some people really believed americans couldn't shoot straight it is their noses were to bid and they couldn't look past their noses. at the same time in america there were ideas that the japanese because of their oriental eyes couldn't shoot straight and so on. the stupidity of people is boundless. >> i'm sure japan 1941 was maybe not the topic of your conversation but you will probably talk a lot about it at dinner so i want to thank you both for being with us this afternoon. [applause] next on booktv charles gati author of the strategy and statecraft of zbigniew brzezinski in a panel of dignitaries discuss the life and career of former national security divisor zbigniew brzezinski. this is about two hours.

[applause] >> while my fellow panelists are getting seated it's my great pleasure and honor to be able to leave this discussion. one of my college professors used to speak about the great chain of being, medieval idea about interconnectedness. i always like to think about the great chain of being in foreign-policy and strategic thinking about foreign-policy and that chain really begins with the person that we are honoring today in our modern history speaking of brzezinski and henry kissinger, a man whom his career has always been linked but the other links in that chain are seated in front of you. it's fascinating to read american history and think about how the ideas, strategies,

challenges were passed from person to person in this amazing american story of foreign-policy decision and discovery. so in that spirit we will try to talk in a brief time that we have and the spirit of zbigniew brzezinski about some big ideas and we didn't do justice if we talked about little ones. i want to start by asking each member of the panel if they would be fully share with his audience the first time you remember meeting zbigniew brzezinski. madeleine? >> happy and very glad to be here with my colleagues in david and you. there is a connection. i did my first year of graduate work in sais and then we moved to new york and i transferred to colombia. there i took a course from zbigniew brzezinski on comparative communism. now at wellesley and also at sais i had been trained on the

soviet bloc and then to be with "zbig" who was able to discuss something that no one talked about in 1963 which was comparative communism. he has had this capability of analyzing the world as it evolves better than anybody i know. >> secretary gates? >> the first time i met "zbig" was when i interviewed for a job in the spring of 1977 and since i don't go way back i will tell you one of my most memorable earlier experiences with "zbig" that i was recounting earlier. in the carter white house the president as an energy-saving measure had all the thermostat thermostat -- so is very warm in the summertime but "zbig"'s office was always cool. i realize this a couple of weeks after he started to work for

him. it was the coolest place in the entire white house and i finally realized what he had done. we talked about strategic aliens but this was tactical brilliance. he had moved a link under the thermostat and the temperature police never caught on. [laughter] >> i met him because i was at the nsc staff when he arrived. i had been hired by brent scowcroft. so far as i can tell the only qualification i had for the job was that i had an active security clearance and on the basis of that they brought me over. i was assigned a wonderful project, and arms control project which had as the name as an akronism which is lost to history called and bfr. the mutual and balanced force

reduction talks in europe. and boy i knew everything about and bfr and i was asked at one point to prepare a memorandum to the national security divisor describing the marvel that was in the negotiations. it went on seven or eight pages and i think it is true that the new security divisor showed great discretion and did not read the memo at all. what he did was he said to me you know you are going to work as sam huntington. you had better try to develop a compound strategy for a national security for this country. having been in the details of an bfr was like the world and opened up and i would be able to look at the world. i think it was sufficiently traumatizing to me that within three months i decided i really ought to go practice law for i went into the other issues. but it was a great opportunity and it has been wonderful to

follow your career and your writings ever since. >> i first met "zbig" and congratulations, in 1953. i know precisely when it was because i was a new instructor at west point and he was a new year at harvard. west point was having a student conference and we were assisting philip mosley who was the famous soviet college -- soviet ecologist at columbia university on this panel. phillip had to leave the day before the caucus was over so zbig and i chaired at the last day and as i recall we disagreed on everything. but then i have to say zbig replace replaced me as national security advisor. he was a busy guy. >> so with that introduction i

want to turn to asking each of the panelists to think with all of us about some of the big ideas that zbigniew brzezinski has written about, thought about and i want to start with secretary albright and ask you to reflect on something that is in the last several of zbig's books and that is the idea that a fundamental thing that is happening in the world that isn't immediately detectable in the daily news is something he calls a global political awakening. it's something that you see in the arab world most vividly but it's everywhere. it's in china, it's in russia. it's something that certainly you were seeing that being innings of when you were secretary. i would be fascinated by your thoughts about how this is playing out of what it means for america and how we should respond to it read. >> thank you and let me say as i said earlier i think zbig's

really insists he is have the capability of analyzing the world as it is at the time and being able to think or wouldn't have larger thoughts about it. i do think for those of us that were raised in a different situation where you had to blocks looking at each other and the u.s. soviet relationship and understanding all of a sudden all the changes that have come about not only with the fall of the wall but just generally i think zbig has had the capability of analyzing that. i would say have had the privilege of sitting in taking notes from zbig most of my life in class and following him around when he was national security adviser and helping to do research for it look. he speaks in perfect hair grafts and so is easy to follow his thoughts. i think that what has happened is obviously a complete disintegration of a variety of systems that we operated with. there are many more forces out there.

the one that has captured people's imagination is what it's been happening in the arab world. i was involved within interesting discussion with an arab. it was the winter so i said we can call it the arab spring anymore so we call it the air of awakening. he was furious. he said this is outrageous. the arabs have not been asleep all of this time. i said what would you call it? and he said arab troubles. i said what about arab opportunities such as enough forethought you see the different approaches to what has actually happened. i think what we have seen and many of us have drawn lessons from what happened in central and eastern eastern europe after the fall of the wall, thinking that it was a similar story in the arab world is completely different i believe. basically there is an awakening, a political awakening but it is not in central and eastern europe there was a desire to the europeans and a desire to be part of the european system. that is not what's going on so we see it in the arab world and we can unpack that at some point

we also see there are many more countries that are playing roles. when zbig was at the nsc we talked about the regional influentials. i think there are more than just one regional influential. there are countries in various places that are playing their roles and they want to be listened to. what is ning also is an awakening in an interior way. here i must say that i think the thing that is entirely different is the role of information technology. and what it has done is awakened within countries. i'm chairman of the board of the national democratic institute at what we have seen is the disaggregation of political voices. people are talking to their governments on 21st century technology. the governments are listening in 20th century technology and responding to it in 19th century ideas. so there is a disconnect and political parties are difficult

to form when the voices are disaggregated. so it's kind of how do you get from tahrir square to governance then there's the other other side of information technology which is that one could say and i don't think zbig arrived with be among those that we do know is going on after world war ii. now we know anything that's going on everywhere and therefore it's changed people's approaches to what needs to be done and that awakening has awakened a set of ideas in terms of how to respond to it throughout the world. but i think it is a huge new issue. we don't know how the infrastructure works whether the organizations that we all grew up with our functional and then wild last thing that has happened is we are all used to a nation-state system. there continue to be nation-states but they are nonstate actors playing a role in this awakening. we don't know at what stage we bring them into the decision-making process. nonstate actors aren't just terrace. nonstate actors are also huge

corporations and ngos that are not under the control of any government and the tools that governments need to use to influence them don't work. there are those tools that work against people that territory and the people they are trying to protect. >> secretary gates something that zbigniew brzezinski has thought about at every moment of his career and indeed through his boyhood, poland is the reality of russia and russian power but it's also the subject that you wrote your doctoral dissertation on if i remember. so i want to ask you, we are now in a fascinating moment in which the united states is seeking to work with russia and want to say again after period that reminded many of us of the cold war in terms of the prickliness and difficulty of dealing with vladimir putin.

do you think that russia can be a genuine and effective partner for the united states in this period first in the syrian chemical weapons dismantling program and second and somehow working to change the political fabric in syria and just more broadly as a partner in this very messy world. >> and a sentence i would say as long as vladimir putin is president of russia began to cheer question is no. i believe that i actually had a period of hope for russia when medvedev was president. i felt he understood the need to strengthen the ties of the west, understood the need for greater openness and freedom in russia itself.

putin's for power and taking a second term away from medvedev and getting himself elected and putin could remain president of russian top 2024 if he is allowed to. i think putin is all about the past, the past glory, the past empire, the lost empire it, the lost glory and the lost power. and i think that it's not an entirely one-sided picture. the reality is that he promised president bush and follow through with president obama that he would not send surface-to-air missiles to iran. they did it stain on some of the international sanctions against iran. they do allow american military to cross the trans-siberian railroad to reinforce afghanistan. it's not a black-and-white picture but i would say on the whole putin is constantly on the search to either tweet the united states or to create

problems for us and to diminish us, believing in any way he could diminish us he elevates russia. my own opinion and probably very many different opinions in the room as there are people, is that his maneuver with respect to syria was very clever because one of the side effects of what he has done is to ensure that assad stays in power. assad is now the figure we are dealing with on chemical weapons so it's now in everybody's interest, europe, ours, everybody else's to keep assad in power so that this move on chemical weapons can take place. so it completely throws into compact whatever the west was thing about getting rid of assad or the need for a change in government and so on. putin has played this in a way that he is insured the survival

in power or at least in some period of time of russia's friend. in terms of whether this works or not, i don't know. some of you may remember how hard it time we had finding a nuclear power plant in eastern syria. in 2006, 2007 you didn't really know was a nuclear power plant until the israelis told us. u.s. intelligence is supposed to be really good at big stuff like that. if you have dozens of chemical weapons storage places might call pundits that they are going to get all the weapons and then they can stop syria from producing new weapons even as they give up weapons or that they are not passing them to hezbollah or tube iran, i just

don't know. i have a great deal of skepticism on the what i have got to give putin credit for a very clever maneuver that put the president behind a ball and put united states behind the eight ball and assured assad's staying in power and brought break greater prestige and putin himself. so all that said again i think there are areas where we can work with russia but by and large i think as long as putin is president as i said at the outset i think finding a longer-term co-operative mutually beneficial relationship with the russians is going to prove a challenge. >> steve hadley if we identify richard nixon and henry kissinger as the people who open engagement with china with mao

and zhou en lai i think it's fair to say that zbigniew brzezinski was the person who consolidated that opening with deng xiaoping in a period that is less celebrated the probably no less important. i want to ask you to think aboue chinese had in saying through their new president xi jinping that they were seeking a new form of great power relationship with the united states. i know you have been in china and please share some thoughts with us. >> one of the things, china, really the growth of asia generally in terms of this economic power and within it china's growth, is going to be a real opportunity but also a challenge for the united states over the next couple of decades and one of the things i worry about quite frankly is that dr. brzezinski and brent and

kissinger in many ways have carried the u.s. china relationship and that has contributed in office but they have been for 40 years the face, the u.s. face to u.s.-china relations. i worry about where our country will be over the next 20 years. i think that this statement by xi jinping about the new relations is a real opportunity for us. i would hope that they would help the united states and china to craft the concept. the gist of it is the following. a lot of the elements of great power contribution -- competition that characterize great power relations in the past territorial frictions, conflicting colonial aspirations are not present between the united states and china. and secondly another thing that's not present as the united states is not trying to keep china down. there are number of chinese who

don't believe that but if you look at the level of investment in the level of. , our sponsorship and international organizations what every president for the last 40 years has said our interest for a strong and prosperous and secure china doesn't hold water. the opportunity is to focus the relationship not on the bilateral tensions which need to be addressed but on the fact that there are a series of multinational challenges that we all know about. adequate energy, adequate food and wire, dealing with terrorism, dealing with proliferation, fixing our global financial system, keeping the economy growing, all things that are global challenges that we all face, that neither china or the united states can solve themselves and of the both of us need to be solved if either of us are going to achieve our own aspirations for a better life

for people our people over the next 10 to 20 years. it is that prospect of china and the united states cooperating together and providing global leadership not as some kind of g2 condominium dictator but as people on equal terms cooperating to lead the global community to solve some of those problems that i think gives you the opportunity of really defining a different kind of relationship between the powers. it's going to be difficult to define. it's going to be hard to operational arise in terms of cooperation. it's going to be hard for our two peoples to understand it because the drescher for competition in zero-sum thinking is present in both of our societies and it's going to be important that we managed our military relations because i think that is where they can -- so a will be tough work but i think it's an opportunity and i

think in some sense henry and brands can do us and do our country a service if they can help to find this kind of a model of relationship and can help carry us through the next decade ahead. >> general scowcroft i think it's fair to say that no country fast zbigniew brzezinski when he was national security adviser more than iran and the iranian revolution that he acted content with and formulate policy about. we are now at a moment that offers the promise for the first time really since 1979 and the revolution of something different. i would like to think of the big turn in the road that is visible. doesn't mean you can get around it but it's fair in terms of the u.s. relationship with iran. i would be very interested in your thoughts, both the

opportunities you see for finally making that turn and the cautions that you would have about the difficulties in the process. >> the u.s. and iran have always had a strong relationship with each other, strongly good and strongly bad. when the british started to pull back from their overseas positions especially in the middle east, we sort of established under the nixon administration iran as their central point for stability in the region, and they played that role for a time. and then the shah fell and the opponents of the shah and the shah's regime seized the

american embassy and put people in hostage. that was zbig's really bad moment. that established a period of going from there our favorite people to be our hated people. the harvard that, rightly so, for a long time. then a few years later we shot down an iranian airliner loaded with passengers by mistake. that gave on the iranian side of the business that fuse this relationship with the hostility that we rarely have with other countries. now we are seeking to see

whether there is a way out. the specific focuses on nuclear weapons but it's a broader issue. my own guess is on the nuclear weapons issue, is it the shah were still around he might be in a very similar place on teen nuclear weapons given the role and the position of iran in the region. but that's not the major point. the question is, can we reach an understanding with iran, which in their eyes is not discriminating against them and yet preserves the middle east or protects it from going one step further into a nuclear competition zone. i don't think we know the answer.

and i think we have been trying and we have been talking with the iranians for years. to me, the real danger of an iran with nuclear weapons is not that they have a half-dozen nuclear weapons but that if iran does this the saudi's are likely to feel compelled to follow and the turks and egyptians. then you have a region which is far different in terms of capacity for destruction than it is now. so the question is, can we reach an understanding? it is very difficult and one of our close allies, israel, feels very strongly about this issue of nuclear weapons. i had a chance to talk to president rouhani and to foreign

minister zahir when they were in new york for the u.n.. president rouhani explained it, let me explain it. he said all the right words but the meeting that i attended he gave some cautions. he said nuclear technology is an opportunity for the world. we need to be able to explore nuclear technology like everybody else. we don't want nuclear weapons but you were telling us we can't and you have no right to do that because you have done it and other countries have done it. so that is sort of the nature of the problem now. so is the question, is there a way that iran can --

certainly they have a nuclear power reactor right now fueled with russian uranium on a lease basis, not on an ownership aces. can we solve this problem? i think we may be able to solve the. we have not up until now and the last time under ahmadinejad, the mullahs, who really ran the country said absolutely not. now interestingly enough rouhani is going around talking somewhat more optimistically and the mullahs are silent. so is it possible to carve this up in a way that iran can do some things like for example limited enrichment of uranium 23% for their reactor under

iaea's provision, or give it all up or whatever. i won't go into the details. they have other kinds of things they are doing but i think it is possible that it will take both sides getting over this distasteful series of decades that have really given bitterness to the relationship that's going to be hard to overcome. >> let me interject a zbig story here. zbig was in algiers and october of 1979 representing the president for the 25th anniversary of the algerian revolution -- resolution and madeline and i were there with him. the iranian revolution reached out and asked zbig for meeting

and went to the meeting. >> this is after the iranian revolution. >> yes, this is eight months after the revolution. this is the first senior-level u.s. official contact with the iranian revolutionary government so the first engagement if you will. i went as the notetaker. they brought with them some of the best pistachios i have ever eaten. [laughter] that said, zbig open the dialogue i saying we are prepared to recognize your revolution. we will work with you. we will even sell you the weapons we contracted to sell the shah because we have common interests. above all, common interest is the soviet union on your northern border. and they said, give us the shah

who was then being treated medically in united states. this dialogue if you can call about went back back and forth for about an hour. at the end, and i will never forget it, zbig said for us to return to shot to you with the incompatible with our national honor. that ended the meeting. three days later the embassy was seized and then in two weeks all three of those officials were out of their jobs and that began this process and as i like to say that again my now more than 30-year long search for the elusive iranian moderate. but i think it's important to realize where the united states started in this relationship in terms of the first senior contact with senior leaders of the iranian government and its rent says maybe this will work out. maybe, just maybe our strategy under both the bush and obama's

administrations are putting the squeeze on these guys in a really meaningful ways economic way has actually worked.