation of the nation-state appears in his book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. He baldly declares that “With the splitting and eclipse of Christianity, man began to worship a new deity: the nation. The nation became a mystical object claiming man’s love and loyalty….The nation-state, along with the doctrine of national sovereignty, fragmented humanity. It could not provide a rational framework within which the relations between nations could [peacefully] develop.”

Brzezinski sees the nation-state as having only partly increased man’s social consciousness and only partially alleviated the human condition. “That is why Marxism,” he unabashedly contends, “represents a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man’s universal vision.”

He says Marxism “was the most powerful doctrine for generating a universal and secular human consciousness.” However, in the Soviet Union, Brzezinski regretfully said, Marxism became “wedded to Russian nationalism.” For Brzezinski, this was not entirely a tragedy.

Though he poses as a “humanist,” Brzezinski has the audacity to say that “although Stalinism may have been a needless tragedy, for both the Russian people and Communism as an ideal, there is the intellectually tantalizing possibility that for the world at large, it was … a blessing in disguise”! Brzezinski could as readily have said: “Yes, Muslims slaughtered more than 200 million people since Muhammad, but Islam brought hundreds of Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Buddhist communities under a single universal vision, that of the Quran”!

Brzezinski’s globalism infected Jimmy Carter. Under Brzezinski’s influence, Carter pursued an economic and syrupy “Third World” or “North-South” policy as opposed to a politically realistic “East-West” or U.S. anti-Soviet policy. Consistent therewith, Carter slashed U.S. defense spending—the same anti-ideological policy of Obama, who cozened up with Iran and Russia while curtailing American ballistic defense systems for Europe.

Let us conclude. Brzezinski’s cultural relativism opposes and undermines the American Declaration of Independence, which affirms the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” His anti-ideological foreign policy vis-à-vis Iran and Islam cannot but subvert the Judeo-Christian foundations of the American Republic and the magnificent idea of American Exceptionalism.

To put it bluntly, Brzezinski’s relativism is anti-American.

He and Obama are two peas in a pod!

©2024. Amil Imani. All rights reserved.