WP, Ignatius: Brzezinski's Manifesto For the Next President: Barack Obama

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: Manifesto For the Next President
By David Ignatius
Wednesday, March 14, 2007; Page A15

Zbigniew Brzezinski has written a new book that might be a foreign policy manifesto for Barack Obama. Its message is that America can recover from what Brzezinski calls the "catastrophic" mistakes of the Bush administration, but only if the next president makes a clean break from those policies and aligns the country with a world in transformation.

The former national security adviser says he hasn't yet picked the candidate who could deliver on his book's title of a " Second Chance" for America to reverse its decline as a superpower. But by stressing the need for a foreign policy makeover, his prescriptions seem tailor-made for a certain junior senator from Illinois. In his every word and gesture, the young, transracial Obama would say to an angry world: Take a new look. I represent a country that is different from the one you think you know....

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The most intriguing part of Brzezinski's book is what I would describe as the Obama manifesto. (He doesn't call it that, but I don't think he would quarrel with that characterization, either.) Brzezinski argues that the world is undergoing a "global political awakening," which is apparent in radically different forms from Iraq to Indonesia, from Bolivia to Tibet. Though America has focused on its notion of what people want (democracy and the wealth created by free trade and open markets), Brzezinski points in a different direction: It's about dignity.

"The worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening," he argues. His worry is that America -- enfeebled by "material self-indulgence, persistent social shortcomings, and public ignorance about the world" -- may not get it.

The next president, Brzezinski writes, will need "an instinctive grasp of the spirit of the times in a world that is stirring, interactive, and motivated by a vague but pervasive sense of prevailing injustice in the human condition." Is that person Barack Obama? It's impossible to know. The man is still largely a blank slate. But Brzezinski has described the challenge of future American leadership with unusual clarity. If we don't pick a leader with these qualities, Brzezinski warns, we will miss our second and perhaps last chance....

(The writer co-hosts, with Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues at http://blog.washingtonpost.com/postglobal.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/13/AR2007031301504.html