31.03.2022

What hath Zbig wrought?

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s grand strategy is alive and well under Biden, writes Daniel Lazare

One of the good things about global hegemony is that it allows you to dispose of governments you don’t like. One of the bad things is that you then have to deal with the mess that occurs after.

This is why Joe Biden’s nine little words about Vladimir Putin - “For god’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” - have thrown the world into such a dither. For weeks, the United States had insisted that its goal in the Ukraine was to help Volodymyr Zelensky beat back Putin’s “special military operation”, no more and no less. Peace, diplomacy and a restoration of national borders - those, supposedly, were the extent of US goals.

But now it appears that America has something else in mind. Despite secretary of state Antony Blinken’s desperate efforts to walk back his master’s words - and despite Biden’s own ex-post facto claim that regime change is not at all what he wants - it is clear that Washington is now taking direct aim at the semi-demonic figure in the Kremlin whom it blames for so much of what is wrong with the world. The last time Nato removed a head of state was when it toppled Libyan strongman, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011, and the results were disastrous. As al Qa’eda, Islamic State and assorted local militias battled for control, one of Africa’s most prosperous states was reduced to anarchy.

But the US thought the price was worth it then, and it apparently thinks it is worth it now. If so, it seems that Washington is channelling the geo-strategist, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in 1997 famously called for Russia to be broken up into three parts: a European Russia, a Siberian Russia and a far-eastern republic - all “loosely confederated” under US tutelage. But Brzezinski, who served as national security advisor under Jimmy Carter and whose student, Madeleine Albright, went on to serve as secretary of state under Bill Clinton in 1997-2001, did not stop there. A broken and partitioned Russia, he argued, would be a stepping stone to a wholesale remake of Eurasia in general. World politics would thus re-crystallise in a whole new pattern consistent with US neoliberalism.

Neo-biblical

But there is a problem. The world has moved on since Brzezinski outlined his world-altering plans in his surprise 1997 best-seller, The grand chessboard - and not in a good way. Instead of the sunny end-of-history 1990s, capitalism has entered a neo-biblical era of war, pestilence and famine. Rather than a global utopia, Brzezinski’s blueprint under such circumstances will lead to the opposite - which is to say to an intensification of the great capitalist breakdown. Hence the near-panic following Biden’s remarks last weekend in Warsaw.

Basically, The grand chessboard is a how-to book on the use of American diplomacy in a vast new way: “the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy,” it says, “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” - which, in modern parlance, means seeing to it that the US continues dominating the European Union via Nato, continues keeping the neo-colonial world in its place and continues seeing to it that the unholy trinity of Russia, Iran and China remains divided, so that American interests are undisturbed. The last, in turn, requires breaking up one, improving relations with another and integrating the third into “a wider framework of international cooperation” under US control.¹

This is what US Democrats set out to do when Bill Clinton began extending Nato eastwards in 1997, when he granted China ‘most favoured nation’ trading status in the year 2000, and when Barack Obama then took steps to denuclearise the Persian Gulf - which is to say, place it under an exclusive US-Israeli nuclear umbrella. The final goal, according to Brzezinski, would be “a Trans-Eurasian Security System” in which:

Three-way American-Japanese-Chinese security talks … pave the way for a series of conferences by all European and Asian states, thereby beginning the process of institutionalizing a transcontinental security system. In time, a more formal structure could begin to take shape … that for the first time would span the entire continent. The shaping of that system - defining its substance and then institutionalizing it - could become the major architectural initiative of the next decade, once the policies outlined earlier have created the necessary preconditions. Such a broad transcontinental security framework could also contain a standing security committee, composed of the major Eurasian entities, in order to enhance [the Trans-Eurasian Security System’s] ability to promote effective cooperation on issues critical to global stability.

First destabilise central Asia by sponsoring jihad in Afghanistan - something Brzezinski set out to do in 1979, when he informed Carter that “We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam war”, by luring it into intervening on behalf of a foundering pro-Soviet government in Kabul. Then put it back together again in the context of a larger US-engineered security system.

The adjective “grand” is entirely justified. But, before Brzezinski could put his scheme into action, he had to first deal with Russia. This is where he makes his inner Halford Mackinder most plain. Mackinder, of course, is the turn-of-the-century geographer who captured the attention of British imperialists by arguing that the Eurasian heartland was “the geographic pivot of history” and therefore the key to world domination - and who clearly went on to capture Brzezinski’s imagination as well.

Mackinder boiled his strategy down into three simple propositions: “Who rules east Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”

The world island is Eurasia, while the heartland roughly corresponds to the then-Russian empire plus large swathes of territory from Afghanistan to Manchuria. But what, exactly, did Mackinder mean by east Europe?

Ukraine key factor

For Brzezinski, the answer was simple: Ukraine. He writes in The grand chessboard:

… if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources, as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia. Ukraine’s loss of independence would have immediate consequences for central Europe, transforming Poland into the geopolitical pivot on the eastern frontier of a united Europe.

Russia plus the Ukraine equals a heartland empire stretching from the Black Sea to Kamchatka. Russia plus the Ukraine plus China equals a Eurasian empire stretching from the Atlantic to the South China Sea and beyond. The goal is to prevent world domination by keeping the first two apart, so that China will have no choice but to look up to America as the top Eurasian dog.

“Although initially the west, especially the United States, had been tardy in recognizing the geopolitical importance of a separate Ukrainian state,” The grand chessboard adds, “by the mid-1990s both America and Germany had become strong backers of Kiev’s separate identity.” With that, the US poured more than $5 billion into the Ukraine to help it “achieve its European aspirations”, according to Victoria Nuland, the Hillary Clinton protégé in charge of Eurasian policy under both Obama and Biden.² It threw its weight behind the 2004 Orange Revolution, which installed a pro-western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, in the presidency and helped shift power from Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the south and east to ultra-right nationalists in the centre and west.

Beginning in late 2013, Washington backed a second uprising, spearheaded by neo-Nazis, that chased out a Russian-leaning president named Viktor Yanukovych and put an even more fiercely pro-US government in power. As an intercepted phone call revealed, Nuland hand-selected members of the incoming cabinet, saw to it that Europe remained out of the loop - “Fuck the EU” is how she put it - and also arranged for neo-fascist leader Oleh Tyahnybok to remain in the background, while “talking to [the new government] four times a week”.³

It was all coming together, just as The grand chessboard said it would. Not only was Ukrainian independence guaranteed, but the new nationalist government would soon be in a position to close off Russian access to the Black Sea by abrogating the long-term lease that allowed it to continue operating its all-important naval base at Sevastopol in what was still the Ukrainian-owned Crimea. Unfortunately for Brzezinski, it all went to pot a few weeks later, when Russia encouraged a breakaway rebellion by Russian-speakers angered by the new nationalist government’s restrictive language laws and then seized the Crimea. With Brzezinski’s grand plan left dangling, the only thing the US could do was to step up military aid to Kyiv in the hope of resuming the battle at some later date.

The US-backed coup d’état thus sowed the seeds for the current conflict. Brzezinski’s great fear, meanwhile, was not only losing Ukraine, but losing Europe as well due to “a grand European realignment, involving either a German-Russian collusion or a Franco-Russian entente”. With Brzezinski’s warnings of a German-Russian alliance still ringing in its ear, Washington imposed economic sanctions aimed at bringing the Russian-built Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to a halt. The US complained that the pipeline would render Germany vulnerable to Russian political blackmail, but the real fear in Washington is that it would render the US vulnerable to a more independent-minded Germany. Germany and Austria denounced the sanctions as “illegal” and declared that “Europe’s energy supply is a matter for Europe and not for the United States of America”.⁴ But the US continued its obstructionism regardless.

Fortunately for Brzezinski - or at least his memory - Germany closed down the project following the February 24 invasion. The US-EU alliance has been solidified, while Nato hopes that Ukraine prevails on the battlefield as well. If regime change occurs in Moscow, then Russian national break-up will pave the way for US penetration of central Asia. As The grand chessboard puts it,

America is now the only global superpower, and Eurasia is the globe’s central arena. Hence, what happens to the distribution of power on the Eurasian continent will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy and to America’s historical legacy … America is now Eurasia’s arbiter, with no major Eurasian issue soluble without America’s participation or contrary to America’s interests.

No oil will be drilled, no gas tapped, no copper or uranium mined, in other words, without America’s say-so. The US will be in a position to proceed with the breakup of China, beginning with the far-western province of Xinjiang. If, if, if ...

If, on the other hand, things do not fall into place - if, for example, Russia succeeds in grinding down Ukrainian resistance, forcing it to cede control of the Crimea and Donbas - then the Brzezinski strategy will once again wind up on hold. Nato will then face the grim choice of sponsoring an Afghan-style insurgency inside Ukraine, taking the war to Russia itself or standing by while Russia attacks guerrilla bases in Poland or Romania. If so, the upshot will not be a wholesale reorganization of Eurasian political structures, but steppe warfare on an even greater scale than in 1941-45.

Just as Brzezinski helped destroy Afghanistan in the process of ‘saving’ it, his grand strategy will end up destroying Ukraine as well - if not the larger region.

1. The CIA has posted a copy of The grand chessboard on its website: www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/36/36669B7894E857AC4F3445EA646BFFE1_Zbigniew_Brzezinski_-_The_Grand_ChessBoard.doc.pdf.↩︎

2. Quote begins at 7.30: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPVs5VuI8XI&t=465s.↩︎

3. www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957.↩︎

4. www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2017-06-15/germany-austria-slam-us-sanctions-against-russia.↩︎