The American foreign affairs establishment seems finally to have gotten worried about the antics of the Boy Emperor. It stood by, more or less mute, while the Bush Administration abandoned the United States' traditional role as a status quo power. We no longer stand for peace, legality, stability and prosperity in the face of the challenges of revisionist powers, nations that seek a total recasting of the global balance of power. Older examples include Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, Communist Russia and Mao's China. With the help of the neoconservatives who have taken over the Pentagon, we have now become the most revisionist power in history, using our armed missionaries to stuff our version of democracy and free markets down the throats of all other peoples on earth. Overcome by pride, arrogance and the erroneous conclusion that we "won" the cold war (we just didn't lose it as fast or as badly as the former USSR), many Americans have come to believe that we are a New Rome, a colossus athwart the world, beyond law or the need for friends, exercising hegemony over all other nations through our overwhelming military force.

Zbigniew Brzezinski is a perfect representative of the old cold war establishment. He's a Democratic Party hawk who once sought to demonstrate to President Jimmy Carter and the nation that he could be just as unscrupulous in the role of National Security Adviser as his Teutonic predecessor, Henry Kissinger. Both men were university professors of international relations before entering the government as civilian militarists. One of Brzezinski's last official acts was to begin arming insurgents in Afghanistan with the intent of provoking a Soviet intervention. When later asked by the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur whether he regretted having supported Islamic fundamentalism and given arms and advice to future terrorists, Brzezinski replied, "What is more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?" Whatever turns out to be more important in world history, Brzezinski has always kept the interests of his native Poland (now our "enthusiastic new ally," as he proudly puts it) in the forefront of his strategic thinking.

In The Choice, Brzezinski recommends that the United States try to reclaim its former identity as a status quo power and return to a policy of leadership rather than of domination over the rest of the world. With this book, he is refashioning himself as a realpolitik critic of the Bush Administration, a position that could help the cause of peace. He is, however, so cautious in his analyses as to defeat his purpose. After our unsanctioned, unilateral assault against Iraq, he understands how hard it would be to restore the world's trust in our country. But at the same time he wants to avoid being read out of the establishment as a "liberal," at the risk of forfeiting his perks as a guest on the international deep-thinkers circuit--e.g., the Trilateral Commission, which he once headed--and as a $25,000-per-diem adviser, along with George Will, Richard Perle, Henry Kissinger and others, to the embattled right-wing media mogul Conrad Black. He therefore cushions his criticism of current Bush Administration policies in every cliché ever uttered about America's magnificence in a "unipolar world."

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