Brzezinski hasn't been an important policy maker for like 30 years.
----- Original Message ---- From: Patrick Bond <pbond at mail.ngo.za>
So what about the rationale from Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of Washington’s most aggressive strategists, who wrote in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, about the ‘chief geopolitical prize’: "How America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A glance at the map suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75% of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60% of the world’s GNP and about three‑fourths of the world’s known energy resources... "The world’s energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the US Department of Energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50% between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia’s economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea... "It follows that America’s primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it... To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.[i]" [i]. Brzezinski, Z. (1997), The Grand Chessboard, New York, pp.30-31, 125, 40. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk