The ten best books on geopolitics - Brzezinski & The Grand Chessboard

What are the ten best books on geopolitics?  John Laughland starts a short series with Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997).

Zbigniew Brzezinski was born in Warsaw in 1928 and rose to become Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser in 1977.  Like Henry Kissinger, he combined considerable intellectual prowess with an acute interest in wielding political power. American politics, indeed, is surprisingly ideas-driven, as attested by the huge influence of think-tanks over policy-making in the Beltway:  I cannot think of any equivalent intellectual figures active in European politics in recent decades with the possible exception of Vaclav Havel.

Having taught at Harvard and Columbia, Brzezinski is remembered for his aggressively anti-Soviet policy, which included arming the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, and for his early espousal of Western hegemony. He was the first director of the Trilateral Commission in 1973, an early globalist elite body which argued in favour of world leadership by developed countries. 

His book The Grand Chessboard combined these two key elements and reformulated them at the very moment when the euphoria over perceived Western victory in the Cold War was reaching its most hubristic apogee, the Yugoslav and Iraq wars of 1999 and 2003 marking the high points of Western imperialism.  Although he does not give him due credit – and when he mentions him, he gets his name wrong – Brzezinski draws heavily on the geopolitical theories of a British geographer, Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) (whom he calls “Harold” in the book). 

Mackinder introduced the study of geography into the University of Oxford in 1887.  He founded what became the University of Reading in 1892 and was appointed director of the London School of Economics in 1903.  In 1904 he presented his master theory to the Royal Geographical Society. His idea is that what he called Euro-Asia is the largest landmass in the world, with the largest population and huge resources, and that it is therefore the key to world history.  Russia, of course, is the biggest single component of that land mass. 

Mackinder believed that the railway would transform the geo-politics of the world.  Prior to its invention, the sea was the most important vector of trade and travel and therefore of power projection.  Railways, by contrast, would open up previously closed spaces and make Euro-Asia, and particularly Russia, the pivot of history - Russia because she occupies the centre of Euro-Asia just as Germany occupies the centre of Europe. 

This notion of pivot in turn led to the concomitant notion of peripheral countries, with an inner crescent of Germany, Turkey India, China, Persia and so on, and an outer crescent of Britain, America, Canada, Australia and Japan.  If Euro-Asia started to exploit its vast natural resources, concluded Mackinder, “the empire of the world would then be in sight”.  He added, “This might happen if Germany were to ally herself with Russia.” This presented a specific challenge to the most peripheral of all states, the USA which is not even part of Eurasia.

Brzezinski adopted Mackinder’s obsession with Eurasia.  “For America,” he wrote, “the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia.”  For the first time in history, a power external to Eurasia had become dominant – America.  The US was “the first and only truly global power”.  Other empires had in fact only ever been regional, while America dominates the world militarily, economically, technologically and culturally.  Its hegemony, Brzezinski showed, was wielded both through regional alliances – NATO with Europe; the alliance with Japan, the then dominant Asian economy; other regional structures – and also through its domination of global international organisations.

Brzezinski was aware that this position would not be retained without effort.  If American power waned, a Eurasian power would immediately dominate Africa and relegate the Western hemisphere and Oceania to peripheral irrelevance. Because all the major rivals to the US are in Eurasia, that continent is the “chessboard” on which the geopolitical game is played out.  America currently retains control over Eurasia by deploying power on three peripheries of the continent – “West” (Europe), “South” (the Middle East) and “East” (China, Japan and Korea).  But that might change.

Brzezinski was writing in 1997, long before China’s ascendancy to its current economic position and certainly long before the proclaimed American animosity towards that country.  He was aware of the essential precarity of American hegemony – and wrote his book to encourage US leaders to avoid certain mistakes.  The key clearly lies in Russia.  Brzezinski divided Eurasia up into different “spaces” – “middle”, “East”, “South” etc. – but the it is clear that the “middle” is essentially Russia.  “If the middle space rebuffs the West, becomes an assertive single entity and either gains control over the South or forms an alliance with the major Eastern actor, then America’s primacy in Eurasia shrinks dramatically.” 

The distance of 25 years now enables us to see how much the world has indeed changed.  Europe – what Brzezinski calls a “bridgehead” for the projection of American power into Eurasia – has grown only more subservient to the USA in recent years. But the other “spaces” in his world have moved in the other direction.  China is now the largest economy in the world and the world’s factory. The Middle East has escaped American control, with Saudi Arabia dramatically diluting its US alliance in favour of a new relationship with Moscow.  Turkey is also increasingly independent and even hostile towards the USA over Israel.  Iran, of course, has been an enemy of the US since 1979 and has this year joined BRICS - together with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates. 

Above all, Russia and China have done precisely what Brzezinski said America should strive to prevent.  They have consolidated a deep strategic partnership which is acting as a centre of gravity for the rest of the world, through BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.  Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow last March was intended, in Xi’s words, to bring about changes “we have not seen for a hundred years.”  This is precisely what Brzezinski described as “potentially the most dangerous scenario” in his book - “a grand coalition of Russia, China and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.”

Brzezinski is, as one would expect from a Pole, deeply interested in Ukraine.  “Ukraine is a geopolitical pivot,” he explains, “because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia.  Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”  This is because Russia would then be turned exclusively towards Asia.  Were Russia to regain control of Ukraine and access to the Black Sea, “Russia automatically regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state spanning Europe and Asia.”  This has been the view of the US foreign policy establishment ever since Brzezinski wrote these lines, and it explains the obsession with Russia within that establishment – the Russiagate nonsense and the first impeachment of Trump both turned on this.  It also explains the current war in Ukraine and above all the West’s visceral reaction to it.

Brzezinski’s book is therefore important not so much for its insights or for any truths it communicates but instead because of the mindset which it so perfectly embodies. Read it and you will understand American geopolitics and especially the absolute determination of the American elite to attain and preserve world hegemony.  You will understand the world we are in, 30 years after these plans were first formulated, but also the new world which is now emerging in inevitable reaction to it.  For in diplomacy as in marriage, no victory is ever permanent.