A Debate on Democratic Grand Strategy

Thanks very much, to the Democrats, in an organization I really admire, and to all of you guys. And, I should say in a mercenary note to start with: almost everything that I say here is in a book that I have coming out from Harper-Collins in late May called "The Good Fight: Why Liberals and only Liberals can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again." So, if anybody disagrees with anything here and wants to tell me why it's wrong or wants to read the book, they should feel free to contact me afterwards here or email me at pbeinart@tnr.com. I would love to send you, and your bosses, a copy. I decided to write the book because of one idea: the idea was that when 9/11 hit, and the world changed quite dramatically, conservatives were much better intellectually prepared for this brand new universe than liberals. Think they were better intellectually prepared because they had a story about the last 50 years in American history. They had a kind of a master narrative which could be summed up in the words: "What would Reagan do?" Conservatives had a.the most junior level conservative activist could tell you a story, which starts at the end of the Vietnam war, about how America lost its confidence in itself, how the conservative movement which had been building up from the 50s through 1964 gained the power to finally elect one of its own, that Ronald Reagan told Americans that they were in a great struggle between good and evil; America gained its self confidence back, didn't listen to the liberals who were carping, the French who were appeasing, stood by its guns, and it won, and the Soviet Union collapsed. That central narrative, much of the Bush foreign policy, and conservative thinking since 9/11 can be understood through a kind of a grand analogy in which George W. Bush is Ronald Reagan, Eastern Europe is the Muslim world, the French are the French, and liberals are liberals. And, and, and, while there are enormous empirical problems with it, liberals mock it at its peril, because we saw in the 2004 campaign, that for all of John Kerry's empiricism, for his ability to rip off a nine-point plan on securing loose nuclear materials, George W. Bush had a large master narrative, that Americans could understand, about how you promoted freedom and protected security, and you believed in yourself, that was very powerful, much more compelling than anything they heard from John Kerry, who had discreet ideas on certain issues but had no larger connecting vision. And, I think that that lack of a large connecting vision is a problem that is inherent to liberals in general. So, let me try to say what I think ours is, which has to do with our own understanding of why America won the cold war. But let me start first by talking about what I think conservatives believe. I think you have to understand this conservative vision in order to understand the liberal vision that's an alternative. The great conservative anxiety in foreign policy, I believe, since the founding of the modern conservative movement in the mid-1950s has been the fear that Americans do not believe strongly in themselves. That liberal government, and in fact secularism itself, modernity itself, has produced a nation of relativists, and faced with fanatically self confident totalitarian foes, who believe in themselves absolutely, the Communists of course and now Jihadists after 9/11, America is potentially morally weak because we are prone to too much self doubt. The great conservative project, if you look at why conservative intellectuals backed Joe McCarthy, it was because they believed that Joe McCarthy was drawing a clear line, a kind of moral clarity between American freedom and Soviet communism. They believed that the liberal New Deal, which they saw as Socialism-like had effaced ? If you look at the conservative critique after Vietnam, it was the fear that under liberals America had stopped believing in itself. Again after 9/11, the fear that under Clinton, America had lost its capacity for moral judgment. Always this fear that Americans don't believe strongly enough in themselves, that we are potential relativists, and so the role of government facing a totalitarian, absolutist foe if to make Americans believe that they fight "evil" and that they represent "good", they represent "virtue." This is why this talismanic importance of the word "evil" in conservative foreign policy going back to the 1950s reprised of course by Ronald Reagan famously, and then by George W. Bush. If you read the conservativewe have been in some ways I think confused by the story of neo-conservatism, came from the Democratic Party into the Republican Party in the early 1970s. Yes, they play a role, but it's very important if you want to understand George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and people around them, to go back and read the conservatives in the 1950s, to read James Burnham in particular, the most important conservative foreign policy thinker of the first half of the Cold War, to read the rhetoric of John Foster Dulles. You find very very clear parallels between that and the rhetoric of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and The Weekly Standard and National Review, particularly around the central idea that America is potentially morally weak because we do not believe in our selves enough and the role of government is to tell the citizenry that we represent good, that we are inherently good. Because Americans will think it is all a big misunderstanding and try to negotiate with foes who cannot be negotiated with. The liberal narrative is very different. It also has its roots early in the Cold War. David Brooks said that liberals don't have anyone to put on their neckties, they don't have a big idea person, particularly in foreign policy. I think they do. I think it is Reinhold Niebuhr, the most important foreign policy intellectual, most important intellectual period of the early part of the Cold War . man who had an enormous impact on a whole generation of liberal thinkers and foreign policy people. What is Niebuhr's core insight in contrast to this conservative story? The core idea, which I think is still the core liberal idea today, is that America can only be great if it recognizes it has the capacity within it for evil. Unless America realizes that it is not inherently intrinsically virtuous, it is not inherently intrinsically good, it will no longer be able to be great. The ironic liberal idea is that American exceptionalism is not destined. What makes America an exceptionally great nation is precisely the recognition that we are not inherently better than anybody else, which leads us to build in the kind of democratic restraints at home and international restraints in the world that make us fundamentally different from the predatory imperialist powers of the past that didn't have those kind of restraints. That's the key insight of the liberal tradition. That in fact American power can be corrupted, and it is the recognition that American power can be corrupted, that we are in fact fallible, that gives us the potential for enormous greatness. And this has tremendous implications, both for the liberal story abroad and for the liberal story at home. If you believe that American power can be corrupted, if you have essentially the same vision, the same basic recognition that animated our founding fathers, that we do not build in an international system, just like we don't build a structure of American government based on the assumption which you find implicit in so much of what George W. Bush says that we are angels. But in fact the recognition that we are not angels. You recognize that international restrains on American power are not necessarily a source of weakness. For conservatives, international institutions, international restrains, ceding some measure of power to other countries is always very dangerous because it is sows self doubt, the suggestion that America is not in fact morally pure. But for Niebuhr and the Cold War liberals who learned from him, in fact restraints on American power could be a key source of strengths. Why? First of all, by building in restrains, by giving weaker countries a say in American decisions, we make them buy into American pre-eminence The striking thing, the thing you will never hear when you hear conservatives try to take the mantle of someone like Harry Truman, is the conscious decision by the Truman administration, the State Department, to give our European allies, who were on their knees at the end of World War II, much more influence in NATO than they deserved based on their power alone. Because of the recognition that we needed to give them a say over our decision-making so they would not see us as an imperialist power. George Kennan, who called Niebuhr "the father of us all" believed that America would defeat the Soviet Union as long as the Soviet Union remained an empire in relation to its Eastern European satellites, and we did not become an empire vis-à-vis our western European allies. And that's why the Truman administration was so adamant about not wanting vassals, about wanting strong nationalist, assertive governments. When the Truman administration passed the Marshall Plan, it specifically made a decision to allow the money to be used in economic ways that to Americans seemed completely socialist, completely anathema, because we didn't want to be perceived as imperialistic. The most important thing was that our allies in Western Europe have local national legitimacy. Compare that to what Paul Bremer did in Iraq., where before Iraq even had an elected government, they got rid of all of the laws on foreign investment because of some idea that Bremer had learned at The Cato Institute of the Heritage Foundation. Because we knew better for them; how they should design their economic system than them. That was a fundamentally imperialist way of thinking, fundamentally alien to the liberal tradition. Even beyond the idea that there is a practical reason for constraining our power through international institutions because that's how American preeminence is maintained. The core moral idea, even a level below that, that comes from Niebuhr is that in fact America should restrain its power in relationship particularly with democratic allies so we do not lose our own virtue, because we can be corrupted by absolute power in the world just as one branch of government can be at home, and the way of maintaining America's goodness, its particular unique goodness, is in fact not to tempt ourselves with absolute power. There is also a very powerful domestic implication to this idea that American greatness comes from the recognition that we are not inherently virtuous but American goodness needs to be earned and proved, not simply, mindlessly asserted over and over and over again. Arthur Schlesinger said that John Foster Dulles had a complacent sense of American virtue. He believed that other countries were naturally selfish and cynical but America was always pure. If you think about how America strives to stand for democracy around the world it is fundamentally alien to the liberal tradition, I believe, for America to put itself out as George W. Bush does as a fixed model for a benighted world. To say we have it right. We are the end state. You benighted countries of the world, you have to accept unprecedented infringements upon your sovereignty in your quest for liberty and justice. No liberal, Hubert Humphrey would never have said that; Walter Ruther would never have said that. Liberal idea was different, critically different, although the difference can sometimes be missed. The idea was that America would inspire the world to moreto greater justice and democracy through our own internal struggle to become a more just and democratic society. That's why for liberal anti-communists, unlike conservative anti-communists, you could not discuss America's role as a beacon for democracy without in the same breath discussing Civil Rights. They were two, they were part of the same intertwined view. Chester Bowles who was Kennedy's Deputy Secretary of State said, "The world will see us as no better than we really are." George W. Bush and the Conservative tradition seems to imagine that if we believe that we are pure and we have good intentions, that will obvious to the rest of the world. The liberal tradition always believes that in fact those things must be proved through hard painful struggle against against the potential for injustice which exists in our own society, and that if Americaif the moral and democratic restrains that bind America are loose, and we can see this very painfully of course in the torture scandals, that Americans will not inherently be better than anybody else. That's a very very important message, I think, still today. If you look at why, I think, there is such resentment. I think George W. Bush deserves applause for having put democracy promotion at the center of his foreign policy but if you look at why it's produced such cynicism, it is largely because he has been so stringent about human rights around the rest of the world, and so complacent about human rights abroad. In a world in which our prisons and our internal workings are more transparent than they ever have been, what Bowles said, "The world will see us as no better than we really are," is more important than it ever has been. There was a powerful column recently by the Lebanese journalist Rami Khouri, a great supporter of democracy and liberalism in the Arab world. He said, "If you want to understand how America inspires the democracy movements in Lebanon today, don't look at the speeches of George W. Bush, look at the Civil Rights movement." It is when America takes actions to make itself a more democratic world and to create a more democratic order, when it aspires to a human rights standard that is above what American actions are itself, when it doesn't simply conflate what America does with what is morally right, that's when in fact when it becomes an inspiring force around the world. And that's what the Bush administration and conservatives fundamentally do not understand. We talk a great game about democracy and human rights, but when people suggest that America itself might be held to a higher standard, we trot out John Bolton. Then, we show the world the back of our hand. That fundamentally, I think is anathema to the liberal tradition. The second point is about domestic politics and how it relates to liberal foreign policy. It starts from this idea again of "what is the basis of American strength at home?" Conservatives have had this deep anxiety that America in fact was, when you go below the surface, was always weak, that because we were relativists, not absolutists, like our foes, we potentially could not sustain a long term struggle. That's why Burnham talked about needing an apocalyptic point of view. It underlay the conservative critiques of containment in the 1950s. the idea that the balance of power was naturally always tilting in favor of dictatorships, away from democracies because democracies didn't believe in themselves enough. And, therefore we had to take some dramatic, radical action to turn things in our favor. That's a very consistent theme you see in the 1970s, and the conservative fear that someone like Paul Wolfowitz was talked about a lot in the 1970s, that if we didn't do something radical, the Soviets were on the verge of strategic superiority, or the kind of rhetoric you heard from Donald Rumsfeld in the 1990s about missile defense, that rogue states were on the verge of being able to have a we were on the verge of having a window of vulnerability unless we acted immediately, a kind of an apocalyptic world view. The liberal view was always based on patience. I think patience in the world is a core liberal virtue. Containment was based on the idea that democracies can afford to be patient in standoffs with dictatorial powers as long as they are committed to self-improvement at home, as long as they are forthrightly trying to solve their domestic problems. That's the key point. Kennan famously said, "Every forthright effort by the American people to solve a deep-seated social ill is worth a thousand diplomatic notes in our struggle against the Soviet Union." The basic idea was: we can afford to be patient ifbecause we are a society, unlike dictatorships, that can solve our social problems without coercion and the threat of social collapse, and as long as we continue to be able to do that. and civil rights is kind of great example in the late 1940s, 50s, and 60s. as long as we can do that, we can afford along standoff. It's only when we lose sight of the domestic basis of American strength, that in fact the balance can start to tip against the United States. Again, something that, I think, is very important to try and understand what is wrong with the conservative argument since 9/11 in fact that Kennan would immediately have pointed to a Niebuhr. to the question of whether America was economically strong, let's agree that we may face a generation-long struggle with Jihadists and potentially with rogue states. Are we building the economic strength to maintain that struggle? One of the key points that liberals made in the 1950s was that the conservatives' focus on tax cuts above all else was bankrupting America's ability to be strong in the world, to have a strong military, to have foreign aid programs. How united is America at home, its domestic political cultural unity that is ultimately the basis for being able to maintain long struggles? How generous is America to its people, that it will not in the long term be possible for America to sustain generous interventionist, international policies abroad, including things like foreign aid if we are not generous at home? That if American isn't perceived as doing things to help working people in the daily struggles they face with things like health care, and child care, and education, and job retraining, that we will not have a societal atmosphere that can maintain large generous programs of foreign aid such as we had during the Marshall Plan and then continued under was reprised by John F. Kennedy under the Alliance for Progress. I want to just end with a point about this liberal vision's critique of the Left because Niebuhr also had a critique of the Left, which I think is also important, although sometimes, maybe more painful for us to think about, and it can be summed up this way: if Niebuhr's critique of the right was that America could not be great unless we recognized that it also had the capacity to do evil. His critique of the Left was that America could not be a force for good in the world if we demanded that America be perfect. This is what Arthur Schlesinger famously called "the doe-faced liberal tradition" against which he was trying to argue for a different kind of liberalism. I think it comes in two forms: the first is what I would call "institutional doe-faceism", and the second is what I would call "moral doe-facesim." Americainternational institutions are extremely important. Ultimately, America's ability to be interventionist around the world will depend on our ability to create stronger international institutions through we can act. This was a great understanding that I think that Tony Blair had in the wake of Kosovo. to recognize that more Kosovos would be necessary because in a globalized world America was increasingly threatened by pathologies within other countries, whether they be refugees, now Jihadism, global pandemics, that America must build the infrastructure to be able to intervene more than it has in the past in the internal affairs of other countries. We have a national security interest in whether China can get a hold of its rural public health system for instance. We have a national security interest in questions like global warming that may emerge in the internal policies of other countries. But, that we may also have to violate a kind of pure institutionalist view in order to actually get things done. There will be compromises, painful compromises. For instance, in Kosovo, the Clinton administration went around the UN. We did not have UN support. There will be imperfections, there will be impurities when America actually wields power in the world because when you actually wield power in the world, you cannot be purists. There are tragic consequences and yet it is still worth doing. Otherwise, you find yourself in a situation of preaching self-righteous inaction. You found this to some degree in the response to 9/11, a kind of an argument you heard from moveon and some others saying, "We want to depose the Taliban, we recognize they are fundamentally illiberal force, we want to find and hunt down the people who attacked us on 9/11, but we must do so without taking any innocent casualties." That is classically what Schlesinger would have called a "doe-faced response" which is to say: by demanding and insisting upon American moral purity, it in fact condemns America to complete self action. There must be a moral realism within liberalism which contains the recognition that America's results must be virtuous even if the means American uses for them will sometimes be compromised. Because, if you maintain a morally absolutist position, in which America is never allowed to take innocent life, and America is never allowed to go outside the UN system, you condemn America to inaction, and, in fact, condemn the world to much greater evil than if America were a powerful force in the world. So I will, I will stop there, seeing a very exciting new entrant into the room -our two -week old son and my wife. And, thank you very much for listening and turn it over to Mike Tomaski. First of all, I do just ant to say for the record that, I emerged from the Capitol South subway station at 1:40, so I wasn't really this late. It is just that, the man who was supposed to meet me, yeah right, the man who was supposed to meet me and I were just feet away, unfortunately the impregnable barrier was in between us. But, I am sorry I was late, and I will talk for not too long, I hope so that we can have time to have a conversation. By the way, on the Cold War, Peter mentioned that conservatives of course do have a very powerful cold war narrative. We have one; it just has lain dormant for many years and it revolves around a man name Guille Horn, the cold war was really won by Guille Horn. I won't go into the now, but during question time somebody wants to say Tomaski, " Who is Guille Horn?" I would love to talk about him, so I will be happy to do that. What I have to say will echo in some ways what Peter had to say, and expand on some things. The title of my little talk if it could be said to have a title is: "The Philosophy Gap." And, that's my way of saying something that Peter said, which is that there is and has been a conservative narrative about the philosophy gap with regards to questions of foreign policy, and actually with regard to many question of domestic policy too, is a very real thing between liberalism and conservatism, and between, I think, the two parties, and I want to talk a little bit about history over the last 30 years, and about why I think that is, and end by saying what I believe that we can try to do about this now. When September 11th happened, I lived in New York at the time. I moved down here later in the fall of 2003. And, I saw it live actually, I lived across the bay from lower Manhattan, and I walked out to the Brooklyn waterfront and watched them fall in person rather than on television, had a little more impact that way. And as we in New York and in America were recovering from that and thinking where that would take the country, I at that point really did expect, quite naively as it turns out, but at that point I really did expect the Democratic Party's leaders to gather in some meetings and have some very serious discussions about what they thought the democratic, liberal response to this situation, this obviously new unprecedented world situation, should be, and I expected sometime in the Spring of 2002 to see Tom Daschle and Harry Reid and 15 or 20 other Democratic leaders stand up, perhaps on the steps of this building somewhere and propound a set of principles about what America's role in the world should be, what America's response to this should be, what America's relationship to the world, in this new age, should be. I really thought that that was going to happen and I was kind of shocked when nothing like it did happen. And, so I started to ask myself, well why didn't this happen? And the answer is historical, and goes back about 30, 35 years, I think, and Peter alluded to some of this history, but I'll try to fill it in a little bit more The problem was that the Democratic Party was fundamentally reorganized in the early 1970s, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the McGovern reforms and various other reforms; these reforms did many good things, they brought more diversity into the party, into the delegate structure, conventions and so on and so forth. But, nothing is all good in this world and nothing is all bad, and these kind of reforms sort of made the party, much more so than it had been before these reforms, made the Democratic Party, in my view, a party of various constituency groups and pressure groups. There was the Civil Rights group, the women's groups, there was the trial lawyer's, environmentalist's, consumer's groups, gay and lesbian groups more recently, etc, etc. But there was no foreign policy group, because foreign policy is one of those things that kind of belongs to everybody and thereby belonging to everybody it belongs to nobody. And, that's not how the Democratic Party was organized to do political battle. I have seen a lot of anecdotal evidence of this since I have moved to Washington, and there hasn't been, there are people like Rachel and the Truman Project is doing terrific work, and thank you for putting this on. But, there aren't a lot of groups around town; there are many many liberal progressive groups around town, , right, there aren't a lot of them that are sitting around thinking about foreign policy. The Truman project, some work has done the Center for American Progress and elsewhere, but, like I go to meetings of progressive activists and so forth and we spend a lot of time talking about Social Security and tax cuts, these are all really important things, and I am not saying they are not, but Iraq doesn't come up, and I mean, we are in the middle of the Iraq war and this was like 2004 when, you know, the insurgency was growing and so forth, and it just doesn't come up. And, so, this huge problem was created where a new generation of thinkers about foreign policy was not being incubated on the liberal and Democratic side, and this happened, I think, throughout the 70s and 80s and 90s, and there are exceptions and there are some brilliant people and so on and so forth, no rule is a blanket rule, but this was indeed a trend that I think has really been a debilitating. Now, in addition, Peter mentioned Vietnam and the sort of post-Vietnam mindset of the party and I think that of course was a big factor too, and a lot of the.that thinking was right at the time and it was right to be against the Vietnam war, to decide that the Vietnam war had been a bad idea, and to have opposed it and help bring it to its end but that thinking, you know there was a hangover to that thinking that lasted a lot longer than it should have, and the other thing that happened at the same time is that the foreign policy thinkers from the earlier generation who Peter mentioned, Niebuhr, Dean Atkinson, who you didn't mention I guess, but Atkinson, George Kennan, the foreign policy intellectuals of the Democrats of the 1940s and 50s, back when they really had a profoundly intelligent stable of foreign policy intellectuals; those people all fell out of favor in the post-Vietnam era. Atkinson was, he was very hawkish on Vietnam but the Atkinson of 1947-48 who did the Truman doctrine and the Atkinson of the early 50s, I might add, because as you may know we had coups in Iran and Guatemala in 1953, in the first year of the Eisenhower/John Foster Dulles administration. The CIA had wanted to undertake those coups under Truman/Atkinson and Atkinson said, "No, absolutely not. We can't be in the business of doing that sort of thing. We are going to get ourselves on the wrong side of history with struggling peoples in third world countries." But I guess he didn't use that phrase, that phrase wasn't quite invented yet. We are going to get our self on the wrong side of history if we start doing this sort of thing. Kennan similarlyKennan was anti-Vietnam was at a fairly early stage but, because he was from that generation, he was kind of tossed out too, and you know containment got a bad name because of Vietnam, well containment actually, to Kennan was never meant to apply to South-East Asia, it was only about Europe. So, so these things happen and we were stuck, I think, with these two very negative legacies that we didn't grow this generation of thinkers on foreign policy questions, and that we lost contact in a really profound way with what was a very noble legacy, so, small wonder then that when something happened, 9/11, the Democratic Party and liberalism, generally speaking, weren't as well prepared as the Republican Party and conservatism to deal with this and to have something to say about this. As Peter said, he said it very well, I don't need to repeat it, but the event fit into a narrative that they had established and that they spent a lot of time thinking about it, , our side didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. And, just one more little anecdote: I was, I guess we are both supposed to mention David Brooks here, I was talking with him in the Spring of 2003, and he told me that he was at some meeting, it must have been one of those Hudson Institute lunches, they have an office in DuPont Circle, it's a conservative foundation, but they have these Left-Right lunches every once in a while, and David was telling me that he was at this lunch shortly before the Iraq war started, and some liberal journalists and advocates were leading the conversation, and the conversation just wasn'tit went 45 minutes before the word "Iraq" was even said. That's the kind of thing that left, I think, Democrats and liberals ill-prepared to respond to 9/11 when the Republicans and conservatives were so well prepared. And, that moment that I opened my talk with, that moment in the fall of 2001, spring to summer of 2002, when liberals, Democratic leaders could have established a counter-narrative. That moment was lost and it's irretrievable now; other things can be done certainly but that moment was lost, and tragically it was lost because there was no real alternative offered to what the administration offered. What I would have liked to have seen, the debate that I really would have loved to have seen happen then, was a debate about the real aims of the administration in going into Iraq. Now, Peter supported the war, I didn't, we will get into that I suppose at some point. But, I wanted to hear Democrats have a fight on principle about what the Bush administration, following the thinkings of the neo-cons, was doing with this war to establish a kind of unipolar hegemony that was laid out long before September 11. It was laid out in 1992, in the April of 1992, in a paper called The Defense Planning Guidance, which you can read about in Jim Mann's book: "The Rise of the Vulcans" for example and in other places. The DPG said very clearly, "We are in a post Cold War era," remember Dick Cheney was the defense secretary at that time and he fully expected to be the defense secretary for the next four years, so who wrote this paper? Under Cheney, Libby. Same people. They expected to be in power for the next four years. They said, "Well, the Cold War is over. What are we going to do? We have to establish unipolar hegemony and we just might need to start a war unilaterally just to prove the point." Iraq would be a good place. It says this. In 1992. Now, I wanted that fight. You know, I understand the political reasons why Democrats felt they couldn't, and they were afraid and they were being accused of being unpatriotic or something, but I wanted that fight to happen, , it might not have worked, but at least it was a framework, and at least it would have given us the serious debate that we deserved then. I will try to wrap up here, butso now we are in a place where, you know I do think that there are possibilities and there are answers that we can pursue now as liberals and as Democrats and, you know I think that for all I said about the lack of incubation of a generation of foreign policy thinkers, I do think that the Clinton administration, by the end, had worked its way toward a good muscular, liberal internationalism that was a plausible foreign policy, and it was built around, first of all it was built around fighting terrorism, the Clinton did more to fight terrorism than the Bush administration did before September 11. In fact, the Clinton administration stopped a terrorist attack. Everybody remember that? That attack on Los Angeles airport on the millennium? Stopped it. And, some luck was involved but a lot of work was involved too. It was built around fighting terrorism, it was built around the idea of using international institutions, as Peter said, not in a reflexive way but in a fluid way, and Peter mentioned using NATO for the Kosovo action, and I think that was completely appropriate and it was a NATO concern more than a UN concern, one could argue. But, they used multilateralism but to achieve ends of democracy and to achieve ends that we can all agree with. It was built also around pursuing Middle East peace, which Clinton, if you recall, was this close to. If Arafat hadn't been so boneheaded it would have happened just before Clinton left office. Now, where's that, after the election last week, and I think also it was built around addressing what Zbigniew Brzezinski has identified in his book: "The Choice" as the increasing politicization of third world peoples.