The Broken Chessboard: Brzezinski Gives Up on Empire
From CounterPunch:
The main architect of Washington’s plan to rule the world has
abandoned the scheme and called for the forging of ties with Russia and
China. While Zbigniew Brzezinski’s article in The American Interest
titled “Towards a Global Realignment” has largely been ignored by the
media, it shows that powerful members of the policymaking establishment
no longer believe that Washington will prevail in its quest to extent US
hegemony across the Middle East and Asia. Brzezinski, who was the main
proponent of this idea and who drew up the blueprint for imperial
expansion in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, has done an about-face and called for a dramatic revising of the strategy. Here’s an excerpt from the article in the AI:
“As its era of global dominance ends, the United States needs to take the lead in realigning the global power architecture.
Five basic verities regarding the emerging redistribution of global
political power and the violent political awakening in the Middle East
are signaling the coming of a new global realignment.
The first of these verities is that the United States is still the
world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity
but, given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no
longer the globally imperial power.” (Toward a Global Realignment, Zbigniew Brzezinski, The American Interest)
Repeat: The US is “no longer the globally imperial power.” Compare
this assessment to a statement Brzezinski made years earlier in
Chessboard when he claimed the US was ” the world’s paramount power.”
“…The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a
tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a
non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian
power relations but also as the world’s paramount power. The defeat and
collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance
of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and,
indeed, the first truly global power.” (“The Grand Chessboard: American
Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives,” Zbigniew Brzezinski, Basic
Books, 1997, p. xiii)
Here’s more from the article in the AI:
“The fact is that there has never been a truly “dominant”
global power until the emergence of America on the world scene….. The
decisive new global reality was the appearance on the world scene of
America as simultaneously the richest and militarily the most powerful
player. During the latter part of the 20th century no other power even
came close. That era is now ending.” (AI)
But why is “that era is now ending”? What’s changed since 1997 when
Brzezinski referred to the US as the “world’s paramount power”?...
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