Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power

Abstract

Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power by Zbigniew Brzezinski New York: Basic Books, 2012 208 pages $26.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Is America up or down? Will China eclipse America as the world's hegemon? What is the shape of the global landscape emerging in the twenty-first century, and how should the US chart its course in this new world? These questions of critical moment are addressed by the eminent scholar and practitioner of statecraft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in Strategic Vision. His book invites comparison with Robert Kagan's recent work, The World America Made. While Kagan calls for a muscular defense of a historically unique liberal world order made by America, Brzezinski offers a new strategic vision for a world where American dominance is no longer attainable. According to Brzezinski, our interactive, interdependent world is marked by a shift in geopolitical power from West to East, with the rise to global preeminence of China, India, and Japan. This redistribution of power is accompanied by the mass political awakening of previously repressed peoples in the Arab world and Central or Eastern Europe. These trends portend instability, yet human survival requires global cooperation. Europe is a spent political model for the world taking shape, and US global supremacy is no longer possible. American society still appeals to the world's peoples, provided it can revitalize itself and adopt a new strategic vision. Brzezinski ascribes greater significance to the nation's domestic problems than does Kagan: a crushing national debt; a financial system driven by self-destructive greed; widening inequality; decaying infrastructure; a citizenry ignorant of the world; and a gridlocked political system. The author denounces America's Iraq and Afghanistan imperial wars and repeats the canard that President George W. Bush's global war on terrorism fostered anti-Islamic sentiment, tarnishing our international reputation. In fact, the Bush administration scrupulously tried to avoid this. On 17 September, six days after 9/11, President Bush visited the Islamic Center in Washington to assure members that America understands the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful and that we are at war with radical jihadist terrorists, not Islam. The President and his aides reaffirmed that message in numerous speeches and remarks. Surveying the world "after America," Brzezinski predicts not Chinese dominance, but instead, like Kagan, a chaotic multipolar world where several roughly equal powers compete for regional hegemony. This conflict will jeopardize international cooperation and the promotion of democracy while placing the fate of the global commons up for grabs. East and South Asia will be the flashpoints of geopolitical rivalry with Japan, India, and Russia wary of a rising China. Brzezinski states as axiomatic that the United States must avoid military involvement or, quite differently, any conflict on the mainland between rival Asian powers. The United States, he argues, should accept Beijing's preeminence on the Asian mainland and its emergence as Asia's leading economic power. We should balance this by maintaining close ties with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, and Indonesia, as well as by cultivating cordial relations with India. Brzezinski entertains cautious optimism that continued modernization and prosperity of a peaceful rising China will foster political pluralism and make it more amenable to the international democratic mainstream. What role will America play in this new world? Brzezinski advocates enlarging the West by drawing Turkey and Russia closer to the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization while balancing Asian rivalries through a cooperative partnership with China that reconciles it to its Asian neighbors. This realistic strategy, he claims, promotes a "revival of the West and facilitates the stabilization of the East within a broader cooperative framework. …