an old interview with Zbig…

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/30/zbigniew-brzezinski-on-the-future-of-the-middle-east/

Zbigniew Brzezinski served as national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter from 1977-1981. In this role, he was intimately involved in brokering the Camp David Accords and wrestling with Iran's transition from a U.S. ally to an anti-Western Islamic republic. Brzezinski is currently a professor of American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

I spoke with Brzezinski this afternoon to get his take on events unfolding in the Middle East and the consequences for Egypt, Israel, Iran and the United States.

too much copy pasta for it all

but

Do you see what’s unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa as a grand reconfiguration of the region? And, if so, how would that affect U.S. concerns?

It is a reconfiguration, but it may not be quite what people here expect. I’m not all that confident the net result is going to be the surfacing and then the flowering of this series of democratic states. I draw a very clear distinction between populism and democracy.

Also, I emphasize in my own work for many years now the fact that a political awakening tends to be a rather extremist in its initial phases, irrespective of the vocabulary that it uses.

My expectation, therefore, is that what we’ll get in the Middle East is indeed a series of regimes more responsive to popular attitudes. But these popular attitudes are, in many respects, quite critical of American foreign policy - and especially so in regards to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. As a consequence, I think, we’ll have a more difficult time in dealing with that problem, and we may end up paying a higher price for not dealing with it seriously.