Zbigniew Brzezinski appeared on Charlie Rose tonight for a 25-minute wide-ranging overview of world affairs. Two threads of the discussion stood out in my mind.
First, he compared the worldview of the conservative religious leaders in Iran to the neocons in the US. They share a simplistic, Manichean idea that global rivals are not merely evil but devoid of value or even humanity. Thus the Great Satan is either the Moslem terrorist or the US, depending on where you are sitting.
Second, he discussed the steady increase in political awareness within the global polity as a dramatic shift with long-lasting implications. The French Revolution was the first example of a society-wide political uprising. Over the past 200 years, the depth and breadth of political involvement has expanded with a concomitant decrease in the ability of the West (or any foreign power) to control the world. The new goal is to manage things as best we can, with the explicit understanding and acceptance that this will require coalition building and new partnerships, not merely force projection and intervention. The neocons will not be happy!
