Brzezinski: There Has Been Progress

The one major area of foreign affairs to which the Carter Administration has devoted relatively little effort is China. To remedy that, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski set out for Peking last week at the head of a team of military, diplomatic and economic experts (but no reporters). Shortly before his departure, at a lunch with the editors of TIME, he was asked for his assessment of the degree to which the Carter Administration was succeeding--or failing--in its foreign policy. His answer:

A big country like the U.S. is not like a speedboat on a lake. It can't veer suddenly to the right or left. It's like a large ship. There's continuity to its course. There's continuity between our Administration's foreign policy and the policy of our predecessors and, indeed, between them and their predecessors.

However, each Administration imposes its own stamp on foreign policy, by turning a little bit from one side to the other. I think there are certain distinctive aspects to the Carter foreign policy.

President Carter, by nature, is what I would call a structural reformer. He doesn't like to deal with the superficialities of problems. He really likes to deal with the essence of the problem with thorough, far-reaching reform. You see this in his domestic programs and in the things he's trying to do in foreign policy. That generates much more resistance. Indeed, it may sometimes create coalitions of opponents and thereby create problems for us.

Nonetheless, to the extent that over a period of time he is successful, I think his successes are likely to be more important and more far-reaching. I think our record on the whole is good, with some failings.

We have done well in establishing human rights as an issue on the agenda. Today there isn't a government which doesn't realize that human rights affects their relationship with us. By and large, on every continent there has been some progress--and more in the past year, thanks to this policy, than in preceding years.

Beyond that, we have made progress in relating the U.S. to new forces in the world, to the new countries that have become more important recently, particularly in the Third World. We sense this at the United Nations. We sense it in relations with such countries as India, Nigeria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Venezuela--newly influential countries which the President has visited.

I would agree that we have not done well enough in developing a North-South economic program. But we have improved the nature of the political relationship with the Third World and the way the Third World perceives us.

I think it's very important that the U.S. not be identified with the status quo, which, in general, is the way it used to be identified. President Carter has identified the U.S. with change in world affairs, thereby giving us the opportunity to shape the nature of change and provide the framework for it. That's a fundamentally important consideration, in terms of the U.S. relationship with the world as a whole. The U.S. in the past was perceived as being antichange--and perhaps occasionally it was.

The political dimension of the relationship was very much improved largely because of Carter himself and also because of Andy Young. I think what Young has done at the U.N. is really remarkable. He has shown that this country genuinely is sympathetic to change which involves more self-determination for those two-thirds of mankind who until recently were truly denied self-determination.

In the Middle East, we are engaged in a thankless but decisively important task: how to structure a peaceful relationship with the entire Middle East --promoting moderation in the region, closer relations with the West and, in that context, a peaceful settlement that is likely to give Israel an opportunity not only to survive but truly to prosper and flourish.

We are trying to help resolve some fundamental issues in southern Africa. We're doing it on the basis of cooperation with the moderate African countries, of the sort that some years ago would have been unthinkable. We are now correcting the relative passivity of" the past year in dealings with east Asia. U.S.-Chinese relations are a central aspect of our policy.

I believe we have made a significant breakthrough in our relations with Latin America. We have abandoned the notion, which has been followed by almost every Administration since F.D.R.'s, of propounding a single slogan for that diversified region. Instead, we're pursuing a policy which is on the one hand more bilateral and on the other hand more related to global issues, thereby generating a more mature set of relationships with individual Latin American countries. By tackling what seemed like a hopeless task--the Panama Canal treaties--we have redressed a historical wrong, and we have opened up opportunities for a new relationship.

With Western Europe we have consulted on all strategic issues more closely than ever before. We have done a great deal tangibly to strengthen NATO. With the Soviet Union we have a more diversified and wide-ranging set of negotiations than ever before. We hope to push SALT, step by step, toward increasingly significant reductions, reducing the trends of the previous decades. In our expanded negotiations with the Soviet Union we have managed to avoid creating the fear, which was present some years ago in Western Europe, the Middle East and China, that we were pointing toward a [U.S.-Soviet] condominium. Detente to be enduring has to be comprehensive and reciprocal. Thus Soviet military intrusion into Africa could have negative consequences.

On global issues we have generated a number of initiatives--some of which, like nuclear nonproliferation, have created, because of our lack of sensitivity initially, some needless friction. But these steps were important in alerting world opinion.

Previous to our Administration, the tendency was, in part because of the highly personal nature of the diplomacy, to focus on a small number of issues. Thus a number of other issues festered. We have tried to work on a wider front because we had no choice. I can't think of a single issue we're tackling we should have left alone. What would one drop and not deal with? SALT, or southern Africa, or Panama? We thought we had to move on all. The fact that we're dealing on a wide front does create certain problems, but on balance, by and large, I believe we've made progress.

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