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In the above-quoted article Brzezinski also wrote, in addressing Turkey, that "Regular consultations with Ankara regarding the future of the Caspian Sea basin and Central Asia would foster Turkey's sense of strategic partnership with the United States. America should also support Turkish aspirations to have a pipeline from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Ceyhan on its own Mediterranean coast serve as a major outlet for the Caspian sea basin energy reserves."
Eight years later, in 2005, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline transporting Caspian Sea oil to Europe came online, followed by the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum natural gas pipeline and the Kars-Akhalkalaki-Tbilisi-Baku railway, with the Nabucco natural gas pipeline next to be activated. The last-named is already slated to include, in addition to Caspian supplies, gas from Iraq and North Africa.
The book whose foreword Brzezinski's "A Geostrategy for Eurasia" in a way was, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And It's Geostrategic Imperatives, laid out in greater detail plans that have been expanded upon in the interim.
The volume's preface states, "It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book....Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran....Averting this contingency, however remote it may be, will require a display of US geostrategic skill on the western, eastern, and southern perimeters of Eurasia simultaneously."
In pursuance of "America's role as the first, only, and last truly global superpower," Brzezinski noted that "the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia. For half a millennium, world affairs were dominated by Eurasian powers and peoples who fought with one another for regional domination and reached out for global power. Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained."
The military fist inside the diplomatic glove is and will remain NATO.
"The emergence of a truly united Europe - especially if that should occur with constructive American support - will require significant changes in the structure and processes of the NATO alliance, the principal link between America and Europe. NATO provides not only the main mechanism for the exercise of US influence regarding European matters but the basis for the politically critical American military presence in Western Europe....Eurasia is thus the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played."
In a section with the heading "The NATO Imperative," the author reiterated earlier policy demands: "It follows that a wider Europe and an enlarged NATO will serve well both the short-term and the longer-term goals of US policy. A larger Europe will expand the range of American influence -- and, through the admission of new Central European members, also increase in the European councils the number of states with a pro-American proclivity -- without simultaneously creating a Europe politically so integrated that it could soon challenge the United States on geopolitical matters of high importance to America elsewhere, particularly in the Middle East."
A Europe united under the EU and especially NATO is to be strong enough to contain, isolate and increasingly confront Russia as the central component of U.S. plans for control of Eurasia and the world, but cannot be allowed to conduct an independent foreign policy, particularly in regard to Russia and the Middle East. European NATO allies are to assist Washington in preventing the emergence of "the most dangerous scenario...a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran" such as has been adumbrated since in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Four years after the publication of The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski's recommended chess move was made: The U.S. and NATO invaded Afghanistan and expanded into Central Asia where Russian, Chinese and Iranian interests converge and where the basis for their regional cooperation existed, and Western military bases were established in the former Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where they remain for the indefinite future.
Western-controlled pipelines traverse the South Caucasus - Azerbaijan and Georgia - to drive Russia and Iran out of the European and ultimately world energy markets, with a concomitant U.S. and NATO takeover of the armed forces of both nations. The two countries have also been tapped for increased troop deployments and transport routes for the war in South Asia.
The West is completing the process described by Brzezinski in his 1997 book in which he stated "In effect, by the mid-1990s a bloc, quietly led by Ukraine and comprising Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and sometimes also Kazakhstan, Georgia and Moldova, had informally emerged to obstruct Russian efforts to use the CIS as the tool for political integration."
Note, not to obstruct a new "imperial" Russia from exploiting the Commonwealth of Independent States to dominate much less absorb former parts not only of the Soviet Union but of historical Russia, but to integrate - or rather maintain the integration of - nations which were within one state until eighteen years ago. At that time, 1991, the Soviet Union precipitately disintegrated into fifteen new nations and four independent "frozen conflict" zones - Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia and Transdniester - and Russia made a 180 degree turn in its political structure and orientation, both domestically and in its foreign policy.
The response to those developments by the U.S. and its NATO cohorts was to scent blood and move in for the kill.
Starting in 1994 NATO recruited all fifteen former Soviet republics into its Partnership for Peace program, which has subsequently prepared ten nations - all in Eastern Europe, three of them former Soviet republics - for full membership.
As noted above, in 1997 the West absorbed four and for a period five former Soviet states - Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Moldova and Uzbekistan - into the GUAM, now Organization for Democracy and Economic Development, format, which has recently been expanded to include Armenia and Belarus with the European Union's Eastern Partnership initiative. The latter includes half (six of twelve) of the CIS and former CIS nations, all except for Russia and the five Central Asian countries. [1]
