ZBIG'S OPTIMISM IN A HOSTILE WORLD

While President Carter sets the broad goals and makes the decisions by which he seeks to fulfill them, his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, provides much of the long-range thinking and the intellectual framework on which foreign policy rests. TIME White House Correspondent Stanley Cloud explored Brzezinski's ideas in two long interviews. His report:

More than a year ago, Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski of Columbia University wrote an article for Foreign Policy magazine titled "America in a Hostile World." He called for a "new international economic order" and for new American leadership to help create it--a leadership that would set "politically and morally compelling directions to which the public might then positively respond." Now the Polish emigre academic, a man of angular features whose crew cut seems a carryover from the '50s, is comfortably entrenched in the West Wing of Jimmy Carter's White House, in the same large, gold-hued corner office once occupied by another foreign-born but very different ex-professor, Henry Kissinger. Brzezinski, 49, who is variously considered brilliant, arrogant and ambitious, is thus in a unique position to translate many of his long-held theories into policy.

Some of the professor's critics find his ideas, as one puts it, "impossibly abstract, which is not to be confused with being cerebral." Yet Carter has no such complaint and appreciates Brzezinski's ability to articulate ideas.

The man who saw the "hostile world" professes little alarm at what many view as a world grown even more hostile since Carter took office. He reckons that sharp shifts in U.S. policy must inevitably shake things up for a time. The changes are necessary, he argues, because "an old-world order is coming to an end and the shape of a new world community is yet to be defined." The old order, based largely on military power and nationalism, is giving way to "a technetronic age" in which there will be increasing emphasis on economic development and social justice. The old East-West ideological struggle will wane in importance; the North-South struggle for control of vital raw materials will gain in importance. In this emerging world, according to Brzezinski, "military power by itself will no longer dictate the ability of a nation to influence political, social and cultural developments."

Brzezinski sees the need for the U.S. to pay more attention to nations beyond its traditional allies in Europe and Japan and its traditional adversary, the Soviet Union. If this alarms the Kremlin, he remains unruffled. He predicts that elements of U.S.-Soviet "cooperation and competition will be mixed for a long time to come," and he argues that Soviet-American relations must be "assimilated into a new approach toward the world as a whole." Brzezinski sees the Kremlin leaders as aging in both years and ideas, and feels that the U.S. is much more in step with the currents of global change. But if he really feels that the Russians have already lost the ideological struggle, that is a view that one senior foreign policy expert on Capitol Hill considers "as fundamental a misconception as I can think of."

The "new approach" in Brzezinski's theory centers on the requirement that the U.S. and the other developed na tions devise a more sensitive and creative relationship with the underdeveloped countries, pursuing policies that "emphasize basic human needs." Sounding like Carter, Brzezinski thus sprinkles his speech with such words as goodness, morality and virtue.

The hyperactive Brzezinski (often called "Zbig") argues that "the U.S. has to be identified with some positive ide al. In the beginning, we stood for liberty, even before we implemented liberty in our own society. Similarly, today, the identification of the U.S. with some thing more than just consumption is essential to our own wellbeing, to our own psychic stability and to the American role in the world. But we shouldn't be strident. Our policy should be more an affirmation than a blunt or sharp instrument of political warfare."

With the shifting foreign policy priorities, Brzezinski envisions "a progression toward a better condition of man kind, a condition in which man is more aware of his fundamental rights, more capable of asserting them, a condition in which social and political systems will be more responsive to those rights." The Administration's championing of hu man rights policy reflects this view. For the first time in history, Brzezinski insists, all the world's peoples have become politically active and must be listened to. "Human rights is in the air," he says, and the U.S. is "the dynam ic force in the world through which progress toward social justice will be advanced."

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