The Grand Chessboard

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...China sweetened its offer by promising to build a pipeline from Kazakhstan directly into China...

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...The Heartland theory also appealed to those Russian intellectuals convinced that Russia was neither Western nor Asian but uniquely Eurasian...

...President Jiang Zemin signaled the seriousness of his country's interest by paying a state visit to Kazakhstan in mid-1997...

...It "is likely to be a major battlefield," Brzezinski predicts, in part because of ethnic and religious tensions, but even more so because of the covetous designs that major powers Russia and China and regional powers such as Turkey and Iran have on it...

...As Brzezinski himself knows as well as anyone, it is difficult for genuine democracies to conduct a foreign policy that needs at times to look like "imperial mobilization...

...Eurasia as a locus of global power politics is not a new concept...

...Brzezinski would defend the island "not for the sake of a separate Taiwan, but for the sake of America's geopolitical interests in the Asia-Pacific area...

...Since then, America and Russia have moved in rather odd directions, with neither of them quite sure of the role it should play in global politics...

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...The Grand Chessboard is a strong reminder that for America — enjoying "global hegemony of a new type"—muddling through is not a serious option.r MOVING...

...The reason for concern, Brzezinski writes, is that "it is on the globe's most important playing field — Eurasia —that a potential rival to America might at some point arise...

...But don't be fooled: Brzezinski's view of the world as an arena of power politics is as sobering as it is timely...

...A s Brzezinski argues in his provocative way, the U.S...

...The last of these fragile states may be the most important, given its rich oil reserves and ethnic and cultural links to both Turkey and Iran...

...Rutskoi would no doubt call Brzezinski an "arch-Atlanticist" for viewing Eurasia as the "chief geopolitical prize" in the global power chess game...

...Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island...

...While the Cold War inspired heroic gestures—from Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri, DAVID AIKMAN is a former Time magazine foreign correspondent...

...should have a foreign policy designed "to perpetuate America's own dominant position for at least a generation...

...The two other countries that really count, Brzezinski says, are Poland and Ukraine: Poland, because its successful recent reconciliation with Germany has helped spread German economic and cultural influence throughout eastern Europe...

...would wither away...

...policy-makers to undergird foreign policy formulation with high-minded slogans, a temptation he deftly avoids in this book...

...Brzezinski's proposals take a leaf out of the book of eighteenth and nineteenth century British diplomacy toward continental Europe...

...is "too distant to be dominant" in Eurasia, but "too powerful not to be engaged...

...Its entry point, according to Brzezinski, should be Europe, whose growing unity and political self-confidence the U.S...

...In this scenario Britain receives short shrift: In Brzezinski's view, it would cease to be a major player globally or within Europe, and the "special relationship" with the U.S...

...It's been affectionately said of the British that they will in the end "muddle through" their foreign policy dilemmas...

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...America has been amusing itself in a cheery sort of way with long-neglected domestic issues like healthcare and gay rights, blissfully inattentive to events beyond its borders...

...Boris Yeltsin has largely been bogged down in a privatization policy that turned the Russian economy over to a cabal of super-rich oligarchs...

...The title of Zbigniew Brzezinski's latest book thus has a positively quaint ring to it...

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...Azerbaijan isn't the only Eurasian country facing outside pressures because of its oil...

...Neither approach, Brzezinski argues, has taken into account the realities of global power politics or the requirement that any country's major domestic political changes should occur in an environment of international peace and stability...

...China's energy demands are growing at a rate far out-pacing domestic production, which no doubt accounts for China's deep interest in Kazakh oil fields...

...Welcome to the so-called post-Cold War era...

...ought to encourage further...

...as "simultaneously the first and the only truly global power...

...What about Russia and China, then...

...The pipeline rivalry in Central Asia among the U.S., Western Europe, Russia, and China is beginning to resemble the railroad rivalry in the same region among the major powers of the nineteenth century...

...Many of today's Russian nationalist thinkers propound a more paranoid theory of "Eurasianism" that sees "Atlanticists" as the arch-enemy who wants the terminal weakening of Russia through a European-North American power axis...

...Indeed, in December 82 March 19 9 8 • The American Spectator 1997 China's major national petroleum company outbid a U.S...

...He views China as America's "natural ally" in the long run, but likely to encounter serious political unrest in the near future because of internal demands for democratization and the unwillingness of the ruling hard-liners to yield power...

...He devotes one chapter to "The Eurasian Balkans," and describes the "ethnic cauldron" that could boil over in the five "stans"— Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan—not to mention Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan...

...Noting that Russia's foreign policy establishment is still crammed with Soviet-era diplomats intuitively hostile to American power, he laments that "no Russian Ataturk is now in sight" who could cajole Russians into a realistic, pro-Western policy, the only serious geostrategic option for Moscow...

...Mackinder's theory was eagerly imbibed by the German strategist Karl Haushofer in the early 1920's, and then by Adolf Hitler, whose Drang nach Osten and Lebensraum owe much to Mackinder, as do Stalinist arguments from the 1940's for keeping Central and Eastern Europe in Moscow's hands...

...This is an important distinction...

...Brzezinski wants American diplomacy to back the region's former Soviet republics in warding off Russian moves to restore something of a client relationship with these newly independent republics...

...From today's perspective, notions like "global chessboard," "the game," or "the chief geopolitical prize" are as passé as Rudyard Kipling...

...Ukraine, by contrast, because it blocks the emergence of a newly powerful Russia...

...Brzezinski is unapologetic in saying the U.S...

...Former Yeltsin vice president Aleksandr Rutskoi has said of Eurasia: "Whoever becomes master of this space will become the master of the world...

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...America's central geostrategic role in Europe can be summed up quite simply," Brzezinski writes: "It is to consolidate through a more general transatlantic partnership the U.S...

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...Zbigniew Brzezinski Basic Books / 223 pages / $26 REVIEWED BY David Aikman I t was just six years ago that the hammer- and-sickle flag atop the Kremlin came down for the last time...

...That same collapse, however, also created an enormous area of potential instability in what he calls Eurasia: the assemblage of nations and states sandwiched between Moscow and Peking, the Arctic Circle and the Indian Ocean...

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...Brzezinski's Europe would be led jointly by a France seeking "reincarnation" of its national greatness and a Germany hoping for national "redemption" through a new, globally assertive pan-European identity...

...in 1946 to Ronald Reagan's victorious "Star Wars" policies four decades later—serious interest in foreign affairs has disappeared from American politics and culture...

...Who rules the World-Island commands the world...

...petroleum giant for a major Kazakh contract...

...This strategy would avoid the shortcomings of the "assertive multilateralism" of Clinton's first two years and the "democratic enlargement" priorities of the more recent period...

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...His thesis is simple: The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union left the U.S...

...It may be to global geostrategists, but it is hard to believe that the U.S...

...Congress would see it that way...

...Brzezinski is well aware of the perennial need of U.S...

...What if Peking invades Taiwan...

...bridgehead on the Eurasian continent so that an enlarging Europe can become a more viable springboard for projecting into Eurasia the international democratic and cooperative order...

...Just as Britain relentlessly chose to support whichever European power wasthe second most dominant at any time, so America's primary interest, he says, "is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space...

...That's all there is to it...

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...An early proponent was British geographer Sir Hal-ford Mackinder, whose 1919 thesis on control of "the World-Island" or "Heartland"— the combined land mass of Europe, Asia, and Africa—was as simple as it was eloquent: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland...