Brzezinski’s memoirs reflect disarray of Carter era

Press, 30 March 1983, Page 13

Brzezinski’s memoirs reflect disarray of Carter era

By

WALTER GOODMAN

of the New York “Times”

Fated to follow, if not to fill, the footsteps of Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski has delivered his memoirs of his service as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter. Just as his career has been less grand than Kissinger’s,' so is his prose less magisterial. Where Kissinger was eloquent, Brzezinski is earnest. The stiffness of his detailed accounts of the major foreign-policy episodes in which he played a part is not relieved by extensive reliance on a journal he kept during his time in office, perhaps with this very use in mind. It is as spontaneous as an exam

paper. But if “Of Power and Principle” offers few amenities of style, it does help us to assess, sometimes despite the author’s loyal intentions, the Carter administration’s reputation for disarray in foreign policy. Not'that the administration was without its accomplishments; the Panama Canal Treaty, improved relations with China, greater attention to human rights and, pre-eminently, the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. Brzezinski adds to our appreciation of the labour that went into such efforts. But then there were the embarrassments, attributable partly to bad luck, partly to uncontrollable events and, in considerable part, to something about the nature of the Carter team: the failure to have

the SALT n treaty ratified: the start and stop responses to Soviet adventures in Africa and Afghanistan and empty fulminations over that Soviet brigade in Cuba: the turnabouts on the neutron bomb, on v Soviet participation in the Middle *East settlement, o*the U.N. resolution involving Jerusalem, and,

finally, the inability to contain or even influence, except for the worse, the revolution in Iran.

The public sense that confusion was a hallmark of that administration is pretty well confirmed by this book. Brzezinski found Secretary of Defence Harold Brown an uncertain ally, Vice President Mondale overconcerned about the domesticrepercussions of any show of harshness toward Israel, and Stansfield Turner’s Central Intelligence Agency uninformative at critical moments. Although he expresses pro forma admiration even for these colleagues, the President alone is treated reverently throughout. No chapter lacks its passage of praise for some remarkable quality of Jimmy Carter. Moreover, like an old performer digging out his press releases, Brzezinski quotes every scrap of compliment that the President ever threw his way on a ceremonial occasion. After a while, this courtier-like performance provides a laugh or two in a book that is not rich in wit

(The quality of humour around the White House, which seems to have consisted mainly of jokes involving animals and children, is appalling. The one good joke in the book we owe to China’s Deng Xiaping, a reply to Carter’s request for eased emigration from China: “Fine. We’ll let them go. Are you prepared to accept 10 million?). The most interesting chapters here’ have to do with Washington’s handling of the Iranian crisis — unprepared for the force or pace of the events that led to the overthrow of the Shah and the ascendance of the Ayatollah Khomeini, our baffled pleaders went into paroxysms okparalysis. The Iranian eruption exposed

dramatically the deep division between Brzezinski ana Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. While the national security adviser argued for a military coup in defence of the Shah or, at. any rate, of a relatively moderate regime, Vance “simply played for time always arguing that the next concession to the Shah’s opponents was'less dangerous than the difficult and dangerous decision for Washington to stage a coup.” If Brzezinski felt lonely in calling for a coup, Vance was alone in opposing the attempt to rescue the American hostages. When that ended in fiasco, by the peculiar logic of Washington politics, it was Vance who resigned. Brzezinski defines their differ-

ences in terms of power and its uses. “For me the highest form of attainment is to combine talk with action, and I believe that power should be a means for attaining morally desirable ends,” he writes, and “when a choice between the two had to be made, between projecting U.S. power and enhancing human rights (as, for example, in Iran), I felt that power had to come first. Without credible American power, we would simply not be able either to protect our interests or to advance more humane goals.” Thus, the national security adviser wanted to send an aircraft carrier to the Indian Ocean to discourage the Soviet adventure, via its Cuban surrogate, in the

Horn of Africa. When the administration did nothing, he “thought seriously about the possibility of resigning.” Whereas the Secretary of State hoped that a new SALT agreement would lead to a wider U.S. Soviet accommodation, Brzezinski saw it as “an opportunity to halt or reduce the momentum of the Soviet military buildup.” In a similar spirit, he viewed a strengthening of ties with Peking as a means of putting pressure on Moscow. In his view, detente with the Soviet Union had to be “reciprocal” and “comprehensive” — that is, “the Soviets could not have a free ride in some parts of tw world while pursuing deterf® where it suited them.”