Ukraine: ZBIG's Grand Chess Board & How The West Was Checkmated

At the end of the Cold War, the Russian people had a tremendous amount of goodwill toward Americans. They loved American music and movies and hoped to be accepted into the Western world on equitable terms. A decisive opportunity had presented itself for a more cooperative international framework to emerge through a good faith effort.

On February 9, 1990, George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker negotiated a gentleman's agreement with Mikhail Gorbachev that, in exchange for allowing a reunified Germany as a NATO member, NATO would not be expanded any farther east. The stage was thus set for global cooperation and the establishment of realpolitik as the operative canon of geostrategic and geopolitical relations. The fruit of such a relationship, many believed, would be a peace dividend.

Tragically, this opportunity was squandered, mostly due to the American political class's triumphalist attitude and a desire to maintain the power and wealth they had established based on an adversarial framework. Thus the march eastward, converting former Soviet satellites to NATO forward operating bases, began a few short years after Baker’s promise to Gorbachev.

On September 17, 1997 Zbigniew Brzeziński’s book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives was published. It spoke clearly to US financial elites and their political courtesans in regards to maintaining US primacy. Its thesis, as stated by Brzeziński, “It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger should emerge capable of dominating Eurasia and thus challenging America’s global pre-eminence.” Since the fall of the Soviet Union the implementation of Zbig’s Grand Chessboard strategy has continued unabated and Washington has moved at a feverish pace to bring the endgame, a checkmate, for Russian and ostensibly Chinese power projection in Eurasia.

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