The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives

by Zbigniew Brzeziński

For America, Russia is much too weak to be a partner but still too strong to be simply its patient. It is more likely to become a problem, unless America fosters a setting that helps to convince the Russians that the best choice for their country is an increasingly organic connection with a transatlantic Europe.

Although a long-term Russo-Chinese and Russo-Iranian strategic alliance is not likely, it is obviously important for America to avoid policies that could distract Russia from making the needed geopolitical choice. To the extent possible, American relations with China and Iran should, therefore, be formulated with their impact on Russian geopolitical calculations also kept in mind. Perpetuating illusions regarding grand geostrategic options can only delay the historic choice that Russia must make in order to bring to an end its deep malaise.

Only a Russia that is willing to accept the new realities of Europe, both economic and geopolitical, will be able to benefit internally from the enlarging scope of transcontinental European cooperation ...

Europe. It also implies that if Russia pursues this path, it will have no choice other than eventually to emulate the course chosen by post-Ottoman Turkey, when it decided to shed its imperial ambitions and embarked very deliberately on the road of modernization, Europeanization, and democratization.

On the contrary, for Europe as well as for America, a national and democratic Russia is a geopolitically desirable entity, a source of stability in the volatile Eurasian complex.

Russia consequently faces the dilemma that the choice in favor of Europe and America, in order for it to yield tangible benefits, requires, first of all, a clear-cut abjuration of the imperial past and, second, no tergiversation regarding the enlarging Europe’s political and security links with America.

Nonetheless, Russians will eventually have to come to recognize that Russia’s national redefinition is not an act of capitulation but one of liberation.

9 They will have to accept that what Yeltsin said in Kiev in 1990 about a nonimperial future for Russia was absolutely on the mark. And a genuinely nonimperial Russia will still be a great power, spanning Eurasia, the world’s largest territorial unit by far.

China’s history is one of national greatness. The currently intense nationalism of the Chinese people is new only in its social pervasiveness, for it engages the self-identification and the emotions of an unprecedented number of Chinese. It is no longer a phenomenon confined largely to the students who, in the early years of this century, formed the precursors of the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese nationalism is now a mass phenomenon, defining the mindset of the world’s most populous state. That mindset has deep historical roots. History has predisposed the Chinese elite to think of China as the natural center of the world. In fact, the Chinese word for China—Chung-kuo, or the “Middle Kingdom”—both conveys the notion of China’s centrality in world affairs and reaffirms the importance of national unity. That perspective also implies a hierarchical radiation of influence from the center to the peripheries, and thus China as the center expects deference from others.

Tensions within China could also intensify, as a result of the inevitable unevenness of highly accelerated economic growth, driven heavily by the uninhibited exploitation of marginal advantages. The coastal South and East as well as the principal urban centers—more accessible to foreign investment and overseas trade—have so far been the major beneficiaries of China’s impressive economic growth. In contrast, the inland rural areas in general and some of the outlying regions have lagged (with upward of 100 million rural unemployed).

The second reason for cautious skepticism regarding the widespread prognoses of China’s emergence during the next quarter of a century as a dominating power in global affairs is, indeed, the future of China’s politics. The dynamic character of China’s nonstatist economic transformation, including its social openness to the rest of the world, is not mutually compatible in the long run with a relatively closed and bureaucratically rigid Communist dictatorship. The proclaimed communism of that dictatorship is progressively less a matter of ideological commitment and more a matter of bureaucratic vested interest. The Chinese political elite remains organized as a self-contained, rigid, disciplined, and monopolistically intolerant hierarchy, still ritualistically proclaiming its fidelity to a dogma that is said to justify its power but that the same elite is no longer implementing socially. At some point, these two dimensions of life will collide head-on, unless Chinese politics begin to adapt gradually to the social imperatives of China’s economics.

To sum up: even by the year 2020, it is quite unlikely even under the best of circumstances that China could become truly competitive in the key dimensions of global power. Even so, however, China is well on the way to becoming the preponderant regional power in East Asia. It is already geopolitically dominant on the mainland. Its military and economic power dwarfs its immediate neighbors, with the exception of India. It is, therefore, only natural that China will increasingly assert itself regionally, in keeping with the dictates of its history, geography, and economics.

It is almost certain that history and geography will make the Chinese increasingly insistent—even emotionally charged—regarding the necessity of the eventual reunification of Taiwan with the mainland. It is also reasonable to assume that China, as its power grows, will make that goal its principal objective during the first decade of the next century, following the economic absorption and political digestion of Hong Kong. Perhaps a peaceful reunification—maybe under a formula of “one nation, several systems” (a variant of Deng Xiaoping’s 1984 slogan “one country, two systems”)—might become appealing to Taiwan and would not be resisted by America, but only if China has been successful in sustaining its economic progress and adopting significant democratizing reforms. Otherwise, even a regionally dominant China is still likely to lack the military means to impose its will, especially in the face of American opposition, in which case the issue is bound to continue galvanizing Chinese nationalism while souring American-Chinese relations.

Geography is also an important factor driving the Chinese interest in making an alliance with Pakistan and establishing a military presence in Burma. In both cases, India is the geostrategic target. Close military cooperation with Pakistan increases India’s security dilemmas and limits India’s ability to establish itself as the regional hegemon in South Asia and as a geopolitical rival to China. Military cooperation with Burma gains China access to naval facilities on several Burmese offshore islands in the Indian Ocean, thereby also providing some further strategic leverage in Southeast Asia generally and in the Strait of Malacca particularly. And if China were to control the Strait of Malacca and the geostrategic choke point at Singapore, it would control Japan’s access to Middle Eastern oil and European markets.

facile analyses

In any case, in some areas of Eurasia, a Greater China may exercise a geopolitical influence that is compatible with America’s grand geostrategic interests in a stable but politically pluralistic Eurasia. For example, China’s growing interest in Central Asia inevitably constrains Russia’s freedom of action in seeking to achieve any form of political reintegration of the region under Moscow’s control. In this connection and as related to the Persian Gulf, China’s growing need for energy dictates a common interest with America in maintaining free access to and political stability in the oil-producing regions.