Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in an interview withThe Daily Beast sums up the situation quite well:
“The Bush missile-shield proposal was based on a nonexistent defense technology, designed against a nonexistent threat, and designed to protect West Europeans, who weren’t asking for the protection.”
Brzezinski also notes:
Does scrapping the missile program weaken our defense options in Europe vis-à-vis the Russians?
Not at all. What is left is militarily sounder. It gives the U.S. more options while still enhancing America’s ability to develop more effective defense systems, which is what the Russians really dislike. But now they have less of an excuse to bitch about it.
This strikes me as correct, as well as an amusing way of putting it.
He is, however, quite critical of the way the announcement was handled:
The way it was conveyed to the Czechs and Poles could not have been worse.
h/t: OTB.
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September 19th, 2024 at 6:27 pm
Don’t know if its the news cycle or a press office Retief would be familiar with, but foreign affairs reporting has been piecemeal, long on opinion (regardless of ideology), short on fact and generally bad.
September 19th, 2024 at 6:33 pm
Sorry, combining Jimmy Carter’s NSA and the Daily Beast just doesn’t cut it for an impartial look at anything concerning President Bush.
And besides, the Russians have been campaigning for years to get us to drop that particular defense capability. Zbig and maybe his former boss are the only people in the world who think the Russians disliked this move.
September 19th, 2024 at 7:17 pm
Walt: kudos for the Retief ref.
September 20th, 2024 at 10:50 am
Looking at that Daily Beast interview a little closer … Zbig is one scary dude these days:
Is he really calling for the US to shoot down Israeli planes if they decide to bomb nuclear bomb making sites in Iran? Is he serious, or is this on more show of bonefides for his status as a complete left wing loon? Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
To tie in another thread, this is way out there, beyond Glen Beck territory. But fortunately, being a left winger this will remain unremarked upon because his heart is in the right place.
September 20th, 2024 at 1:01 pm
First, Brzezinski is not a “left winger” (unless one had an extremely broad definition of the term meaning anyone to the left of you).
Second, while I am not arguing in favor of the position, this is not Glenn Beck territory, this is hard core foreign policy realism: if one believes (which, it would appear, Brzezinski does) that an Israel strike on Iran could lead to a broader regional war that would inevitably draw in the United States, then there is a perfectly defensible position to state that the US should not allow an overflight of Iraq. And the only way to not allow such an overflight would require a willingness to confront such a mission. One would suspect that if the US really was of that position it would not come to such a confrontation.
This has nothing to do with having one’s “heart in the right place.”
I will say this: I think he has a very valid point about the potential outcome of an Israeli strike on Iran–it could lead to escalation. It will not be like the strike on Iraq back in the 1980s. And because the US is in Iran and Afghanistan, we would be caught up in such an escalation. That is a far more serious issues that the connection between Che Guevara, Woodrow Wilson and ACORN, to refer back to Glenn Beck territory.