America and the World

DAVID IGNATIUS: You are both master practitioners of foreign policy, and you agreed to take part in this project in part because you believe the world is changing and that the rules under which you operated when you were national security advisors in the White House are also changing, forcing us to think in different ways. Today I want to ask you to talk about what’s new in the world. What challenges are different from the template you both grew up with? Brent, let me ask you to start off.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: I believe we’ve had a more abrupt change in the international environment than at any time in recent history, a fundamental change that goes under the broad heading of globalization. It’s a change in the way people communicate and interact. That is what’s revolutionizing the world. The world’s people are more politically active. There have always been immigration flows, for instance, but they’re huge now because radio and television allow people to compare their current status with that of others around the world and see where the opportunities are. This is happening around the globe. Some of the consequences are good and some are bad. The important point is that it is really changing the status of the nation-state, how it cares for its people, and how it can manage its overall responsibilities for its citizens. The fact is that the role of the nation-state, while still predominant, is steadily diminishing.

I think that is at the heart of what we’re facing. The major challenge is that the whole world is changing at once, and this so-called information age is literally transforming the world we all know and the institutions with which we are familiar. It is most dramatic in the more highly developed countries, and those with access to the most modern technology. It is less acute in Latin America and least acute in Africa. And when it hits Africa, divided as it is into states that have no rational borders and that cut across tribes and ethnic groups, it’s going to be even more challenging.

IGNATIUS: In this new world, Brent, it sometimes looks as if the Internet, our new instant communications network, acts as an opinion accelerator. For instance, anger over Danish cartoons can suddenly spread to every capital in the Muslim world and there’ll be crowds in the streets. We see that phenomenon throughout politics. What does that acceleration of anger mean for the conduct of foreign policy?

SCOWCROFT: It makes people who have never been very aware of anything beyond their immediate village politically active. And much of the flow of information is without the moderating influence of editors of newspapers or of radio or television. For example, on a blog you can say, this is the way the world is, and nobody edits it, corrects it, or says it is not true. So there’s a flood of information coming to people who are not used to questioning or sorting through accuracy and inaccuracy by themselves. It’s having a profound impact on radicalism and terrorism.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: First of all, we have to recognize that the traditional problems of power and geopolitics are still with us. But superimposed upon these traditional problems and also transforming their character are two novel, fundamental realities. One is the transformation in the subjective condition of humanity, what I call the global political awakening. For the first time in history all of the world is politically activated. This is something that started with the French Revolution and spread through Europe and to Asia in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, and now it’s global.

The second reality is the surfacing of the first truly global problems of survival. The biggest problems of survival, heretofore, were national problems, whether they were man-made like the Armenian genocide or the Holocaust, or natural phenomena such as a drought. Now we have problems of survival of a global character. Let me just amplify both propositions.

On the subjective level, this global political awakening is creating massive intolerance, impatience with inequality, with differentials in standards of living. It’s creating jealousies, resentments, more rapid immigration, the things that Brent referred to. Connected with that is a craving for respect for differentiated cultures and for individual dignity. Much of humanity feels that respect is lacking from the well-to-do. On the objective level, the new global problems include such things as the crisis of the environment, the threat to the human condition associated with climate change, and the incredible potential for massive lethality deliberately inflicted by human beings on other human beings. We are now capable of killing a lot of people instantly and very easily.

I once wrote something to the effect that until recently it was easier to govern a million people than to kill a million people. Today, it’s much easier to kill a million people than to govern a million restless, stirred-up, impatient people. That danger confronts all of us. It is what makes the issue of nonproliferation so important.

These two novel conditions complicate the more traditional issues we have to cope with. Superimposed on them is this obligation to understand and respond to the unique challenges of the twenty-first century, which involve a comprehensive transformation in both the subjective and the objective conditions of mankind.

My old professor at Harvard, Daniel Bell, observed more than thirty years ago that the nation-state is too big for the small problems of life and too small for the big problems of life. I wonder if we need to think about new structures, new ways to deal with these problems that transcend the nation-state. What do you think, Brent? That’s a dream that goes back to 1945.

SCOWCROFT: We do. I think we’ve described the imperative for that, that this new world is superimposed on the international structures created by and for the old world, which is very different. But the attitude in the United States is probably more negative toward international organization now than it’s been in decades. It’s always been ambivalent, but it’s more negative now. I would suggest that if we didn’t already have a United Nations, the world as it is right now could not sit down and agree on a useful UN charter.

BRZEZINSKI: Let me add to that. Earlier in our discussions Brent expressed skepticism regarding the notion that some people are propagating regarding some sort of collective or union of democracies. I forget the exact phrase they use, but anyway Brent was doubtful about the utility of such a formation. And I share his skepticism. For one thing, how do we define democracy? Who’s in, who’s out? A lot of our friends are going to be out, we may have some people in who are not really our friends, and it’s not going to work. But as a practical matter, we do have to ask ourselves: Who can we best work with in dealing with the kind of issues we have just been talking about?

My inclination would be to emphasize two propositions: One, we know that certain states share, basically, some of our values and interests, and therefore we have to work with them more closely. I would put in that category, first of all, Europe. This is why I attach such importance to a really serious effort to create a genuinely collaborative partnership with Europe. That requires a lot of work. It’s more than a slogan.

Secondly, I would say there are some countries outside Europe that fall in the same category, and therefore we ought to think of how to draw them in. That includes Australia; it very much includes Japan, and that’s a more complicated challenge; and increasingly, South Korea, which is now incorporating global responsibility into its policies. There may be some others.

In brief, on the issues we have been talking about, we ought to be interested in shaping coalitions of states that share a responsible interest in solving these problems and not determine participation entirely on the basis of whether or not the states concerned are democracies. We would start with democracies that share our values, but then selectively engage those countries that really are prepared to work responsibly on some of these issues. That’s going to be tough, but we won’t be able to solve these problems alone in any case, and we’ll need coalitions that in some fashion represent a dominant majority of wealth, power, and serious commitment. On some issues, we may want Russia in the coalition, on other issues, China, India, Brazil, et cetera.

IGNATIUS: One question is how that group of like-minded, developed countries can extend the writ of law, order, and security to the world as a whole. Thomas Barnett, a political theorist, has written a book called The Pentagon’s New Map, in which he distinguishes between these core connected countries with, as he says, orderly rule sets—the countries of globalization, as Brent has described it—and the disconnected periphery of states that are outside this world of orderly rule sets and that increasingly are lawless, ungoverned, often tyrannical. The challenge he presents is how we’ll extend connectedness and orderly rule sets to the world as a whole, so we don’t have these pockets of lawlessness. Brent, how can we do that?

SCOWCROFT: I would start with leadership on issues. Not domination and ultimatums but leadership. The United States has a tradition of leadership. The League of Nations, for example, the UN—these were U.S. ideas. They’re attractive ideas, and the United States, with its reputation for having the interest of mankind at heart, if it takes a leadership position, can gather people together and persuade them to move in the right direction. That’s been lacking in recent years, partly because the end of the cold war induced all of us to breathe a sigh of relief and conclude that there were no more serious problems and we could just go back to preoccupation with our domestic issues. The outside world was fine—not really threatening.

We’re finding out that it is not fine, but I think if we, for example, were to mobilize United States leadership on behalf of climate change and say, “This is a world problem, we really need to move,” the world would respond. We have that kind of power or moral authority, to a degree that no one else does. Europe eventually may have it, but it doesn’t right now, and certainly no other power centers have it. That’s what we can do, that we have not done very much since the end of the cold war.

BRZEZINSKI: Let me also add that to do it, the president not only has to take global leadership, he has to make a really serious effort at domestic leadership because, ultimately, we are a democracy. Ultimately, the United States is not going to be serious about anything unless there is a national commitment by the president, by Congress, and by the public. The issues we’re talking about do require a significant rethinking by Americans of what the key challenges are in the world today and what America’s principal responsibilities are.

It’s very easy, given recent circumstances, to slide into a paranoid mood in which war on terror defines everything and struggle against Muslim jihad is the defining strategy. If we move down that path, we will not be able to touch any of the issues we’ve been discussing. But it’s not enough just to abandon these demagogic slogans; there really is a task of significant public education. More than ever before, the next president will have to be a national teacher on these issues and make a very concerned, intellectually sustained effort to get the American people to think hard about what is new about the twenty-first century, what is unique about the challenges we face, and why America can only respond to them if it manages to shape a whole series of differentiated coalitions that are dedicated to a collective response.

IGNATIUS: Zbig, let’s dig a little deeper on that. You’ve written about this global awakening. We’ve talked about it in our conversations, and you’ve described a global yearning for dignity. Not simply a better life or a higher standard of living but for something intangible, which is respect. How does the United States put itself on the side of that aspiration for dignity in a more powerful way?

BRZEZINSKI: First of all, avoiding stigmatizing others. I fear that a great deal of our talk about Islamic terrorism has unfortunately created more hostility towards us among the largest religious formation in the world. We have to be very careful. If we were to use the same terminology, let’s say, about the Irish Republican Army and keep talking about how they’re trying to establish a papacy in western Europe, that this is a Catholic conspiracy, that this is a Catholic crusade against us, we would certainly alienate most Catholics, including the sixty-five or seventy million Catholics in this country. So we have to be sensitive about the language we use.

Secondly, we have to face the fact that the quest for dignity is related to the awareness of social disparities. People who feel deprived, and who can now see on television how deprived they are compared to others, are going to resent the rich if they feel the rich are perpetuating the status quo.

So we have to identify ourselves with certain specific causes, such as elimination of starvation in the world. Millions of people are still starving in the world, and some deliberate effort is needed to begin to create conditions for self-sustaining development in poorer countries.

We have to do much more in terms of health and medicine and better schooling for people in the poorest parts of the world. It’s these kinds of causes where an evident American involvement, a pioneering role, would help a great deal. And that requires, last but not least, asking ourselves whether the unlimited acquisition of wealth is the ultimate objective of life. That applies not only to the people who simply want to have more material goods; it applies particularly to our political elite. I find it disgusting—I’m using the word advisedly—disgusting that chief executives, in businesses that often have adopted destructive, short-term policies focusing on immediate profit, are obtaining payoffs on a scale of hundreds of millions of dollars when they leave their bankrupt financial institutions. There’s something fundamentally unjust in a world where that’s taking place. And so there’s a whole gamut of issues, ranging far beyond the political into the cultural and philosophical, that we have to think about seriously.

IGNATIUS: We’re talking about living our values better. Brent, part of the mystery of leadership is how a president can embody our values in a way that speaks to the world rather than alienating the world. George Bush certainly thinks of himself as a principled man, but the world’s reaction has been to be turned off.

SCOWCROFT: One of the problems is the use of terms. We’re throwing around terms like freedom, but freedom means different things to different people. Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? What are the restrictions on freedom? It becomes very confusing. We should be talking, instead, about dignity—dignity of the individual. Dignity is easier to understand. And if you take that idea to heart, it changes the way you look at things. Our current immigration problem, for example, has resulted in pressure on the government to round up and deport illegal immigrants. But these are not animals crawling across our border, they are human beings. They’ve come to the United States, most of them, hoping for a better life, for a more dignified existence.

If we would focus on human dignity, it would help us deal with the issues Zbig talked about. I don’t see anything wrong with getting wealthy, but we need to think about people’s dignity and how we can improve their well-being, which is what we as a nation are about.

BRZEZINSKI: Well, at the risk of a personal confession, the reason I liked Obama from the very beginning—he may or may not be the president this book will be read by—is that apart from his intrinsic intelligence, I felt that his election would, by itself, signal respect for the dignity of others. I don’t mean this to be a political tract for him, but given his biography and his identity, he creates a collective respect for diversity. And for dignity, because dignity entails respect for diversity.

Dignity is not the same for everybody. Yet we have to universalize the notion and not have a sense that the world is divided into superior countries with superior cultures and downtrodden countries with inferior cultures. That will not endure in the twenty-first century. It has the makings of chaos and violence and resentment. Obama represents one way a president could respond, simply through who and what he is.

Another way is simply to address the issue. McCain is an engaging personality. You have a sense of heroic decency in the guy. And if he makes it his intellectual challenge, I think he could help a lot. I hope very much that he doesn’t make the crusade against jihadism a major definition of his foreign policy, because I think that would be self-defeating for America as well as for him. I think he has the capability, in his personality and intellect and heroic past, to project another message.

SCOWCROFT: It’s harder to do than to say. We have said since the country was founded that all men are created equal. Yet those words were written at a time when one-third of the United States population was enslaved. Only five years before I was born did women get the vote throughout the United States.

Simply to talk about dignity, to assert that one human being ought to be considered as valuable as another, is important, but it also has to be reflected in the way one behaves. I think Barack Obama represents those values, so does Hillary Clinton—and so does John McCain in his crusading about immigration, about Guantanamo, and against mistreatment of detainees. These issues are at heart about dignity, about how you treat other human beings.

IGNATIUS: Certainly in the sense of dignity of the human body and soul, John McCain—who experienced the most hideous insult to personal dignity, being tortured month after month, year after year in North Vietnam—made a decision that what was done to him should never be done to any human being. He defied President Bush to press that issue.

IGNATIUS: The word in Arabic for dignity is karameh and it’s a very powerful word for Arabs. In my thirty years of tromping around that part of the world, I’ve realized it’s the one thing people won’t give up. You can batter them, imprison them, but they won’t give that up. In our conversations we’ve approached a subject that worries all of us, and now I’d like to address it directly: whether, after the mistakes and difficulties of the last seven years, we are becoming locked in a clash of civilizations.

We don’t want to be, we don’t think it’s necessary, but there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who are furious at the United States, for whom the images of those prisoners at Abu Ghraib will never go away. What do we do about that? How do we avoid the crackup that many people fear is ahead of us, despite our nice words about dignity?

BRZEZINSKI: It’s not only a question of the new president, his or her personality, his or her words. It’s not only a question of how Americans are encouraged to rethink what we ought to be doing in the world. It’s very specifically a question of what we do, soon after the inaugural, to deal with the problems in the Middle East which precipitate a long-lasting hatred of America. It will take a lot of effort, but it’s a series of issues that cannot be put off. In my view, there should be a sense of urgency in dealing with the issue of Iraq, even though Brent and I might disagree on how rapidly something can be done.

There’s certainly a sense that we have been slack and ineffective in promoting an Israeli-Palestinian peace, which both peoples need, but which, more importantly, we need—and we have to be identified with it.

There is the more general question of how we deal with Iran. Last but not least, there’s the question of how we deal with Muslim traditionalism and fundamentalism, which should not be reduced simply to Al-Qaeda. If we’re not careful in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, we can get embroiled in something that perpetuates hostility towards us.

SCOWCROFT: It hasn’t helped that we have surrounded ourselves with an environment of fear. That has been deadly. We have depicted Muslims in the war on terror the way we depicted Germans in World War I. We dehumanized them, turned them into objects of hatred and fear, the enemy. But Al-Qaeda is a very different kind of enemy. It is a small clique with a certain goal, and we need to remember that. Just because a man going through Customs is named Mohammad, you don’t pull him aside and strip search him. But we do because the climate of fear has become pervasive in this country. That’s one thing we have to attack.

BRZEZINSKI: It’s made us more susceptible to demagogy. And demagogy makes you more inclined to take rash decisions. It distorts your sense of reality. It also channels your resources into areas which perhaps are not of first importance. I’m struck by the extent to which this country, more than any other, lives in an environment in which everywhere on television, on radio, in the newspapers, you see advertisements emphasizing security and defense and weapons. We have a defense budget that is literally bigger than that of the entire rest of the world combined.

BRZEZINSKI: That’s right. It’s quietly accepted because we’re scared. We’re meeting in this building in Washington, and we go through this idiotic security procedure to enter it. The implicit message of these precautions is that Bin Laden is sitting in some cave in Pakistan planning to blow up the building in which a few investment banks and law firms are located. We have succumbed to a fearful paranoia that the outside world is conspiring through its massive terrorist forces to destroy us. Is that a real picture of the world, or is it a classic paranoia that’s become rampant and has been officially abetted? If I fault our high officials for anything, it is for the deliberate propagation of fear.

When Brent was in office, when I was in office, we lived in a situation in which in six hours, half the population of the United States could be dead. We did everything we could to conduct our foreign policies rationally, to make deterrence credible, to keep the American people secure and confident. We haven’t done that in the last seven years.

SCOWCROFT: In World War II, in the cold war, was Washington barricaded the way it is now? No. True, the threat today is different. But we’re in danger of losing what has been the ideal of America: the hope that we can make ourselves better, and make the world better.

SCOWCROFT: And the optimism to go out and do good. That’s been the symbol of America, why we’ve accomplished so much. That’s why the world traditionally likes us. Even when we made serious foreign policy mistakes most said, “Well, they mean well.” Now there’s great doubt around the world about whether we mean well. That’s a tremendous change, and we need to recover our image. The next president needs to start on this recovery and make us again the hope of mankind that we’ve always seen ourselves as being and that much of the world has traditionally seen us as being.

IGNATIUS: I’m struck that the two of you, who are often described as foreign policy realists, who put America’s national interests first and try to form policy around the advancement and protection of those interests, have been talking in this conversation, and in all of our other discussions as well, about values. How should future American leadership combine those two strands, a realism about our interests and an anchor in our values as a people and a country? Zbig, that’s not an easy trick. Jimmy Carter, the president you served, sometimes got that right, sometimes wrong.

BRZEZINSKI: We’ll always get it sometimes right and sometimes wrong, because you’re right, it’s not easy. I entitled my memoirs from the White House Power and Principle. And I don’t know whether I’m a realist or an idealist—I don’t classify myself.

It seems to me that if you’re engaged in statecraft, you have to address the realities of power. Power is a threat but also a tool. If you’re intelligent and you have the kind of power that is needed, you use it in a way that promotes your national security and interests, but that is not enough. Power has to be driven by principle, and this is where the element of idealism comes in. You have to ask yourself, ultimately, what is the purpose of life? What is the purpose of national existence? What is the challenge that humanity faces? What is it that we all have in common as human beings?

And you try to strike a balance between the use of power to promote national security and interests, and trying to improve the human condition. It’s not easy to do the two things together. But you have to be conscious of it. You mustn’t be cynical or hypocritical because that’s demoralizing and not morally sustainable. You have to be historically confident. You have to have a sense that what you are doing is somehow in tune with the mysterious unraveling of history and that you’re pointing in the right direction.

What we have been trying to talk about today deals precisely with that issue. How, in the early stages of the twenty-first century, do we set a course for America that deals with the practical realities but is channeled towards this larger goal? The president said in his latest State of the Union message that the defining character of the twenty-first century is going to be the struggle against terrorism. This is an absurd statement—first of all because it’s now 2008, so we still have ninety-two years to run. To define the essence of this century so early on is premature. What Brent and I are doing today is trying to grope our way towards a more complex and sophisticated definition of the challenges of the century, and to say how, in that context, an American national policy that combines power with principle is the right response.

SCOWCROFT: These labels—realist, idealist—are difficult. I don’t know what I am. People write about me and say I’m a realist. During the cold war I was criticized by the left for being a realist because I was focused on the Soviet military threat rather than the existence of nuclear weapons. Now I’m criticized as a realist by the right. So these things change. I’m still the same person I was.

When I went to graduate school, Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations was the bible for students of international politics. It is one of the founding texts of realism. At his purest, Morgenthau held that international politics is a struggle for power, and that power is the only thing that matters. States try to maximize their own power or that of their group against other groups.

Well, that’s the extreme of it. To me, realism is a recognition of the limits of what can be achieved. It’s not what your goals are, but what can you realistically do. The idealist starts from the other end—What do we want to be? What do we want to achieve?—and may neglect how feasible it is to try to get there and whether, in trying to get there, you do things which destroy your ability to get there and sacrifice the very ideals you were pursuing. The difference is which end of the issue you start with and, as Zbig says, how you balance ends and means. Do you try to leap for the stars? Or are you so mired in day-to-day difficulties that you don’t even elevate your sights to believe that progress can be made? We need to strike some balance between the extremes of realism and idealism. The United States ought to be on the side of trying to achieve maybe a little more than it can.

BRZEZINSKI: Ultimately, we have to face the fact that we’re all fallible. Striking that balance is a desirable objective, but more often than not, we’ll probably err on one side or the other. That’s inherent in the human condition. Therefore there will always be a debate about whether we’re being too realistic or too idealistic.

IGNATIUS: We Americans are often accused of wanting to have it all, of wanting to have things that are in conflict. We want lower taxes and more services. We want freedom and protection from our adversaries. This habit of wanting it all is going to hinder us as we try to deal practically with the problems of the twenty-first century.

To take an obvious example, you both agree that climate change, global warming, is a real and growing problem for the world. To deal with it, we have to change the way we live. We’re going to have to accept some limits on carbon emissions, either through a tax or some other system, and that’s going to change how Americans live. How does presidential leadership get us to do the thing that’s hard for any people, but I think hardest for Americans, which is to give up some of our fabulous wealth and opportunities for our long-run good and for the good of the world? Zbig, how does a president teach people to do that?

BRZEZINSKI: There’s no magic prescription, but it does start with what you have just raised, namely, presidential involvement. The president is uniquely positioned to be an educator of the country, a public definer of its long-range interests and of how these interests mesh into the larger global context. Only the president can do that. The issue is how we define the good life. Are the unlimited acquisition of material possessions and ever-higher use of energy the ultimate definition of the good life? How is this going to be sustainable on a global basis?

I don’t think the answers will come easily. They certainly will not come within the term of any one president. This is a debate that has to start within the country that, in a sense, has set the worldwide standard for material attainments and which, in the current global era, has to ask itself whether that standard is compatible, literally, with continued global survival. We are not quickly going to make a dramatic voluntary change in how we live, but the issue has to be put onto our national agenda.

SCOWCROFT: We first have to change the mind-set. Throughout the development of the industrial age, we have generally behaved as though the pollutants we produced just disappeared in the environment, and nature has been so capacious that they seemed to. We poured them into the ocean, we put them into the air, and they just seemed to go away. Now we’ve begun to realize that they don’t go away. And the quantities that are being produced, with the increase of population and civilization, are beginning to defeat nature’s ability to absorb them. That’s the fundamental thing Americans have to grasp.

IGNATIUS: In this world that we’re describing, does the United States need to think about a different kind of sovereignty? We have been blessed with this unique geographical position—surrounded by two oceans. We’re not just a city on a hill, we’re a city on a great big hill that’s very hard to attack, so we’ve gotten used to an extreme version of sovereignty. Should we be thinking about a more interdependent sovereignty in the twenty-first century, where we acknowledge that our existence depends on our ability to work with others to deal with global disease, climate change, and other global problems?

SCOWCROFT: We have to. Take the environment as a prime example. The United States can exercise all the discipline we have, but it does no good if the rest of the world won’t go along. The Chinese and Indians, for example, might say, “It’s fine for you to propose restrictions because you went through your industrial period and spewed all these pollutants and you didn’t pay anything for it. Now you’re saying we have to pay a price for our development. Well, we refuse.”

We have to negotiate. We have to reach across national borders. These kinds of problems, whether it’s how the world deals with a growing shortage of the mobile energy that petroleum provides, or whether it’s climate change, they cannot be solved nationally. It has to be done cooperatively, and that brings us back to the question, what are the mechanisms for cooperation? International organizations have too seldom gone beyond issues of war and peace or the elements of trade, into the issues we’re talking about now. But they’re going to have to, and the sooner we do it, the less we’ll have to do it in a climate of crisis.

BRZEZINSKI: You asked about national sovereignty, and that harkens back to our discussion of the complex relationship between the realist and the idealist embodied in a single individual or in a group of policymakers. I think the redefinition of national sovereignty is implicit in all of this. But at the same time, one has to be very careful not to start talking about it too soon, even if one is thinking about it, because sovereignty is one of those trigger issues that could cause a reaction in a democratic public that has lived for several hundred years in uniquely secure and isolated circumstances, and which equates that sovereignty with its own identity. Dealing with these global issues is going to demand a readjustment or redefinition of what sovereignty means. But if we start talking too early about sacrificing sovereignty in order to deal with these problems, we’ll probably produce a nationalist reaction that will prevent any solution.

IGNATIUS: Zbig, isn’t that why we never get around to solving problems? We know we need to raise taxes and change the structure of social security and entitlement programs, but we know the public will go nuts. We know we need carbon taxes to reduce emissions, but the public will go nuts. So nobody ever gets around to doing it. Isn’t the task of leadership to say the things that are unsayable?

Let us close by exploring a question suggested by our editor, William Frucht, which arises from American exceptionalism. It sometimes seems that Americans divide the world into two categories: People are either Americans or potential Americans. We assume that everybody wants to live as we do.

IGNATIUS: So here is the question: Is it condescending—and therefore disrespectful of people’s dignity—to say that everybody wants to live as we do? Or is it more condescending to say, well, we have these freedoms, but other people don’t need them. How do you walk that line? How do you respect people’s differences without saying that we’re entitled to things they’re not necessarily entitled to, such as equality for women or democracy?

SCOWCROFT: American exceptionalism is really based on the idea of human dignity. People want to improve their lives and their position in the world. In that sense, everybody wants to be like us. They want a better life. We think the way we have devised it is the best path to that better life. That doesn’t necessarily mean that others must follow the same path. American exceptionalism is frequently distorted by the notion that everyone else ought to be like Americans, whether they like it or not. But at its heart, it envisions a better life for everybody. Perhaps we just got a head start. That’s how I think you resolve the dilemma. We have ordinarily stood for a better life around the world.

BRZEZINSKI: But it’s a better life for everybody in a society that emerged and improved itself and made itself wealthier in an environment in which a relatively small number of people were blessed with very rich resources, which they were able to develop as their numbers grew gradually. When I came to America as a child, for example, the population of the United States was 120 million people. It’s 300 million today. Our path to wealth cannot be duplicated in India or China or Africa, where you have hundreds of millions of people, in some places billions, already living in poverty.

So while our successful society can rightfully be viewed as relevant to others, the way we created it cannot be duplicated everywhere. Others have to do it differently. That means some significant departures from the way we have operated and have structured our system.

SCOWCROFT: No, you’re right. But I think our structures and processes have created value in the world. Look at China, for example. If you compare today with fifty years ago, the average Chinese is infinitely better off.

IGNATIUS: Is there a problem with this combination of American exceptionalism, a sense that we’re special and uniquely blessed, and our tendency to universalize our values? We’re special and everybody should be like us? One thing that I see as I travel the world is that people want to write their own history, even if they get it wrong. It goes back to this sense of dignity. It’s mine; it’s not yours. Even if you’re right, I don’t want to do it your way; I want to do it my way.

SCOWCROFT: This is how we have evolved. A century or so ago, when the Hungarians were subordinated by the Austrians, freedom meant freedom from empire. That’s the world Woodrow Wilson was dealing with. Today freedom means something very different.

BRZEZINSKI: The reason Wilsonianism had such an appeal was that it coincided with a particular phase of European history, in which freedom for people who aspired for it and focused their sense of identity on it was a very timely thing. The rise of independent European states and the collapse of empires was very much in keeping with what Wilson was talking about, and America became a symbol of it.

The reason I put so much emphasis on the notion of dignity in my book Second Chance is that it’s dignity, not freedom, that people around the world—now politically awakened and aware of global disparities—really seek. People want dignity in their existence, dignity in their ability to give a meaningful opportunity for their children, dignity in the respect that others give them, including their cultures and their religions.

That thought occurred to me, as I was writing that book, in a very curious way. I was listening to a postgame discussion among football players—not all of whom, even though they all claim to have gone to college, are very well educated—and I was struck by how often they will say, whether celebrating their victory or mourning their defeat, “They didn’t give us respect.” And it struck me that this is a vital human emotion.

SCOWCROFT: Yes. But our role in the world has evolved so dramatically. Go back to the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. The Hungarians raised monuments similar to the Statue of Liberty. They told us they had our ideals and asked for our help. Our response was to wish them well. We hoped they succeeded, but it was not our fight.

BRZEZINSKI: We’re also exceptional in the sense that no country today, in the twenty-first century, can duplicate our experience, our asymmetry between resources and population. But while we can acknowledge that we’re exceptional, I think we should also acknowledge that certain aspirations are universal, particularly the aspiration for dignity.