Quite an excellent read to expose the reality of American foreign policy and 50 years of failures ... the truth behind the Ugly American residing in the White House.

[All links added are mine - Oui]

INTRODUCTION

The Realist Chessboard

'Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago,' Zbigniew Brzezinski notes in the opening lines of The Grand Chessboard, 'Eurasia has been the centre of world power'. Russia, Austro-Hungary, France, the Ottoman Empire, Britain and Germany all wanted to dominate this bizarre landscape ranging from the French shores of the Atlantic down to the Persian Gulf, and from the Chinese land mass to Central Asia, the Black Sea, the Turkish Straits and the Suez. Brzezinski observes that all of the powers claiming mastery over Eurasia in the past were part of its landscape, but now 'for the first time ever, a non Eurasian power has emerged, not only as the key arbiter of Eurasian power relations, but also as the world's paramount power'. America is indeed the sole world superpower after the fall of 'really existing socialism' and has taken a firm grip of a great part of the economic and political resources of the vast Eurasian continent.

• World In Turmoil: Role of Brzezinski and Albright, Our Democrats

In the midst of the great debates about the future of NATO and the EU, Brzezinski, like many other Anglo-Saxon analysts, attempts to elaborate a comprehensive strategy for America, so as to make impossible the emergence of any other challenger capable of thwarting America's primacy in Eurasia. Quite rightly, he argues that 'Eurasia is the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played, and that strategy involves geo-strategy - the management of geo-political interests.'  In other words, if America lacks the proper strategy to streamline the development of key Eurasian actors according to her national interests, then Eurasia will be lost and America's primacy in world politics will wither away too.

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Brzezinski's account is clear, comprehensive and instructive. The overall message of his book can even be perceived by a tout court reading of it. He makes everybody understand that globalisation via power projection is not an 'illicit' method by which the US may promote its national interests across the globe. What is more, these interests are best served by making realist geo-political use of the power innate in certain Cold War institutions, such as NATO and the IMF, as well as of the US paramount military might per se Brzezinski suggests not a contraction of American power after the eclipse of the USSR, but an expansion of it.

The second, more specific, message is a direct consequence of the first: there is no such thing as 'ethical foreign policy', or a power projection based on moral and 'human rights' values. [See the White House promotion of ill-conceived R2P principle to overthrow leaders and intervene militarily] 'In Paris in 1998 to promote the French edition of his book', Diana Johnstone acutely observed, 'he was asked about the apparent "paradox" that his book was steeped in Realpolitik whereas, in his days as National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski had been the "defender of human rights".' But the man waved the 'paradox' aside. 'There is no paradox', he replied. 'I elaborated that doctrine in agreement with President Carter, as it was the best way to destabilise the Soviet Union. And it worked.'

We have come to the crux of the matter. The world we live in is still a realist/neo-realist world dominated by states, national
interests, geo-politics and power politics. The more 'globalised' and lopsided it becomes under the sway of the dominant power (i.e. the US) the more the possibilities for conflict, terrorist activities and ethnic and religious wars will be in the ascendant. The zones of conflict and conflicting regional micro-interests multiply, and with them the difficulties and contradictions of world-rule policies grow inexorably.

The collapse of the USSR opened up new peripheral corridors and regions for US hegemonic engagement, but this US engagement proved to be not entirely problem-free. After all, not everything that happens in the world and which affects US interests is predicted by US strategic and contingency planning. The US engagement policies are, at times, reactive rather than proactive. This is due in part to pressure exercised by domestic political factors, such as public opinion, ethnic lobbies, legislative institutions, state departments and other organised class and corporate interests. This overall set of vicissitudes of US policy for world domination is the overarching theme that runs through the pages of this book, a theme that Brzezinski and the majority of US policy-makers fail to address critically. How do we explore and infuse that theme in the present discussion and what is the key set of arguments developed here?

Low point in the Democratic campaign to preserve the White House for party appointed candidate HRC in 2016 ...

Morrell and Negroponte Endorse HRC for President | @BooMan by Oui | Aug 11, 2016 |

...the backlash called Trump I ... Post Trump, Joe Biden steps in where he left off in 2016 ☹

• Biden's Blitzkrieg Across Europe
• Bushwhacked Into America's Wars

Amnesia and Gaza Genocide