Une parole franche

Zbigniew Brzezinski: From Grand Chessboard to Obama Advisor. Part Two

 

By Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

 

 

 

Note: This multi-part analytical article reviews Zbigniew Brzezinski’s post-Cold War writings, from 1997 to 2008.

 

 

The Grand Chessboard: The Far East

 

The most interesting element in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s description of the eastern extremity of Eurasia is that he presents us with two great nations, the People’s Republic of China and Japan, as the objects of particular American attention. For the co-founder of the Trilateral Commission, the shift of attention away from Nippon is stunning. Whereas in the 1970s it was quite forward looking to make U.S. relations with Japan in some way comparable with its relations with Europe, by the 1990s the meteoric rise of the Chinese economy and world standing and the onset of Japan’s decade long economic stagnation were inescapable and Brzezinski hastened to draw the appropriate conclusions.

 

Brzezinski devotes separate chapters to the two Asian powers and clearly delineates the different ways each can serve U.S. objectives of consolidating its influence in Eurasia.

China, he tells us, has become a major regional power, but is as yet unprepared to play a global role and given the risks to its stability and growth rate in the years ahead in the form of possible social disruption and political conflict, it is difficult to foresee when it may be ready to take on the world.

 

Brzezinski took a benign view of China’s increasing preponderance among its East Asian neighbors. He compared it more to a ‘sphere of deference’ than a classical ‘sphere of influence.’ In this regard, like veteran political scientist Sam Huntington at roughly the same time, Brzezinski was prepared to make an exception to the general rule of condemning the emergence of any regional powers which might challenge U.S. dominance. Indeed, he foresaw that if the United States managed relations skillfully, a ‘regionally preeminent China should become America’s Far Eastern anchor.”

 

He specifically advised against pursuing a policy of containment directed against China, against deviating from the ‘one China’ policy even as the United States made plain its willingness to counter any attempt at take-over of Taiwan by military force. The objective should be to ensure China had no reason to enter into an anti-hegemonic coalition with Russia and other dissatisfied powers like Iran. In the near term, the U.S. could draw China into a constructive role whereby it assisted America’s geostrategic interest by helping to maintain a politically pluralistic Eurasia. This China could perform by competing with Russia for the attention of Central Asia. Its support of Pakistan would also keep India’s ambitions under control.

 

The very fact that China was unlikely to become a global power in the near term meant that the United States could afford to treat it as a ‘globally significant player,’ meaning inviting it into the G-7 club.

 

Brzezinski viewed Japan from the opposite standpoint:

 

“Unlike China, which can seek global power by first becoming a regional power, Japan can gain global influence by eschewing the quest for regional power.”

 

He explains that any hopes which Japan may have had for regional influence were frustrated by the enmity it created among all its Asian neighbors through military conquest and cruel occupation during WWII. Only under an American protectorate, with its own military power kept in check, and with its attention diverted to the global stage, acting in cooperation with its U.S. partners, could Japan be accepted as a citizen in good standing in Asia and play the role it deserved as the world’s second largest economy.

 

Under these circumstances, Brzezinski recommended that the U.S. maintain its troop presence in both Japan and nearby South Korea, that it not press the Japanese to assume greater defense responsibilities in the Asia-Pacific region or to pursue rearmament. The task was to continue to orient Japan towards a global role, close friendship with the United States and regional accommodation with Greater China. “In effect, Japan should be America’s global partner in tackling the new agenda of world affairs.”

 

The Grand Chessboard: Russia

 

The Russian Federation accounts for slightly more than 10% of the Earth’s surface and it occupies a central, though unenviable position in Brzezinski’s political map of Eurasia as a ‘black hole.’ Russia is where Brzezinski leaves behind his sober methodology of country risk analysis and engages heavily in speculation on how to change the country under study not only to avoid crossing American objectives elsewhere but also to meet an American. definition of what its self-interest should be. This is where his voluntarism, in the sense of will to act as the agent of history, comes to the fore. Indeed, one might say that the sections of the book dealing with Russia and its southern borderlands are what this book is all about,. Here Brzezinski does not merely reconfirm the logic of existing diplomatic arrangements but charts a new course for American foreign policy:

 

“…the immediate task has to be to reduce the probability of political anarchy or a reversion to a hostile dictatorship in a crumbling state still possessing a powerful nuclear arsenal. But the long-range task remains: how to encourage Russia’s democratic transformation and economic recovery while avoiding the reemergence of a Eurasian empire that could obstruct the American geostrategic goal of shaping a larger Euro-Atlantic system to which Russia can then be stably and safely related.”

 

 

The temptation to meddle in the nation-building exercise was surely encouraged by Russia’s public search for a new identity, a new national mission statement as it rose from the ashes of the Soviet Union beginning in 1992. Here Brzezinski very capably describes the various options which the Russians considered in the ‘90s as they looked for a way forward. These were:

 

1) To reach a strategic partnership with the United States, meaning global co-equality such as the Soviet leadership of Brezhnev had proposed twenty years earlier. However, this was no longer attractive to the United States and in any case, the Russian Federation was now too weak to be such a global partner*.

 

(*Brzezinski paused briefly at this point to consider whether the United States had not missed an opportunity with Russia in 1993 by not responding to the hopes of Russia’s westernizing democrats and including the country in the process of NATO expansion.. When Yeltsin dropped his objections to Poland’s accession to NATO, the question hung in the air. However, he insists that Russia was not yet sufficiently sure of itself and its westernizers were fated to lose out to its nationalists. Brzezinski may be right, but then again we shall never know since the effort to reach out to the Russians was not made.)

 

2) To spread out into the post-Soviet space, or CIS, as a unifying force of the ‘near abroad.’ But the supporters of this option were divided among themselves over the nature of the future association, namely whether it would be dominated by functional considerations of commercial exchange and consist merely of a ‘common economic space’ similar to the EEC or entail the resurrection of the Soviet empire under some new unifying principal such as a mystical pan-Slav or Eurasian world view. At the moment restoration of empire was improbable because Russia lacked the strength to impose its will on the ‘near abroad’ and was also too poor to get its way by force of attraction

 

3) A counter-alliance with China and other powers directed against the American worldwide hegemony. This was the latest of the fashionable concepts to seize the imagination of Russian statesmen, having been floated by the Yeltsin government in the year when Brzezinski was preparing Chessboard for publication. He expected it to fail because it supposed an association of outcasts and for Russia, in particular, held the prospect of being a junior partner.

 

For these reasons, Brzezinski concluded that Russia had only one viable option available to it as it proceeded with remaking its national identity and finding a realistic international role for itself. This was to modernize socially and politically by aligning with the enlarging EU and NATO. The first step on this path would be to give up its imperial ambitions, and the acid test would be Russia’s unqualified acceptance of Ukrainian sovereignty and abandonment of any right of say over NATO’s further expansion.

 

There were a number of important problems with this proposal at the time he wrote it and they have largely remained with us to this day, not least of all that Brzezinski did not name any significant immediate reward even if the Russian leadership were capable of acceding to these demands. At the very end of the book he speaks about enhancing Russia’s status with the reward of a seat at the G7, plus the following perks: “a role in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, further Western financial assistance, improved highways and railway connections.” It is hard to believe that Brzezinski was serious about such meager inducements for a country to agree on “a clear-cut abjuration of the imperial past.” The reason is obvious: the Americans were in no position to offer Russia a safe harbor of close relationship with the European Union. Moreover, as more and more former Soviet Bloc countries joined the EU and brought their resentments against Russia into the inner counsels of Europe, the prospects for the solution he held out progressively dimmed.

 

 

In any case, his prescription is one-dimensional: it ignores the nature of the successor states in the post-Soviet space and their ongoing relations with Russia, all of which militated against the Russians throwing themselves unreservedly into the arms of the EU and letting go of their neighbors. The political and social stability of these states was and remains highly variable, creating some serious security risks for Russia. Their national identities were often being created through anti-Russian slogans, which did not bode well for future inter-state relations. They all have substantial minorities of ethnic Russians who, following the break-up of the Soviet Union, were relegated to second class citizenship, generating massive inflows of displaced persons into the Russian Federation and exacerbating nationalist resentments.. There were and remain very significant common industrial projects and economic interests with some of these countries and often major Gastarbeiter relations with immigrant non-ethnic Russian labor coming from the former republics

 

Meanwhile, at the same time that Brzezinski was urging the Russians to seek their future in the embrace of Europe, he was calling for Western measures to ensure ‘geopolitical pluralism’ in Eurasia by wresting Central Asia away from Russian economic control. At issue were projects to ensure direct access of the energy riches of that region to Europe via Azerbaijan and Georgia without passing through Russia. This was and remains to our day one of the key elements in what has to be described as open economic warfare with the Russian Federation. It is hard to see how this could pave the way for closer Russian relations with Europe.

 

Still the most remarkable passages on Russia in The Grand Chessboard come at the very end, in the chapter entitled ‘Conclusion.’ This is something of a misnomer, since Brzezinski proceeds to make some recommendations in it which hardly follow from the preceding 193 pages.

 

Here he suggests that Russia abandon its futile attempts to regain global power status and instead modernize itself by decentralizing its political system and building on a free market. This, he says, will liberate the creative potential of the Russian people and its vast natural resources which have been held back for generations by stifling bureaucracy.

 

Here, at last, he spells out what he means by decentralization. It is the break-up of Russia into three loosely federated states: European Russia, a Siberian Republic and a Far Eastern Republic.

 

This was written in 1997 when the results of a five-year devolution of power to the provinces under Boris Yeltsin and of economic shock therapy for the purpose of establishing a market economy on the ruins of state planning were perfectly clear. The relaxation of central controls from Moscow had already led to the development of virtual satrapies in the provinces run by local thugs or demagogues. There were rumblings of ethnic-based independence movements across the land. An energy-rich Muslim republic of Tatarstan was on its way to autonomy just several hundred miles from the capital. Meanwhile the international brotherhood of energy companies had concluded long term contracts for oil and gas extraction under terms very prejudicial to Russia’s national interests, and home-grown oligarchs had taken over vast mineral resources in exchange for political support to the Yeltsin regime while draining the proceeds to offshore accounts. Within a year of Brzezinski’s publication of his master work, the widely expected bankruptcy of the country occurred and Russia defaulted on its state obligations.

 

These facts on the growing chaos resulting from decentralization and the likelihood of financial collapse were well known to all serious Western observers at the time when Brzezinski was writing The Grand Chessboard, so it is very difficult to accept his recommendations on Russia as having been made in good faith.

 

However, it must be acknowledged that among Russia’s ‘westernizing intellectuals,’ with whom Brzezinski surely was and today remains in contact, the notion of breaking up the country for the sake of its democratic salvation had a certain appeal at the time, such was their hatred of the Soviet past and wish to ensure against its possible revival. The problem is that such individuals, who often are fluent in English and quick to attract the ear of foreign visitors, were wholly inexperienced in the practical matters of politics and wholly unrepresentative of the country at large.

 

To be charitable, Brzezinski’s taking up and lending his authority to ideas which could only lead to still greater pauperization, disorder and armed conflict on the territory of the Russian Federation, is indicative of the epistemological limits of intelligence work underpinning state-building schemes from some foreign capital even when the master analyst is as experienced in the métier as Zbigniew Brzezinski.

 

The Grand Chessboard: The Eurasian Balkans

 

The one remaining region in Eurasia which Brzezinski serves up is what he calls the “Eurasian Balkans” which takes in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey. The logic to this designation is that these countries are ethnically heterogeneous with many disaffected minority peoples and like the Balkans in southeast Europe they are unstable and potentially explosive. He provides us with tables to demonstrate the ethnic, religious, linguistic complexities. He sets out in the manner of a good intelligence officer the domestic political issues and the interests of neighboring powers which play out here.

 

However, Brzezinski’s explanation of commonality of these countries as a region is not persuasive One can say the same about large swathes of the world in general where nation states emerged from colonial rule and did not necessarily have a basis in ethnic and linguistic homogeneity or in borders that are well defined by topography.

 

The true distinguishing feature of most of this region to the South of Russia is vast energy and other natural resources. Its core area is Central Asia, where the various Soviet republics emerged as independent states in 1992. They remained for some time under Russian economic domination because they are landlocked and most pipelines and transportation routes to market passed north across Russia.

 

In The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski argued the case for their liberation from the Russian embrace….into the waiting arms of the international community:

 

“America’s primary interest is to help ensure than no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it. Geopolitical pluralism will become an enduring reality only when a network of pipeline and transportation routes links the region directly to the major centers of global economic activity via the Mediterranean and Arabian Seas, as well as overland.”

 

Apart from Central Asia, the other countries in what he calls the Eurasian Balkans are put there mainly because they can serve as logistics facilitators. They are the territories through which the pipelines would pass, and, in the case of Iran and Azerbaijan, they could also be major contributors to the oil and gas flows heading to Europe from their own considerable reserves.

 

Brzezinski wants to persuade his readers that these energy projects would bring peace and stability to the region and that possible Russian opposition would be “inimical to regional stability.” However, he disavowed any wish to boot out the Russians. So long as Russia did not seek exclusive domination of the region, it would remain welcome to participate actively in the region’s development, which could be enriching for all.

 

It bears mention that around the time he was writing these lines Brzezinski was providing counsel on promoting ‘geopolitical pluralism’ in Central Asia and the Caucasus to the Clinton administration and he accepted an assignment to assist negotiations surrounding the first major pipeline to realize the task of bringing regional energy resources to European markets: the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan project. It is surely no accident that the senior administration official responsible for Eurasian energy policy at the time, Richard Morningstar, spoke and wrote about the geopolitical objectives then and in 2006 when the pipeline was finally opened in virtually the same terms as Brzezinski.* (* See my blog article “Richard Morningstar, Letter to a Wayward Classmate,” La Libre Belgique, 06.05.2009).

 

The Russian-Georgian war of August 2008 may be said to have resulted in good part from the carte blanche security assurances which the United States eventually extended to Tblisi in recognition of the central role Georgia assumed in the transmission of Azerbaijan oil to Europe per the strategy authored by Brzezinski. And the present day Grand Game in Central Asia over the creation of a Trans-Caspian pipeline linked to the projected Nabucco pipeline which in turn follows the path of Baku-Tbilisi into Turkey is merely an update to the scheme for realizing geopolitical objectives which we find in Brzezinski’s 1997 book. Once again Richard Morningstar has been invited by the State Department to act as America’s principal emissary to drive the delicate and complex multiparty negotiations to successful conclusion.

 

Back in 1997, Brzezinski was able to justify America’s move into Central Asia by Russia’s weakness and inability to regain imperial rule over the region, creating what could be argued was a power vacuum. The United States proposed to play a constructive role by bringing in development funds and raising the general prosperity. In 2009, following Russia’s economic and political resurgence and its ability and determination to protect its position as largest energy supplier to Europe from both its own and Central Asian reserves, the activities which Brzezinski advocates appear to be simply brazen meddling in other people’s backyard for the purpose of weakening a challenger to U.S. global hegemony. It is at this point that Brzezinski’s policies become destabilizing and a threat to the peace.

 

Triumphalism and other failings

 

As I mentioned at the beginning of this examination of The Grand Chessboard, the author devotes only a handful of pages to explaining why it is desirable and necessary to perpetuate American worldwide hegemony which came about suddenly and unexpectedly with the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1992.

 

Initially he contents himself with citing Harvard professor and doyen of American foreign policy studies Sam Huntington: “A world without U.S. primacy will be a world with more violence and disorder and less democracy and economic growth than a world where the United States continues to have more influence than any other country in shaping global affairs.”

 

We have to wait to the very end of the book for Brzezinski to present his own case for American worldwide domination and he does so in a manner which does not allow of contradiction, saying flatly: “Short of a deliberate or unintentional American abdication, the only real alternative to American global leadership in the foreseeable future is international anarchy.”

 

What then are the engines of disorder which can bring about calamity, indeed global anarchy, if America does not take the lead? Brzezinski offers a hodge-podge list of threats including the consequences of population explosion, poverty-driven migration, radicalizing urbanization, ethnic and religious hostility and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

 

He tells us that without America defending peace and order, Europe may lose its way, and xenophobia fed by high unemployment could propel political extremism. He claims that a genuinely prerevolutionary situation is brewing in Europe. Meanwhile, America’s steadying hand is essential to see Russia off to a brighter future in close cooperation with Europe and to oversee the grand accommodation with China among its neighbors in the Far East.

 

What we have here is scare-mongering on behalf of the favored scenario, continued American world domination. What is missing in this type of intelligence work or risk analysis is a review of alternative scenarios. For example, it is hard to understand why the threats to peace and stability which Brzezinski catalogues could not have been managed at once by a presidium of world powers, whether the narrow G8 or some broader body.

 

Without explanation, Brzezinski states that a shift to more equitably shared decision making in the world community can begin some time after five years within a twenty year horizon. The strategic partners in this new condominium would be an expanded and politically integrated European Union, Japan and possibly Greater China. Is this schedule dictated by the unreadiness of the proposed partners or by the unreadiness of the United States to let go until its own strength declines significantly in consequencet of the rise of emerging powers? In a book that is otherwise strikingly frank, this is an important question which is not addressed.

 

Instead we only get Brzezinski’s say-so that America is truly “indispensable” and has to do the job of managing the world as it best sees fit. Thus, in the end, Brzezinski offers us in this book a splendid edifice of reasoning about managing and perpetuating world domination placed atop a foundation of blind faith in the justness of the mission.

 

En passant, one might also ask why Brzezinski does not raise the question of whether world domination was in the national interest of….the United States. This is no idle question. During 19^th century colonialism, though there were obviously beneficiaries in the home country in terms of companies and cadres of administrators, in many cases it was never clear that the net revenue inflow to the imperial home countries exceeded the outflows in infrastructure development and running costs. Brzezinski is interested in geopolitical strategy on chessboards, not in the workaday issues of paying for a vast military establishment which has a greater budget than the defense costs of the rest of the world put together.

 

Instead what we find is Brzezinski’s expression of doubt about the staying power of the American public for reasons of its own lack of seriousness. His remarks about his compatriots have a smack of elitism, as he criticizes them for unwillingness to make sacrifices, for hedonistic life style, concluding that the country is fixated on mass entertainment and social escapism.

 

Unlike past empires, the Pax Americana is borne by a populist democracy which has no ambition for international supremacy. He cites polls indicating a mere 13% of Americans are pleased that the country is the only remaining superpower while 74% would prefer if the burden of managing the world were shared with others.

 

 

Brzezinski wrote The Grand Chessboard at the high point in U.S. power and, notwithstanding his reputation for steely reserve, his text is imbued with the triumphalism which held sway in Washington at the time. The overarching objective he is serving, maintaining U.S. worldwide domination, is frequently stated with astonishing lack of embarrassment in a way that borders on hubris. The following succinct statement of strategy is a perfect example.

 

“To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”

 

In the context of his book, it would be safe to assume that the vassals are the Europeans; the tributaries are the Japanese, and the barbarians are the Russians, Chinese and Iranians. However, regardless of who is who, Brzezinski’s terminology is grossly offensive and it is almost as if he never expected these cynical remarks to be read by those he is describing. Yet the book was promoted by his publishers and sold widely abroad, where it laid bare the worst suspicions of many.

 

Among the countries where Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard was most widely read among the educated classes was Russia, and the impact of a book like this by one of America’s most reputed and influential strategists should not be overlooked. Ten years after its publication, on 1 September 2008, in a speech delivered at Moscow’s elite school of international relations studies, MGIMO, on the occasion of the opening of the academic year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reminded his audience whence came the policies which led to the Russian-Georgian war three weeks earlier, saying “To us, [post-Soviet space] is not a ‘chessboard’ for playing geopolitical games.”

 

The disarming frankness of Brzezinski’s narrative is such that several of the reviews of the book which one finds on the internet consist of nothing other than clippings of the more bold if not outrageous quotations from the book. It is not without reason that one critic, Scott Thompson writing in the Executive Intelligence Review, entitled his article “Brzezinski testifies against himself.’

. .’.

 

© Gilbert Doctorow 2009

* * * * *

This four-part article devoted to Zbigniew Brzezinski forms part of a collection of essays on America's most influential political scientists and their writings about international affairs in the post-Cold War period published during the years 1993 – 2009. Publication of the collection in the United States is planned for late 2010. Visitors to this site may wish to consult other chapters already issued here as blog articles on the dates indicated below:

Noam Chomsky: The Most Widely Read Dissident Voice on U.S. Foreign Policy, 05.04.2010

Henry Kissinger, From Diplomacy to Does America Need a Foreign Policy?   09.02.2010

Francis Fukuyama, From the End of History to After the Neocons, 30.11,2009

Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Smart Power, 10.08.2009

Can Common Sense fix what is wrong with American foreign policy? Leslie Gelb and Power Rules, 03.06.2009

The History Wars…A review of Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams and a bit more, 20.04.2009.

Samuel Huntingon and The Clash of Civilizations, Parts One and Two, 03.02.2009.