A Manifesto For the Next President

By David Ignatius
Washington Post

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.

Obama would have severe limitations as a foreign policy president, not least his almost complete lack of experience. That's the flip side of being a fresh face, unencumbered by the past. It's hard to know what Obama's views would be on big issues, other than Iraq. So let's focus on Brzezinski, the foreign policy guru, and not his prospective pupil.

First, an encomium to Brzezinski: If there's any foreign policy analyst who has earned the right to be taken seriously today, it's this 78-year-old veteran of the Carter administration. Brzezinski was right about Iraq, warning early and emphatically of the dangers of an American invasion at a time when most foreign policy pundits (including this one) were, with whatever quibbles, supporting President Bush's decision to go to war.

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