Brzezinski proves you don't have to be a liberal to loathe administration policy.

Has Zbigniew Brzezinski gone soft? Zbig was never a favorite among liberal Democrats. As the national security adviser in Jimmy Carter's White House, he was the lone, strutting hawk, the adventurously steely Cold Warrior in an administration that valued detente and arms control. Yet there he was, on Oct. 28, at a conference sponsored by the American Prospect, arousing stormy applause from a crowd of liberal Democrats with a rigorous, passionate speech that slammed President Bush's foreign policy and celebrated what seemed to be liberal principles.

He bemoaned what he called Bush's "paranoiac view of the world," which has resulted in "two very disturbing phenomena—the loss of U.S. international credibility [and] the growing U.S. international isolation."

He called for "a return to fundamentals" in U.S. foreign policy, including the construction of genuine alliances, "particularly with Europe, which does share our values and interests even if it disagrees with us on specific policies."

In an implicit indictment of Donald Rumsfeld, Brzezinski added, "We cannot have that relationship if we only dictate or threaten and condemn those who disagree. … We should seek to cooperate with Europe, not to divide Europe into a fictitious 'new' and a fictitious 'old.'… While America is paramount, it isn't omnipotent. We need the Europeans. We need the European Union."

He asks whether a world power can "really mobilize support, and particularly the support of friends, when we tell them that if you are not with us, you are against us." He says the "war on terrorism" cannot effectively be defined as an "abstract, vague and quasi-theological" struggle, or waged with pre-emptive attacks, which only "reinforce the worst tendencies in a theocratic fundamentalist regime" and "widen the zone of conflict in the Middle East."

His conclusion: "If we want to lead, we have to have other countries trust us. When we speak, they have to think it is the truth. … We are going to live in an insecure world. It cannot be avoided. We have to learn to live in it with dignity, with idealism, with steadfastness."

And the crowd went wild.

But many in that crowd were also a bit puzzled. Brzezinski has been out of the limelight for a couple of decades, hanging his hat at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a popular refuge for moderate conservatives out of power. So what was this speech all about? Was it the emergence of a kinder and gentler Zbig? Or was it a maneuver by a canny opportunist, regrooming his views for a comeback in the next Democratic administration?

Actually, it was neither. The principles recited in this speech are identical to those laid out in Brzezinski's 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. In fact, they are not so different from those of any classical theorist of balance-of-power politics. It's just that current U.S. political rhetoric has been so corrupted—especially when it comes to foreign policy—that an eloquent presentation of ideas dating back to Metternich, if not Thucydides, comes off as refreshing and modern.

Brzezinski's book is worth a close look. In it he spells out more fully his reasons for valuing America's alliance with Europe. His advocacy stems not from an idealistic internationalism for its own sake, but rather from a hard-boiled realpolitik.