Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski numbered the United States among “the most socially unjust societies in the world,” citing American income inequality, and said that social injustice is diminishing the relevance of Western countries to the rest of “a world that is now universally awakened.”
“The United States is becoming rapidly one of the most unjust societies in the world,” said Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser (NSA), during today’s Morning Joe. “And that is raising basic questions about the relevance of the West to a world that is now universally awakened, stirring, restless, conflicted.”
He also said that “the West today is somewhat corrupt and easy about its value system.”
Brzezinski defended his claim. “Social disparities between the rich and poor in the United States are now the most severe in the world,” he said. “There is a measure called the Gini coefficient that measures social inequality, and the United States is at the top of the list, with — if I remember correctly — China, Brazil, and India, I think.”
“I’m not talking about places like . . . Rwanda,” he hastened to add. He might have also noted, at that point, that the U.S. doesn’t have China’s brutal one-child policy that mandates forced abortions on women who become pregnant with a second baby.
Brzezinski also said the Europe has greater upward socal mobility than the United States, and said that the United States must moderate it’s foreign policy — “how do we extract ourselves from Southwest Asia?” he asked.
Another Morning Joe guest, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, added, “I agree with just about everything Dr. Brzezinski has said.”
Brzezinski offered a dire view of American foreign and domestic policy prospects in years to come. “We have to face the fact that we are going to be living now, for probably the next several decades — several decades — in a world that is going to be unstable, turbulent, with periodic crises,” he said. “We no longer have the power to dominate it or to shape it.”
