As in The Grand Failure, his recent survey of the reasons for the collapse of communism, Zbigniew Brzezinski uses Out of Control to analyze current political thinking and give the reader a dependable and sober view of the crises to come: the problems of American hegemony, the potential rise of Japan as a diplomatic giant, the problems of moral and spiritual decline in the West. Read as a moderate-conservative survey, Out of Control is useful enough, yet it lacks the specificity of The Grand Failure and the comprehensiveness of that other Cassandra, historian Paul Kennedy; Out of Control is neither original nor graceful in its discussion of the more spiritual dimensions of the century to come. While Brzezinski's fear of a Western world grown fat and indulgent is clear enough, it is hard to discern what he is up to with this, other than a very stern, and very familiar, sermon.
