Zbigniew Brzezinski was a geopolitical advisor under Democratic administrations of both Lyndon Johnson and later the National Security advisory for Jimmy Carter. In 1997, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union collapse, he wrote ‘the Grand Chessboard’ which provided a rare and unfiltered insight into geopolitical stratums at the highest level of the US government.
Its primary thesis was that throughout history, any power that
dominates Eurasia gains markets, resources, labour and production capability that
will also allow it to dominate the world.
Brzezinski argued that for the US had to ensure that no other regional power was able to align a combination of Eurasian regions as their combined strength could "push America out of Eurasia, thereby threatening America's status as a global power". The book itself is extremely detailed, describing the history and motivations of Eurasian nations from a snapshot in time of the mid-1990s. His proposed strategy for maintaining US hegemonic power over the "world island" was to incrementally expand it’s European “bridgehead” eastward, eventually incorporating a crippled Russia that had to be forced to realise its only hope for prosperity was as a minor player in a US influenced Europe.
Significant key paragraphs are reprinted
below.
“Europe is America's essential geopolitical bridgehead on the Eurasian continent. America's geostrategic stake in Europe is enormous. Unlike America's links with Japan the Atlantic alliance entrenches American political influence and military power directly on the Eurasian mainland. At this stage of American-European relations, with the allied European nations still highly dependent on U.S. security protection, any expansion in the scope of Europe becomes automatically an expansion in the scope of direct U.S. influence as well.”
“America must work… in promoting the eastward expansion of Europe. American-German cooperation and joint leadership regarding this issue are essential. Expansion will happen if the United States and Germany jointly encourage the other NATO allies to endorse the step and either negotiate effectively some accommodation with Russia, if it is willing to compromise… or act assertively, in the correct conviction that the task of constructing Europe cannot be subordinated to Moscow's objections.”
“Ultimately at stake in this effort is America's long-range role in Europe. A new Europe is still taking shape, and if that new Europe is to remain geopolitically a part of the "Euro-Atlantic" space, the expansion of NATO is essential. Indeed, a comprehensive U.S. policy for Eurasia as a whole will not be possible if the effort to widen NATO, having been launched by the United States, stalls and falters. That failure would discredit American leadership; it would shatter the concept of an expanding Europe; it would (be)…not only a regional defeat but a global defeat as well.”
“America's central geostrategic goal in Europe can be summed up quite simply: it is to consolidate through a more genuine transatlantic partnership the U.S. 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.”
Brzezinski considered the geopolitical threats that might
thwart the US ambition of bringing an enlarged Greater Europe under its
influence. He warned of the
"…possibility of a grand European realignment, involving either a German-Russian collusion or a Franco-Russian entente. There are obvious historical precedents for both, and either could emerge if European unification were to grind to a halt and if relations between Europe and America were to deteriorate gravely. Indeed, in the latter eventuality, one could imagine a European-Russian accommodation to exclude America from the continent."
The building of the Nord Stream pipelines was correctly described as a geopolitical threat by the US and Eastern European states between 2014 to
2021. The US felt so strongly against
its completion that it sanctioned firms involved with its construction.
In 2016 the governments of Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary,
Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Lithuania lodged a formal objection to
the EU president over the pipeline on the grounds that it's use would have “potentially
destabilising geopolitical consequences”.
Like Brzezinski, they understood that the completed pipelines would
create a multigenerational partnership between Germany and Russia which would
become the dominant geopolitical relationship of Western Eurasia. A historical search of news articles
published prior to 2021 shows a consistent narrative that the direct
partnership between Germany and Russia was a "geopolitical threat" to the United
States and the European project.
Self-imposed sanctions against Russian energy, has precipitated deindustrialisation and an economic crisis and in Germany. So long as the Nord Stream pipelines existed, any future German governments could still decide to act in its national interest and resume a direct economic integration with Russia. Ultimately, the only guarantee this could not occur is if the pipelines ceased to exist.
Seymour Hersh's writing revealed that the US began planning
to blow up the pipeline began before the Russian intervention in the ongoing
Ukraine conflict. President Biden’s vow
that “If Russia invades... again, then there will be longer Nord Stream 2. We
will bring an end to it" was made well after the planning for the pipeline’s
bombing had begun.
Brzezinski coherently explains the criticality for
preventing Russian-German integration, the overthrow of Ukraine’s government in
2014 and the eastward expansion of Europe and NATO (with an ultimate goal of regime
change in Russia).
Interestingly, he also warned that:
"…the most dangerous scenario would be a
grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an
"antihegemonic" coalition united not by ideology but by complementary
grievances".
“However, a coalition allying
Russia with both China and Iran can develop only if the United States is shortsighted
enough to antagonize China and Iran simultaneously. To be sure, that
eventuality cannot be excluded, and American conduct in 1995-1996 almost seemed
consistent with the notion that the United States was seeking an antagonistic
relationship with both Teheran and Beijing”.
