…would Brzezinski be called a leftie.
Here’s my letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review:
To the Editor:
Jonathan Freedland’s comparative review of books by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Kagan is a perfect illustration of the relentless drive by corporate media outlets to push the ideological 50-yard line of politics to the right.
“As you’d expect,” Freedland writes, “there are big differences between the two.” (Setting the tone of this supposed smackdown is this sub-headline: “Brzezinski from the left and Kagan from the right agree that America should remain dominant.)
As you’d expect? Not if “you” is anyone who knows who these men are.
No doubt, Kagan represents the right.
But Brzezinski a leftist? It depends on what the meaning of “left” is, but by any objective contemporary or current standard, the policies he has promoted for four decades place him squarely in the mainstream, of the Republican Party.
Though once a proponent of détente with the former USSR, by the time he came to power as Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Brzezinski had become a hawk. He initiated the huge defense build-up that continued under Reagan, planned the failed 1980 attempt to rescue the U.S. embassy hostages in Iran, and advocated U.S. arming and financing of radical Islamists in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan—the so-called “Afghan Trap” that would draw the Russians into their own Vietnam-like quagmire. Today we are living with the consequences of Brzezinski’s reckless policies—which liberals protested at the time.
Brzezinski went on to work for Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He officially endorsed Bush. In 1990 Time magazine described him as “a hardliner.” More recently, he backed the U.S. intervention in Libya, which American leftists opposed.
Freedland writes: “And yet the great surprise is how much they [Brzezinski and Kagan] agree with each other, especially on what matters.”
Considering that both men are and have long been men of the right in the standard neoconservative mold, the only surprise is that the editors of the Book Review thought their readers were unaware of recent history. On the other hand, no real leftist writer has appeared in your pages in ages. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that they exist?
