The Empire 599

Get Familiar with Zbigniew Brzezinski

From his Christopher J. Makins Lecture to the Atlantic Council of the US:

What we need today is a shared understanding of the things that make our time unique. That understanding must recognize what is unique both about the world in general and about the particular threat we face.
Let me make a stab, just a stab, at a formulation. On the general level, what is distinctive about our time is that the United States and Europe, the most advanced part of the world, face a massive and unprecedented global political awakening. That is something new in all of history. The world as a whole is experiencing today what French society as a whole experienced during the French revolution ? a sudden stirring of political awareness, unleashed passions, fermenting excitement, and escalating aspirations. Today, that sense of revolution is the political reality worldwide and it is altogether new, though it has been developing over a number of decades.
Today, even in remote Nepal, Bolivia, and Kyrgyzstan, we see similar manifestations of political behavior. Today, in Somalia, East Timor, and Chechnya, we see similar manifestations of brutal violence. And throughout the world, we see similar trends in the rise of radical populism, which carries with it the potential for violent extremism. This radical populism, organized through the Internet and fueled by the images of human inequality that are disseminated globally by the electronic media, is also stimulated by a new political reality. This political reality is no longer that of an aroused peasantry or that of the industrial proletariat of Marx ? it is some 120 million fermenting and politically active university students throughout the world. That is the new reality we confront together, and it is a much more complex and difficult reality than we faced during the Cold War, World War I, or World War II.

From Zbigniew's classic "The Grand Chessboard":

... how America "manages" Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources."
"In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last."

From a June 14, 2007 Roundtable discussion with Henry Kissinger and Brent Snowcroft

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: The political awakening that is happening worldwide is a major challenge for America, because it means that the world is much more restless. It's stirring. It has aspirations which are not easily satisfied. And if America is to lead, it has to relate itself somehow to these new, lively, intense political aspirations, which make our age so different from even the recent past.
But the challenge that we face is rooted much more in the immediate problem, which we have partially created -- namely, we are the number one superpower today in the world. We are the only superpower. But our leadership is being tested in the Middle East, and some of the things that we have done in the Middle East are contributing to a potential explosion region-wide. And if that explosion gets out of hand, we may end up being bogged down for many years to come in a conflict that will be profoundly damaging to our capacity to exercise our power, to address the problems implicit in this global awakening, and we may face a world in which much of the world turns away from us, seeks its own equilibrium, but probably slides into a growing chaos.