In his
Foreign Affairs article, Brzezinski warns: “How Obama handles these three urgent and interrelated issues – the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the Iranian dilemma and the Afghan-Pakistani conflict – will determine the US’s global role for the foreseeable future.”
If Washington fails to broker peace between Israel and Palestinians, if there is a military confrontation with Iran, and if the war in Afghanistan continues to escalate, he warns, it “could spell the end of the United States’ current global pre-eminence”.
Yet, in our conversation, Brzezinski expressed pessimism on the Israeli and Iranian fronts. Israel-Palestine is the issue “on which we have the greatest degree of direct leverage”.
“We are refusing to use our leverage in the Middle East, so we are sort of ‘waiting for Godot’. With the Iranians, the fact is you are dealing with a very unpredictable regime and you have to be super-careful not to unify the public with the regime. So, again, that limits our ability to be really effective.
“Of those three, the one we are most likely to solve satisfactorily within a reasonably predictable period of time is Afpak – Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Brzezinski says.