Zbigniew Brzezinski - Strategic Vision - America and the Crisis of Global Power

In brief, the crisis of global power is the cumulative consequence of the dynamic shift in the world’s center of gravity from the West to the East, of the accelerated surfacing of the restless phenomenon of global political awakening, and of America’s deficient domestic and international performance since its emergence by 1990 as the world’s only superpower. The foregoing poses serious longer-term risks to the survival of some endangered states, to the security of the global commons, and to global stability at large. This book seeks to outline the needed strategic vision, looking beyond 2025.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI

March 2011

The long-lasting political domination of the world by the West has been fading for some decades. For a brief moment in the 1990s, however, it looked as if the West, despite Europe’s twin attempts at collective suicide during the first half of the twentieth century, might stage a historical comeback. The peaceful end of the Cold War, culminating in the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, signaled the final step in the rapid ascendance of the United States as the first truly global superpower. That internationally dominant power, together with its politically motivated and economically dynamic partner, the European Union, appeared capable not only of reviving the West ’s global preeminence but also of defining for itself a constructive global role.

Twenty years later, few expect the European Union to emerge soon as a politically serious global player while America’s preeminent global status seems tenuous. Because the West as a whole is now less capable of acting in unison, its lasting political legacy is thus also more in doubt. Once upon a time, though briefly, it did seem that worldwide democracy, international peace, and increasingly even a comfortable social compact would be the West ’s enduring bequest to humanity. However, basic changes in the distribution of global power, the impact of the new phenomenon of global political awakening on the exercise of that power, and the negative consequences of recent US foreign policy moves and of growing doubts regarding the vitality of the American system have cumulatively put that more hopeful legacy of the West in question.

The very notion of a globally dominant power is a recent historical development. For millennia, people lived in isolated communities, unaware of the existence of their more distant neighbors. Migrations and sporadic collisions with outsiders took place in a setting of total ignorance of the world at large. It has only been within the last eight hundred years or so that an initially vague awareness of the presence of distant “others” permeated the human consciousness, first through expeditions and mapping of once-unknown areas and then through colonization and large migrations. Eventually, that knowledge led to imperial rivalries, which in turn led to two destructive wars for world domination, and then to the global systemic confrontation of the Cold War. In recent times, space exploration has dramatized the new appreciation of the relative “smallness” of the earth, while photographs from outer space taken at night have conveyed the vivid contrast between the illuminated concentrations of urbanized humanity—especially in what is usually described as the West—and the darker, less technologically advanced, but increasingly crowded regions of the rest of the world.

MAP 1.1 THE EARTH AT NIGHT

The states located on the Western European shores of the North Atlantic Ocean were the first to set out, self-consciously and vigorously, on the world at large. They were driven by a potent mix of maritime technological advancement, proselytizing passion, visions of monarchical and personal glory, and out-and-out material greed. Partially as a result of this head start, they controlled territory far away from their continental home bases for nearly half a millennium. The geographic scope of the West thus expanded—first by conquest and then by settlement—from Europe’s Atlantic shores to the Western Hemisphere. Portugal and Spain conquered and colonized South America while Britain and France did the same in North America. Eventual political independence from Europe by both Americas was then followed by large-scale European migration into the Western Hemisphere. In the meantime, the Western European maritime states bordering on the Atlantic also reached into the Indian and Pacific Oceans, establishing dominion over today’s India and Indonesia, imposing a patronizing presence in parts of China, carving up almost all of Africa and the Middle East, and seizing scores of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans as well as in the Caribbean Sea.

EMPIRES AT THEIR GREATEST EXTENT

1.British Empire (1920) 34,000,000 km 2

2.Mongol Empire (1309) 24,000,000 km 2

3.Russian Empire (1905) 23,000,000 km 2

4.Second French Colonial Empire (1920) 15,000,000 km 2

5.Manchu-Qing Dynasty, China (1800) 15,000,000 km 2

6.Spanish Empire (1800) 14,000,000 km 2

7.Umayyad Caliphate (720) 11,000,000 km 2

8.Yuan Dynasty, China (1320) 11,000,000 km 2

9.Abbasid Caliphate (750) 11,000,000 km 2

10.Portuguese Empire (1815) 10,400,000 km 2

11.Achaemenid Empire, Persia (480 BC) 8,000,000 km 2

12.Roman Empire (117) 6,500,000 km 2

From the sixteenth century until the midpoint of the twentieth, this combination of cultural and political outreach made the European states of the North Atlantic politically dominant in areas spanning the globe. (In that respect, their imperial domains differed fundamentally from the much earlier but essentially isolated and contiguous regional empires—such as the Roman, Persian, Mughal, Mongol, Chinese, or Incan—each of which conceived of itself as the center of the world but with little geographic knowledge of the world beyond.) Tsarist Russia massively expanded its land-based empire from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, but it similarly absorbed only adjoining territory with the brief exception of Alaska. The same was true of the Ottoman Empire’s expansion in the Middle East and Southeast Europe.

But while the European maritime powers on the Atlantic Coast ranged over the world, the prolonged conflicts among them weakened their geopolitical position relative to rising powers from within the European continent and from North America. The material and strategic cost of prolonged war in the Low Countries and German provinces during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exhausted Iberian power, while Dutch prominence began to wane during the late seventeenth century in the face of ascending Britain on the seas and assertive France next door on land. By the time the smoke cleared in the mid-eighteenth century, Great Britain and France stood as the only remaining competitors in the struggle for imperial dominance.

Their transoceanic rivalry for colonial possessions expanded during the nineteenth century into a contest for supremacy over Europe itself, before turning early in the twentieth century into a joint alliance against a rising European continental power that not coincidentally also had entered the global colonial competition—Germany. From the consequent two world wars, Europe emerged devastated, divided, and demoralized. Indeed, after 1945 a vast Eurasian land power, the Soviet Union, victoriously ensconced in Europe’s geographic middle, seemed poised—like the Mongol Empire some seven hundred years earlier—to sweep even further westward.