*NOTE: The content below is presented here for reasons of
gaining an insightful look into the eyes and mind of the US establishments
champion Zbigniew Brzezinski;
Brzezinski's lays out his advice regarding geopolitical and economic conquest in the 21st Century.
There are some very interesting admissions by Zbigniew Brzezinski in
the video and text below that also clarifies the western establishments position while shedding light on the way they perceive the ongoing geopolitical conflicts throughout the world.
Reflections on Global History in the 20th Century: Towards a
New Vision for the 21st Century 2 – (Dec 14, 2015)
Video Source: Center for Strategic & InternationalStudies
Toward a Global Realignment
By: Zbigniew Brzezinski
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. But neither is any other major power.
The second verity is that Russia is experiencing the latest
convulsive phase of its imperial devolution. A painful process, Russia is not
fatally precluded – if it acts wisely – from becoming eventually a leading European
nation-state. However, currently it is pointlessly alienating some of its
former subjects in the Islamic southwest of its once extensive empire, as well
as Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia, not to mention the Baltic States.
The third verity is that China is rising steadily, if more
slowly as of late, as America’s eventual coequal and likely rival; but for the
time being it is careful not to pose an outright challenge to America.
Militarily, it seems to be seeking a breakthrough in a new generation of weapons
while patiently enhancing its still very limited naval power.
The fourth verity is that Europe is not now and is not
likely to become a global power. But it can play a constructive role in taking
the lead in regard to transnational threats to global wellbeing and even human
survival. Additionally, Europe is politically and culturally aligned with and
supportive of core U.S. interests in the Middle East, and European
steadfastness within NATO is essential to an eventually constructive resolution
of the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
The fifth verity is that the currently violent political
awakening among post-colonial Muslims is, in part, a belated reaction to their
occasionally brutal suppression mostly by European powers. It fuses a delayed
but deeply felt sense of injustice with a religious motivation that is unifying
large numbers of Muslims against the outside world; but at the same time,
because of historic sectarian schisms within Islam that have nothing to do with
the West, the recent welling up of historical grievances is also divisive
within Islam.
Taken together as a unified framework, these five verities
tell us that the United States must take the lead in realigning the global
power architecture in such a way that the violence erupting within and
occasionally projected beyond the Muslim world—and in the future possibly from
other parts of what used to be called the Third World—can be contained without
destroying the global order. We can sketch this new architecture by elaborating
briefly each of the five foregoing verities.
First, America can only be effective in dealing with the
current Middle Eastern violence if it forges a coalition that involves, in
varying degrees, also Russia and China. To enable such a coalition to take
shape, Russia must first be discouraged from its reliance on the unilateral use
of force against its own neighbors—notably Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic
States—and China should be disabused of the idea that selfish passivity in the
face of the rising regional crisis in the Middle East will prove to be
politically and economically rewarding to its ambitions in the global arena.
These shortsighted policy impulses need to be channeled into a more farsighted
vision.
Second, Russia is becoming for the first time in its history
a truly national state, a development that is as momentous as it is generally
overlooked. The Czarist Empire, with its multinational but largely politically
passive population, came to an end with World War I and the Bolshevik creation
of an allegedly voluntary union of national republics (the USSR), with power
resting effectively in Russian hands, took its place. The collapse of the
Soviet Union at the end of 1991 led to the sudden emergence of a predominantly
Russian state as its successor, and to the transformation of the former Soviet
Union’s non-Russian “republics” into formally independent states. These states
are now consolidating their independence, and both the West and China—in
different areas and different ways—are exploiting that new reality to Russia’s
disadvantage. In the meantime, Russia’s own future depends on its ability to
become a major and influential nation-state that is part of a unifying Europe.
Not to do so could have dramatically negative consequences for Russia’s ability
to withstand growing territorial-demographic pressure from China, which is
increasingly inclined as its power grows to recall the “unequal” treaties
Moscow imposed on Beijing in times past.
Third, China’s dramatic economic success requires enduring
patience and the country’s awareness that political haste will make for social
waste. The best political prospect for China in the near future is to become
America’s principal partner in containing global chaos of the sort that is
spreading outward (including to the northeast) from the Middle East. If it is
not contained, it will contaminate Russia’s southern and eastern territories as
well as the western portions of China. Closer relations between China and the
new republics in Central Asia, the post-British Muslim states in Southwest Asia
(notably Pakistan) and especially with Iran (given its strategic assets and
economic significance), are the natural targets of Chinese regional
geopolitical outreach. But they should also be targets of global Sino-American
accommodation.
Fourth, tolerable stability will not return to the Middle
East as long as local armed military formations can calculate that they can be
simultaneously the beneficiaries of a territorial realignment while selectively
abetting extreme violence. Their ability to act in a savage manner can only be
contained by increasingly effective—but also selective—pressure derived from a
base of U.S.-Russian-Chinese cooperation that, in turn, enhances the prospects
for the responsible use of force by the region’s more established states
(namely, Iran, Turkey, Israel, and Egypt). The latter should also be the
recipients of more selective European support. Under normal circumstances,
Saudi Arabia would be a significant player on that list, but the current
inclination of the Saudi government still to foster Wahhabi fanaticism, even
while engaged in ambitious domestic modernization efforts, raises grave doubts
regarding Saudi Arabia’s ability to play a regionally significant constructive
role.
Fifth, special attention should be focused on the
non-Western world’s newly politically aroused masses. Long-repressed political
memories are fueling in large part the sudden and very explosive awakening
energized by Islamic extremists in the Middle East, but what is happening in
the Middle East today may be just the beginning of a wider phenomenon to come
out of Africa, Asia, and even among the pre-colonial peoples of the Western
Hemisphere in the years ahead.
Periodic massacres of their not-so-distant ancestors by
colonists and associated wealth-seekers largely from western Europe (countries
that today are, still tentatively at least, most open to multiethnic
cohabitation) resulted within the past two or so centuries in the slaughter of
colonized peoples on a scale comparable to Nazi World War II crimes: literally
involving hundreds of thousands and even millions of victims. Political
self-assertion enhanced by delayed outrage and grief is a powerful force that
is now surfacing, thirsting for revenge, not just in the Muslim Middle East but
also very likely beyond.
Much of the data cannot be precisely established, but taken
collectively, they are shocking. Let just a few examples suffice. In the 16th
century, due largely to disease brought by Spanish explorers, the population of
the native Aztec Empire in present-day Mexico declined from 25 million to
approximately one million. Similarly, in North America, an estimated 90 percent
of the native population died within the first five years of contact with
European settlers, due primarily to diseases. In the 19th century, various wars
and forced resettlements killed an additional 100,000. In India from 1857-1867,
the British are suspected of killing up to one million civilians in reprisals
stemming from the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The British East India Company’s
use of Indian agriculture to grow opium then essentially forced on China
resulted in the premature deaths of millions, not including the directly
inflicted Chinese casualties of the First and Second Opium Wars. In the Congo,
which was the personal holding of Belgian King Leopold II, 10-15 million people
were killed between 1890 and 1910. In Vietnam, recent estimates suggest that
between one and three million civilians were killed from 1955 to 1975.
As to the Muslim world, in Russia’s Caucasus, from 1864 and
1867, 90 percent of the local Circassian population was forcibly relocated and
between 300,000 and 1.5 million either starved to death or were killed. Between
1916 and 1918, tens of thousands of Muslims were killed when 300,000 Turkic Muslims
were forced by Russian authorities through the mountains of Central Asia and
into China. In Indonesia, between 1835 and 1840, the Dutch occupiers killed an
estimated 300,000 civilians. In Algeria, following a 15-year civil war from
1830-1845, French brutality, famine, and disease killed 1.5 million Algerians,
nearly half the population. In neighbouring Libya, the Italians forced
Cyrenaicans into concentration camps, where an estimated 80,000 to 500,000 died
between 1927 and 1934.
More recently, in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 the
Soviet Union is estimated to have killed around one million civilians; two
decades later, the United States has killed 26,000 civilians during its 15-year
war in Afghanistan. In Iraq, 165,000 civilians have been killed by the United
States and its allies in the past 13 years. (The disparity between the reported
number of deaths inflicted by European colonizers compared with the United
States and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan may be due in part to the
technological advances that have led to the ability to use force more
precisely, and in part as well to a shift in the world’s normative climate.)
Just as shocking as the scale of these atrocities is how quickly the West
forgot about them.
In today’s postcolonial world, a new historical narrative is
emerging. A profound resentment against the West and its colonial legacy in
Muslim countries and beyond is being used to justify their sense of deprivation
and denial of self-dignity. A stark example of the experience and attitudes of
colonial peoples is well summarized by the Senegalese poet David Diop in:
“Vultures”
In those days,
When civilization kicked us in the face
The vultures built in the shadow of their talons
The blood stained monument of tutelage…
----------------
The growing evocation of these memories, in the Muslim world
and increasingly beyond, shows how the past still influences the present, but
it certainly does not justify the violent behaviors that are transpiring in the
Middle East today.
Given all this, a long and painful road toward an initially
limited regional accommodation is the only viable option for the United States,
Russia, China, and the pertinent Middle Eastern entities. For the United
States, that will require patient persistence in forging cooperative relationships
with some new partners (particularly Russia and China) as well as joint efforts
with more established and historically rooted Muslim states (Turkey, Iran,
Egypt, and Saudi Arabia if it can detach its foreign policy from Wahhabi
extremism) in shaping a wider framework of regional stability. Our European
allies, previously dominant in the region, can still be helpful in that regard.
A comprehensive U.S. pullout from the Muslim world favored
by domestic isolationists, could give rise to new wars (for example, Israel vs.
Iran, Saudi Arabia vs. Iran, a major Egyptian intervention in Libya) and would
generate an even deeper crisis of confidence in America’s globally stabilizing
role. In different but dramatically unpredictable ways, Russia and China could
be the geopolitical beneficiaries of such a development even as global order
itself becomes the more immediate geopolitical casualty. Last but not least, in
such circumstances a divided and fearful Europe would see its current member
states searching for patrons and competing with one another in alternative but
separate arrangements among the more powerful trio.
A constructive U.S. policy must be patiently guided by a
long-range vision. It must seek outcomes that promote the gradual realization
in Russia (probably post-Putin) that its only place as an influential world
power is ultimately within Europe. China’s increasing role in the Middle East
should reflect the reciprocal American and Chinese realization that a growing
U.S.-PRC partnership in coping with the Middle Eastern crisis is an
historically significant test of their ability to shape and enhance together
wider global stability.
The alternative to a constructive vision, and especially the
quest for a one-sided militarily and ideologically imposed outcome, can only
result in prolonged and self-destructive futility. For America, that could
entail enduring conflict, fatigue, and conceivably even a demoralizing
withdrawal to its pre-20th century isolationism. For Russia, it could mean
major defeat, increasing the likelihood of subordination in some fashion to
Chinese predominance. For China, it could portend war not only with the United
States but also, perhaps separately, with either Japan or India or with both.
And, in any case, a prolonged phase of sustained ethnic, quasi-religious wars
pursued through the Middle East with self-righteous fanaticism would generate
escalating bloodshed within and outside the region, and growing cruelty
everywhere.
The fact is that there has never been a truly “dominant”
global power until the emergence of America on the world scene. Imperial Great
Britain came close to becoming one, but World War I and later World War II not
only bankrupted it but also prompted the emergence of rival regional powers.
The decisive new global reality was the appearance on the world scene of
America as simultaneously the richest and militarily the most powerful player.
During the latter part of the 20th century no other power even came close.
That era is now ending. While no state is likely in the near
future to match America’s economic-financial superiority, new weapons systems
could suddenly endow some countries with the means to commit suicide in a joint
tit-for-tat embrace with the United States, or even to prevail. Without going
into speculative detail, the sudden acquisition by some state of the capacity
to render the America militarily broadly inferior would spell the end of
America’s global role. The result would most probably be global chaos. And that
is why it behooves the United States to fashion a policy in which at least one
of the two potentially threatening states becomes a partner in the quest for
regional and then wider global stability, and thus in containing the least
predictable but potentially the most likely rival to overreach. Currently, the
more likely to overreach is Russia, but in the longer run it could be China.
Since the next twenty years may well be the last phase of
the more traditional and familiar political alignments with which we have grown
comfortable, the response needs to be shaped now. During the rest of this
century, humanity will also have to be increasingly preoccupied with survival
as such on account of a confluence of environmental challenges. Those
challenges can only be addressed responsibly and effectively in a setting of
increased international accommodation. And that accommodation has to be based
on a strategic vision that recognizes the urgent need for a new geopolitical
framework.
-----------------------------------
*The author acknowledges the helpful contribution of his
research assistant Paul Wasserman, and the scholarship on the subject of
colonial brutality by Adam Hochschild, Richard Pierce, William Polk, and the
Watson Institute at Brown University, among others.
Zbigniew Brzezinski is a counselor at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies and was the National Security Advisor to
President Jimmy Carter from 1977-81. He is the author, most recently, of
Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power.
Posts
a.jpg)
a.jpg)
