When a leader missteps a world can go astray

A second chance :

In the months before the American invasion of Iraq, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, was one of the few members of the foreign policy establishment (along with Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to President George H. W. Bush) to speak out strongly about the dangers of going to war unilaterally against Saddam Hussein, and to warn, presciently it turns out, of the possibly dire consequences of doing so without a larger strategic plan.

In August 2002, as the current Bush administration was already hurrying toward an invasion, Mr. Brzezinski cautioned that war "is too serious a business and too unpredictable in its dynamic consequences especially in a highly flammable region to be undertaken because of a personal peeve, demagogically articulated fears or vague factual assertions."

In February 2003, just weeks before the invasion, he added that "an America that decides to act essentially on its own regarding Iraq" could "find itself quite alone in having to cope with the costs and burdens of the war's aftermath, not to mention widespread and rising hostility abroad."

In his compelling new book, "Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower," Mr. Brzezinski not only assesses the short- and long-term fallout of the Iraq war, but also puts that grim situation in perspective with the tumultuous global changes that have taken place in the last two decades.

He dispassionately analyzes American foreign policy as conducted by the last three presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush and he gives the reader a sobering analysis of where these leaders' cumulative decisions have left the United States as it now searches for an exit strategy from Iraq, faces potentially explosive situations in Iran and North Korea and copes with an increasingly alienated Europe and an increasingly assertive China.

"Second Chance" is, in some respects, a continuation of the author's earlier books "The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership" (2004) and "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives" (1997), which examined the responsibilities and perils of global leadership facing America as the one superpower in a post-cold-war world.

As in those books, Mr. Brzezinski employs a brisk, no-nonsense style here, using his erudition in history and foreign policy to lay out his views succinctly.

A confirmed realist (a school of thinking willfully dismissed by the idealists and ideological hawks in the current Bush administration), the author writes with a keen understanding of the ways in which military or political actions in one part of the world can affect developments in another region, as well as a shrewd appreciation of the fallout of a global zeitgeist that is increasingly anti-imperialist, anti-Western and anti-American.

What this book does most strikingly is remind the reader just how drastically things have changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union.

At that point, Mr. Brzezinski writes, America was "globally admired" and "faced no peer, no rival, no threat, neither on the Western front nor the Eastern front, nor on the Southern fronts of the great cold war that had been waged for several decades on the massive Eurasian chessboard."

This precarious situation, Mr. Brzezinski says, means that "it will take years of deliberate effort and genuine skill to restore America's political credibility and legitimacy," placing enormous importance on the diplomatic and strategic skills of the next president "to fashion a truly post-cold-war globalist foreign policy."

"Nothing could be worse for America, and eventually the world," he writes at the end of this unsparing volume.

NYTIMES