Brzezinski vs. Vance

...This is an altogether more appealing perspective than Brzezinski's, and possibly, as Vance observes, the only viable one for Americans Yet the conservative National Security Adviser must be given his due He complains that Vance had a "deep aversion to the use of force " After allowing that such an aversion is not entirely an undesirable quality in a Secretary of State, the barb sticks Vance sometimes seems to be overly worried about Soviet sensibilities And in his discussions of Africa, he never adequately explains why he opposed aiding Jonas Savimbi's rebel forces m Angola...

...A word, finally, should be said about these memoirs as books Neither Brzezinski nor Vance is a writer Both supply a great amount of detail of a sort that only a historian could love, and one often senses that the two volumes were meant for posterity, not human beings Unfortunately, taking Henry Kissinger as their model, more and more people who have held high office are feeling compelled to put their experiences down in print With Power and Principle and Hard Choices in hand, one can safely say that this is a tendency not to be applauded...

...VANCE BY BARRY GEWEN THE COLD WAR that raged within the Carter Administration between the President's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, has not abated It has simply moved from the corridors of Washington to the printed page Both have now written accounts of their experiences in office, and each seems to number his rival, along with Brezhnev, Khomeini and Begin, among the chief obstacles to the successful conduct of American foreign policy...

...Vance's accommodating nature shows at its worst in the Middle East His solution to the thorny West Bank problem was a five-year transitional period of limited autonomy under international supervision leading to a plebiscite and a peace treaty between the Israelis and the Palestinians In this way he hoped to overcome Israel's "atavistic fears and mistrust of the Arabs " What would happen, if, at the end of the five-year period, the Palestinians were unwilling to come forth with satisfactory guarantees for Israel's security...

...Vance doesn't say His silence on this point is especially objectionable because he has already described a direct experience with Palestinian intransigence At his prompting, the Saudis proposed to the Executive Committee of the PLO that it publicly acknowledge Israel's right to exist, thereby paving the way to contacts with the U S Vance recalls "Our suggestion had indeed been considered last night and had failed to muster the necessary votes for approval The opposition was led by the extreme elements within the PLO I departed with a heavy heart as I felt that an important opportunity had been missed because of the deep division within the PLO " Not "atavistic fears" but legitimate suspicions were behind the Israeli government's hesitations Nonetheless, Vance continued to press for it (Between Vance's excess of trust in Israel's enemies and Brzezinski's power politics manipulations, those who perceived a tilt in the Carter Administration away from the Jewish State had cause for their alarm ). Taken together, Power and Principle and Hard Choices indicate that Jimmy Carter knew what he was doing in relying on this odd couple Brzezinski's job may have been to light a fire in Vance, Vance's to cool Brzezinski's flames Each conceivably pulled the other back from his own excesses The two men are more than kind to the President they served, pointing to some major accomplishments during his years in power History may yet record that their pairing worked better than either one currently seems to believe...

...Yet Brzezinski is clearly of the opinion that force is all that ultimately matters in international affairs, that ethical considerations are at best secondary He writes "I felt that the United States should use its power to improve the human condition, but I put stronger emphasis perhaps than Carter on the notion that strengthening American power was the necessary point of departure Indeed, later on, when a choice between the two had to be made, between projecting U S power or enhancing human rights (as, for example, in Iran), I felt that power had to come first ". Brzezinski's approving description of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping as "tough, even brutal," is that of a realpolitiker concerned about the preservation of order and authority, one is hardly surprised to learn that his favorite statesman is the Pope Small wonder, too, that until the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, causing Carter to adopt a more confrontational stance, Brzezinski felt rather isolated in an Administration whose predilections ran toward the idea of human perfectibility (He notes his exasperation, for instance, when the President refused to have the cabins at Camp David bugged during the Egyptian-Israeli negotiations...

...There is nothing necessarily wrong with a conservative voicing a healthy skepticism about the potency of virtue or a respect for the uses of power But Brzezinski can be faulted on two counts The first is his posing, consciously or unconsciously, as something other than what he really is Since his commitment to human rights hardly seems to run very deep, his expressed admiration tor Jimmy Carter as a man of genuine conviction rings false Similarly, after demonstrating over hundreds of pages his philosophic rejection of principle in policy questions, Brzezinski moves us to at least a raised eyebrow by urging admission of the Shah into the U S as "a matter of principle" that should not be compromised...

...Careful readers may also be excused for translating his call for "progress" on the West Bank issue as a recommendation to pressure Israel for concessions the progress he means is improving the American position vis-a-vis the Soviets...

...Their comments on each other differ according to their respective styles and temperaments Where the former National Security Adviser is an infighter who enjoys trafficking in personalities, the former Secretary is an aloof diplomat with a preference for staying out of the ring whenever possible Consequently, more blood is shed on Brzezinski's pages, while Vance's assaults, being less frequent, have greater impact-as when he practically calls his antagonist a liar In their outlooks Brzezinski and Vance represented two poles of the Administration, and under different circumstances their quarrel might have led to a creative tension that united them In actuality, they became the Gingham Dog and Calico Cat...

...In the section entitled "Moral Power," Vance stresses the centrality of ethical considerations m international affairs, stating "We must ensure that our foreign and defense policies abroad measure up to American values and beliefs, rather than judging them solely in terms of what is represented to be the pursuit of our most narrowly defined national interests In fact, championing human rights is a national requirement for a nation with our heritage " Without moral strength, Vance believes, a U S President would be unable to rally the American people "Indeed, it would be impossible to have anything called a 'foreign policy' at all...

...Secondly, Brzezinski reveals a certain coarseness of thought, a lack of attention to the matter at hand for the sake of his grand designs He can be depended upon to advocate the hard line in almost any situation, and before long his positions become all too predictable He is, of course, for making a show of force m Africa, taking a tougher stand on arms control, building the neutron bomb In his eagerness to play the "China card" as a counter to the USSR, he appears almost indifferent to the potential costs, an impression reinforced by Vance's comment that "some of the President's advisers, particularly Z big, were so anxious to move rapidly toward normalization that they seemed ready to compromise the well-being of the people of Taiwan ". This hawkish penchant reached its height with the Iran crisis when, at every point during the Shah's slide, Brzezinski opted for the "iron fist" solution The very real possibility of a bloodbath did not deter him Nor did opposition from America's Iran experts, the British and U S ambassadors in Teheran, Vice President Walter Mondale, and handpicked special adviser George Ball-or even the reluctance of his closest ally, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown Brzezinski professes puzzlement about the "historical assumptions" that prevented Carter and Vance from plunging Iran into a potentially savage civil war, concluding that "their assumptions were different from mine and involved a somewhat different scheme of the world ". Cyrus Vance's "different scheme of the world" is spelled out in Hard Choices Critical Years in America's Foreign Policy (Simon & Schuster, 541pp , $19 95) Where Brzezinski seeks to employ power, Vance tries to work through diplomacy, where Brzezinski believes in the necessity of confronting the Soviet Union, Vance looks for areas of cooperation, where Brzezinski tends to globalize conflicts, Vance prefers to localize them, where Brzezinski operates primarily on the level of national interest, Vance interjects transcendent values into his decisions...

...Brzezinski's Power and Principle Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977-1981 (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 587 pp , $22 50) is a tale of a deeply conservative man serving an Administration whose impulses are fundament ally liberal Apparently, Brzezinski does not like to think of himself as conservative He praises Carter's attention to human rights and, contrary to the conservative's natural pessimism about human nature and human events, declares his desire to "infuse greater historical optimism into our outlook on the world " No doubt "realist" would be the description he prefers, for he takes as the framework for his book the inevitable tug of war between the demands of national interest and the dictates of morality, intimating that his own views strike the appropriate balance...