The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives

by Zbigniew Brzeziński

The brutal fact is that Western Europe, and increasingly also Central Europe, remains largely an American protectorate, with its allied states reminiscent of ancient vassals and tributaries. This is not a healthy condition, either for America or for the European nations.

Even residual European anti-Americanism, currently quite weak, is curiously cynical: the Europeans deplore American “hegemony” but take comfort in being sheltered by it.

France could seize the idea of Europe, identify itself with it, and usurp it as identical with France’s conception of itself. The country that first invented the idea of the sovereign nation-state and made nationalism into a civic religion thus found it quite natural to see itself—with the same emotional commitment that was once invested in “la patrie”—as the embodiment of an independent but united Europe. The grandeur of a French-led Europe would then be France’s as well.