Humanitarian Realpolitik-4
When Madeleine Albright took over the State Department from Warren Christopher in
early 1997, her promotion was presented to the public more as a personal success for a
woman than as a corporate success for a policy design. At its most informative, The New
York Times, mentioned influential policy-makers as if they were benevolent uncles ready to
give encouragement to a lady. Three months after she took office, it was reported:
"Ms. Albright has reached out for advice. She has talked with Zbigniew Brzezinski;
the departing president of the Carnegie Endowment, Morton Abramowitz; the philanthropist
George Soros; and Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations."
If Abramowitz may be considered the éminence grise behind the whole "humanitarian
intervention" policy, Brzezinski provided a geostrategic rationale. Brzezinski has no inhibitions
about using high principles in the power game. In Paris in January 1998 to promote the
French edition of his book, The Grand Chessboard, he was asked about an apparent
"paradox" between the fact that his book was steeped in Realpolitik, whereas, in
his days as National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski had been the
"defender of human rights".
Brzezinski waved the paradox aside. There is none, he replied. "I elaborated
that doctrine in agreement with President Carter, as it was the best way to destabilize
the Soviet Union. And it worked".
Of course, it took more than nice words about human rights
to destabilize the Soviet Union. It took war. And Brzezinski was very active on that front. As he told a second French weekly
during his book promotion tour, the CIA had begun bank-rolling counter- revolutionary
Afghan forces in mid-1979, half a year before the Soviet Union moved into Afghanistan on a
"stabilizing" mission around New Year's Day 1980. "We did not push the
Russians into intervening, but we knowingly increased the possibility that they would.
That secret operation was an excellent idea. The effect was to draw the Russians into the
Afghan trap."
Brzezinski rightly felt he could be forthright about such matters as humanitarian
entrapment in Paris, where the policy elite admires nothing so much in American leaders as
unabashed cynical power politics. This admiration is most acute when the French are
offered a share in it, as was the case with Brzezinski and his book. France, wrote
Brzezinski, "is an essential partner in the important task of permanently locking a
democratic Germany into Europe", which means preventing Germany from building its own
separate sphere of influence to the East, possibly including Russia -- a connection that
Brzezinski's policy recommendations are designed to forestall at all costs. "This is
the historic role of the Franco-German relationship, and the expansion of both the EU and
NATO eastward should enhance the importance of that relationship as Europe's inner core.
Finally, France is not strong enough either to obstruct America on the geostrategic
fundamentals of America's European policy or to become by itself a leader of Europe as
such. Hence, its peculiarities and even its tantrums can be tolerated".
These assurances may contribute to explaining the mystery -- as it was widely
perceived in other countries -- of France's strong support to NATO's Kosovo war, second
only to Britain and in disharmony with reactions in Germany and Italy. That is, the French
elite had been given to understand this war as part of the Brzezinski design for a
transatlantic Europe giving France a politico-military leadership role offsetting
Germany's economic predominance.
Brzezinski frankly sets the goal for U.S. policy: "to perpetuate America's own dominant position for at least a
generation and preferably longer still". This involves creating a "geopolitical
framework" around NATO that will initially include Ukraine and exclude Russia.
This will establish the geostrategic basis for controlling conflict in what Brzezinski
calls "the Eurasian Balkans", the huge area between the Eastern shore of the
Black Sea to China, which includes the Caspian Sea and its petroleum resources, a top
priority for U.S. foreign policy. In the policy elites of both
Britain and France, perpetuation of Trans-Atlantic domination could be understood as a way
of preventing a Russo-German rapprochement able to dominate the continent.
Along with Jeane Kirkpatrick,
Frank Carlucci, William Odom and
Stephan Solarz, Brzezinski has joined the anti-Serb crusade
in yet another new Washington policy shop, the "Balkan Action Council", calling
for all-out war against Yugoslavia over Kosovo.
In the Brzezinski scheme of things, Yugoslavia is a testing
ground and a metaphor for the Soviet Union. In this metaphor, "Serbia" is
Russia, and Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, etc., are Ukraine, the Baltic States, Georgia and the
former Soviet Republics of "the Eurasian Balkans". This being the case, the
successful secession of Croatia and company from Yugoslavia sets a positive precedent for
maintaining the independence of Ukraine and its progressive inclusion in the European
Union and NATO, which he sets for the decade 2005-2015 as a "reasonable time
frame".
The little Balkan "Balkans" appear on a map on page 22 of The Grand
Chessboard interestingly shaded in three gradations representing U.S. geopolitical
preponderance (dark), U.S. political influence (medium) and the apparent absence of either
(white). Darkly shaded (like the U.S., Canada and Western Europe) are Hungary, Rumania,
Bulgaria and Turkey. Medium shading covers Slovakia, Moldavia and Ukraine as well as
Georgia and most of the "Eurasian Balkans". Glaringly white, like Russia, are
Yugoslavia and Greece. For Brzezinski, Belgrade was a potential
relay for Moscow. Serbs might be unaware of this, but in the geostrategic view, they were
only so many surrogate Russians.
[ Clinton Doctrine ] [ Importance of War Crimes ] [ Humanitarian Realpolitik ] [ Cultural Divides ] [ Scenarios Reach the TV Screen ] [ Abramowitz-Albright Policy For Yugoslavia ] [ How to sabotage the OSCE ] [ How to obtain "Justice" ] [ Unified Empires ] [ History as Melodrama ]
