Tag Archive for: Zbigniew Brzezinski

Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski — A Man Without a Country

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.

Obama Invoked the ‘Brzezinski Doctrine’ to Shoot Down IAF Planes Attacking Iran?

Last night, I glanced at a report from a Kuwaiti  news paper and thought it looked suspiciously familiar. The Kuwaiti publication Al-Jarida published a report that a senior Israeli minister with alleged close ties to the Obama Administration had tipped off  Secretary of State Kerry about  a possible IAF attack against selected Iranian nuclear facilities.  Israel National News (INN)  reported:

U.S. President Barack Obama thwarted an Israeli military attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2014 by threatening to shoot down Israeli jets before they could reach their targets in Iran.

Following Obama’s threat, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was reportedly forced to abort the planned Iran attack.

According to Al-Jarida, the Netanyahu government took the decision to strike Iran some time in 2014 soon after Israel had discovered the United States and Iran had been involved in secret talks over Iran’s nuclear program and were about to sign an agreement in that regard behind Israel’s back.

Al-Jarida quoted “well-placed” sources as saying that Netanyahu, along with Minister of Defense Moshe Yaalon, and then-Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, had decided to carry out airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear program after consultations with top security commanders.

According to the report, “Netanyahu and his commanders agreed after four nights of deliberations to task the Israeli army’s chief of staff, Benny Gantz, to prepare a qualitative operation against Iran’s nuclear program. In addition, Netanyahu and his ministers decided to do whatever they could do to thwart a possible agreement between Iran and the White House because such an agreement is, allegedly, a threat to Israel’s security.”

The sources added that Gantz and his commanders prepared the requested plan and that Israeli fighter jets trained for several weeks in order to make sure the plans would work successfully. Israeli fighter jets reportedly even carried out experimental flights in Iran’s airspace after they managed to break through radars.

If this sounds like déjà vu all over again, as baseball great Yogi Berra might opine, it should. Back in 2008, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Carter National Security Advisor, was a foreign policy consultant to then Senator Obama in the midst of his first Presidential campaign. He became a center of controversy when he publicly favored the shoot down of IAF aircraft transiting Middle East airspace in an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu, in a September 21, 2009, INN report wrote:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who enthusiastically campaigned for U.S. President Barack Obama, has called on the president to shoot down Israeli planes if they attack Iran. “They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?” said the former national security advisor to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter in an interview with the Daily Beast. Brzezinski, who served in the Carter administration from 1977 to 1981, is currently a professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Maryland.

“We have to be serious about denying them that right,” he said. “If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a ‘Liberty’ in reverse.’” Israel mistakenly attacked the American Liberty ship during the Six-Day War in 1967.

Brzezinski was a top candidate to become an official advisor to President Obama, but he was downgraded after Republican and pro-Israel Democratic charges during the campaign that Brzezinski’s anti-Israel attitude would damage Obama at the polls.

But like a bad penny, the Brzezinski doctrine popped up in an exchange in 2010 between Admiral Mike Mullins, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an Air Force ROTC cadet at the University  of West Virginia. Gil Ronen of INN in an April 21, 2010 report noted:

The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, evaded a question Tuesday regarding the theoretical possibility that the US would shoot down IAF jets en route to attack Iran.

The Weekly Standard reported that in a town hall meeting on the campus of the University of West Virginia, a US Air Force ROTC cadet asked Mullen to respond to a hypothetical situation: if Israel decided to attack Iran, he said, its jets would need to fly through Iraqi airspace, which is considered a “no-fly” zone by the American military. Would US troops shoot down the Israeli jets, the airman asked, if they entered that zone?

Mullen evaded the question. “We have an exceptionally strong relationship with Israel,” he said. “I’ve spent a lot of time with my counterpart in Israel. So we also have a very clear understanding of where we are. And beyond that, I just wouldn’t get into the speculation of what might happen and who might do what. I don’t think it serves a purpose, frankly,” he said. “I am hopeful that this will be resolved in a way where we never have to answer a question like that.”

The cadet insisted: “Would an airman like me ever be ordered to fire on an Israeli aircraft or personnel?”

Mullen still would not answer directly. “Again, I wouldn’t move out into the future very far from here,” he said. “They’re an extraordinarily close ally, have been for a long time, and will be in the future.”

Mullen, appearing in a forum at Columbia University on Sunday, equated the danger of a nuclear Iran with the danger of an attack on it. “”I worry . . . about striking Iran. I’ve been very public about that because of the unintended consequences. I think Iran having a nuclear weapon would be incredibly destabilizing. I think attacking them would also create the same kind of outcome,”  He did not mention the added danger to Israel of a nuclear Iran that has vowed publicly to destroy the Jewish State.

Israel - Iran War Scenarios  12-14

For a larger view click on the map.

Israel may be prepared to counter an Iranian S-300 threat. We commented in a 2010, Iconoclast Post:

In June 2008, Israel’s air force undertook massive air training exercises involving more than 100 aircraft in the eastern Mediterranean against Greek S-300 Russian air defense systems. That effort demonstrated the canny effectiveness of swarming attacks against the S-300 and later versions that upset the Iranian military and Revolutionary Guards.

That did not go unnoticed by the IRGC Air Force commanders.   They had put in orders for  an advanced version of the S-300 system to counter a possible Israeli air attack threat. However, Russia  was prevailed upon  by Israel and the US not to deliver those air defense systems.  Just after the January 18, 2015 Golan attack that took out senior Hezbollah and Iranian Al Quds commanders, there was a meeting in Tehran  on January 20, 2015 between, Russian Defense Minister Shogui and Iranian Defense Minister Gen. Dehghan. We noted in a January 21, 2015 Iconoclast post:

TAAS reported the US studying the announced Russian –Iranian military agreement, but specifically objecting to possible shipment of the S-300/400 air defense system. Russia might finally ship Iran the advanced S-300 air defense system that both the US and Israeli successfully lobbied former Russian President Medvedev in 2010 to cancel.  Immediate payment by Iran of $800 million for the S-300 system may have cemented the deal.  This defense cooperation deal is a prelude to a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President   Hassan Rouhani in a Central Asian republic location.

The Russian delivery of the S-300/400 air defense system to Iran  maybe a  possible counter to the IAF December 8, 2014 attacks at Damascus  International airport hangars  that destroyed  deliveries of missiles headed for Hezbollah in Lebanon and allegedly killed two senior  terrorist proxy operatives.

While the threat of the Brzezinski doctrine allegedly may have been invoked by President Obama to foil an alleged IAF attack in 2014 against Iranian nuclear facilities, the Israelis are prepared in that eventuality to spring some surprises that neither the US nor Iran had planned to  counter.  These reports reinforce the widening divide that has erupted between the Obama Administration and the Israeli Netanyahu government, the latter facing a general Knesset election on March 17th. PM Netanyahu’s arrival in Washington this evening demonstrates his determination to inform the American body polity of the clear and present dangers of Iran’s closure on becoming a nuclear threshold state  as witnessed by the  leaks of a bilateral Memorandum of Understanding revealed in our February 27, 2015 post.

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EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review. The featured image is courtesy of BreakForNews.com.