The Broken Chessboard: Brzezinski Gives Up on Empire

[yurbud]

In retrospect, Brzezinski's book, THE GRAND CHESSBOARD, reads like the "to do list" of everything that has happened in foreign policy in the last 20 years.

His ideas were also echoed in the Project for a New American Century, that essentially said we should grab all we can before Russia, China, and other emerging powers get their shit together. I'm using "we" very loosely. 99.9999% of us don't benefit from being the world's only superpower anymore than a factory worker in Britain did at the end of the 19th century.

This sounds like the masters announcing through their trusted servant that the smash and grab is over--it's time to make nice before everybody else gets together and fights back.

You know what would have been nice though? If we skipped the last 20 years of killing people in Eurasia, getting our troops killed there, and squandering our wealth making more enemies, and just got to the part where we make nice with the emerging powers and create a stable world together.

But then the very wealthiest Americans wouldn't have been able to stuff their pockets with quite so much of other people's money, most Americans being other people too.

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)

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/25/the-broken-chessboard-brzezinski-gives-up-on-empire/

[MADem]

1. A kick for your article....

Even though my first thought was that Mika had stopped watching night time soaps!

?w=835

[brush]

2. How intelligent people, those with the reins of power, could believe that we could smash and . . .

Last edited Sat Aug 27, 2016, 02:31 PM - Edit history (2)

grab and rule the world with our Vietnam experience just a few short years in the past is amazing.

We couldn't pull it off in Southeast Asia so what gave them the idea that we could be successful in the Middle East?

Foolish.

The whole concept of American exceptionalism (which actually should read white exceptionalism destined to dominate over POCs) infiltrated minds that should have known better, but who instead bought it hook, line and sinker — much like the concept of "manifest destiny" from earlier times was considered gospel.

Too much of that thinking still exists. A reckoning is still to come though, what with the demographics of the country fast approaching majority-minority status.

Wonder how many generations of that will it take before the concept of American (read white) exceptionalism becomes the relic that it needs to be?

[anamandujano]

3. In other words he is saying "Oops, I made a mistake! Carry on."

Doofus!

[IMG][/IMG]

[malthaussen]

4. I don't see this as changing his mind.

The concept was to grab as much as "we" could while the grabbing was good. Now, "we" need to focus on ways to secure our gains. Mr Brzezinski might have toyed with the odd fantasy of glomming on to all of it, but I'm sure in practice he was much more realistic. Although it might have been necessary to exaggerate in order to secure the cooperation of the marks.

-- Mal

[yurbud]

5. He might have thought it was possible but the window of opportunity was limited--now it's closed