In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard , Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the United States "as the sole and, indeed, first truly global power" using France, Germany, Poland and Ukraine as "The Democratic Bridgehead for projecting into Eurasia the international democratic collective order." Yet even as the United States began to flex its unchallenged global power the ethnic flaw undergirding Brzezinski's motives began to show.
When asked the real reason why the United States had taken such a hard line toward the Soviet Union on Afghanistan at the 1995 Nobel Symposium, President Carter's CIA Director Stansfield Turner replied the responsibility could only be located in one individual. "Brzezinski's name comes up here every five minutes; but nobody has as yet mentioned that he is a Pole," Turner said, implying that it was ethnic hatred of Russia that had propelled his policy against the Soviet Union; not just geopolitics. Yet anybody who knew Brzezinski at the time knew that is exactly what he was doing, but they had all looked the other way.
The year before he died Brzezinski delivered a profound revelation in an article titled "Toward a Global Realignment" warning that "the United States is still the world's politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity, but given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no longer the globally imperial power." Zbigniew Brzezinski had expected Poland to be at the center of America's conquest of Eurasia. But after years of American missteps he realized his dream would never be. Though unapologetic at using his imperial hubris to lure the Soviets into Afghanistan, he did not expect his own beloved American Empire to fall into the same trap and ultimately lived long enough to see that in the end, his use of imperial power had won him only a Pyrrhic victory.
Copyright - 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
The Grand Illusion of Imperial Power 2 Part Series
Part 1: How the Neocon dream for everlasting Hegemony turned America into a nightmare
Part 2: The Tragic Imperialist: Brzezinski, Afghanistan and the End of Emperors
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story , Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice . Visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk.com
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