The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives

What is The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic about?

Written in 1997, when the United States had come out of the Cold War as the first power with genuinely global reach, this book asks how long that primacy can last. Brzezinski starts from geography: Eurasia holds most of the world's people, industry and energy, so American power rests on preventing any rival from organizing the continent against it. He sorts states into active geostrategic players — France, Germany, Russia, China, India — and geopolitical pivots such as Ukraine, Turkey and South Korea, whose alignment matters more than their strength. He then works region by region through Europe, a diminished Russia, the Central Asian belt he calls the Eurasian Balkans, and East Asia. The prescription is a deliberate strategy of managing rivals and building a trans-Eurasian security framework while the window is open, argued in the idiom of classical geopolitics for policymakers and students of international relations.

Zbigniew Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981 and taught international relations at Columbia and Johns Hopkins; his other books include Between Two Ages, The Grand Failure and Strategic Vision.