Leadership Quote by Zbigniew Brzezinski

"War on terrorism" is doing a lot of work here: Brzezinski treats it less as a security strategy than as an organizing ideology, the kind that shrinks a superpower's field of vision until everything looks like a target. His intent is to reframe the post-9/11 posture as a choice, not an inevitability. By calling it the "central preoccupation", he signals obsession and imbalance, the way a single lens can distort an entire worldview.

The subtext is sharper than it first appears. Brzezinski flips the moral vocabulary Washington often reserved for enemies back onto Washington itself: a "narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy". In his hands, "extremist" isn't about tactics; it's about imagination. A democracy with "genuinely idealistic traditions" is, he suggests, squandering its most potent asset: legitimacy that comes from restraint, coalition-building, and a sense of proportion. The implied accusation is not just that the U.S. overreached, but that it misread what power is for.

Context matters: Brzezinski was no pacifist outsider. He helped architect Cold War strategy and understood hard power intimately. That pedigree gives the critique its sting. He's warning that the "world's first superpower" can degrade itself not only through failure abroad but through the habits it adopts to prevent fear. The line is designed to sting American self-conception: if you define yourself by permanent war, you may win battles and still lose the republic's story about itself.