After a long period of indifferent international leadership, during Jimmy Carter's presidency foreign policy came under the charge of an underestimated figure, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. ?????migre Polish aristocrat, professor of international relations, and an autodidact when it came to geopolitics, he was above all an intellectual acolyte of Sir Halford Mackinder. Through both action and analysis, Brzezinski made Mackinder's concept of Eurasia as the world island and its vast interior heartland as the "pivot" of global power his own. He would prove particularly adept at applying Sir Halford's famous dictum: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the world."
Wielding a $100 million CIA covert operation like a sharpened wedge, Brzezinski drove radical Islam from Afghanistan into the "heartland" of Soviet Central Asia, drawing Moscow into a debilitating decade-long Afghan war that weakened Russia sufficiently for Eastern Europe to finally break free from the Soviet empire. With a calculus that couldn't have been more coldblooded, he understood and rationalized the untold misery and unimaginable human suffering his strategy inflicted through ravaged landscapes, the millions his policy uprooted from ancestral villages and turned into refugees, and the countless Afghan dead and wounded. Dismissing the long-term damage as "some stirred-up Moslems," as he saw it, none of it added up to a hill of beans compared to the importance of striking directly into the Eurasian heartland to free Eastern Europe, half a continent away, and shatter the Soviet empire. And these results did indeed mark Brzezinski as a grandmaster of geopolitics in all its ruthless realpolitik. (Mind you, the future suffering from those "stirred-up Moslems" now includes the rise of al-Qaeda, 9/11, and America's second Afghan War, as well as the unsettling of the Greater Middle East thanks to the growth of the Islamic extremism he first nurtured.)
In 1998, in retirement, Brzezinski again applied Sir Halford's theory, this time in a book titled The Grand Chessboard, a geopolitical treatise on America's capacity for extending its global hegemony. Although Washington was still basking in the pre-9/11 glow of its newly won grandeur as the world's sole superpower, he could already imagine the geopolitical constraints that might come into play and undermine that status. If the U.S. then seemed a colossus standing astride the world, Eurasia still remained "the globe's most important playing field... with preponderance over the entire Eurasian continent serving as the central basis for global primacy."
That Eurasian "megacontinent," Brzezinski observed, "is just too large, too populous, culturally too varied, and composed of too many historically ambitious and politically energetic states to be compliant toward even the most economically successful and politically preeminent global power." Washington, he predicted, could continue its half-century dominion over the "oddly shaped Eurasian chessboard -- extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok" only as long as it could preserve its unchallenged "perch on the Western periphery," while the vast "middle space" does not become "an assertive single entity," and the Eastern end of the world continent did not unify itself in a way that might lead to "the expulsion of America from its offshore bases." Should any of these critical conditions change, Brzezinski warned prophetically, "a potential rival to America might at some point arise."
Barack Obama, Defender of U.S. Global Hegemony
Less than a decade later, China emerged to challenge America's control of Eurasia and so threaten Washington's standing as the globe's great hegemon. While the U.S. military was mired in the Middle East, Beijing quietly began working to unify that vast "middle space" of Eurasia, while preparing to neutralize America's "offshore bases."
By the time Barack Obama entered the Oval Office in 2009, there were already the first signs of a serious geopolitical challenge that only the president and his closest advisers seemed to recognize. In a speech to the Australian parliament in November 2011, Obama said: "Let there be no doubt: in the Asia-Pacific in the twenty-first century, the United States of America is all in." After two long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan "that cost us dearly, in blood and treasure, " he explained, "the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia Pacific region," which is "the world's fastest-growing region -- and home to more than half the global economy." His initial deployment of just 2,500 U.S. troops to Australia seemed a slender down payment on his "deliberate and strategic decision" to become America's first "Pacific president," producing a great deal of premature criticism and derision.
Four years later, one CNN commentator would still be calling this "Obama's pivot to nowhere." Even seasoned foreign policy commentator Fareed Zakaria would ask, in early 2015, "Whatever happened to the pivot to Asia?" Answering his own question, Zakaria argued that the president was still mired in the Middle East and the centerpiece of that pivot, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, seemed to be facing certain defeat in Congress.
To the consternation of his critics, in the waning months of his presidency, from Iran to Cuba, from Burma to the Pacific Ocean, Obama has revealed himself as an American strategist potentially capable of laying the groundwork for the continued planetary dominion of the United States deep into the twenty-first century. In the last 16 months of his presidency, with a bit of grit and luck and a final diplomatic surge -- concluding the nuclear treaty with Iran to prevent another debilitating Middle Eastern conflict, winning congressional approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and completing negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership -- Obama just might secure the U.S. a significant extension of its waning global hegemony.
Specifics aside, the world's two most powerful nations, China and the United States, seem to have developed conflicting geopolitical strategies to guide their struggle for global power. Whether Beijing will succeed in moving ever further toward unifying Asia, Africa, and Europe into that world island or Washington will persist with Obama's strategy of splitting that land mass along its axial divisions via trans-oceanic trade won't become clear for another decade or two.
We still cannot say whether the outcome of this great game will be decided through an almost invisible commercial competition or a more violent drama akin to history's last comparable imperial transition, the protracted rivalry between Napoleon's "continental system" and Britain's maritime strategy at the start of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, we are starting to see the broad parameters of an epochal geopolitical contest likely to shape the world's destiny in the coming decades of this still young twenty-first century.
Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author, most recently, of Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation, and co-editor of Endless Empire: Europe's Eclipse, Spain's Retreat, America's Decline.
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Copyright 2015 Alfred W. McCoy
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