THE EDITORS (MONTHLY REVIEW)
As we write these notes at the beginning of March 2022, the eight-year limited civil war in Ukraine has turned into a full-scale war. This represents a turning point in the New Cold War and a great human tragedy. By threatening global nuclear holocaust, these events are also now endangering the entire world. To understand the origins of the New Cold War and the onset of the current Russian entry into the Ukrainian civil war, it is necessary to go back to decisions associated with the creation of the New World Order made in Washington when the previous Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Within months, Paul Wolfowitz, then under secretary of defense for policy in the George H. W. Bush administration, issued a Defense Planning Guidance stating: “Our policy [after the fall of the Soviet Union] must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor.” Wolfowitz emphasized that “Russia will remain the strongest military power in Eurasia.” Extraordinary efforts were therefore necessary to weaken Russia’s geopolitical position permanently and irrevocably, before it would be in a position to recover, bringing into the Western strategic orbit all of those states now surrounding it that had formerly either been parts of the Soviet Union or that had fallen within its sphere of influence (“Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan: ‘Preventing the Re-Emergence of a New Rival’,” New York Times, March 8, 1992).
The Wolfowitz Defense Planning Guidance was adopted by Washington and all the leading U.S. strategic planners, whose views at that point increasingly reached back to the classical geopolitical doctrines introduced by Halford Mackinder in imperial Britain before the First World War, and that were further developed by Karl Haushofer in Nazi Germany and Nicholas John Spykman in the United States during the 1930s and ’40s. It was Mackinder who in 1904 introduced the notion that geopolitical control of the world depended on domination of Eurasia (the main land mass of the European and Asian continents), which he referred to as the Heartland. The rest of Asia and Africa together with the Heartland made up the World Island. Thus arose his oft-quoted dictum:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:
Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island:
Who rules the World Island commands the World.
This geopolitical doctrine was, from the first, aimed at world dominance and has governed the imperial strategy of the leading capitalist nations ever since, in the form of what is commonly referred to as “grand strategy.” But while it dictated the thinking of such U.S. national security figures as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, geopolitics was for a long time downplayed in the public sphere due to popular identification of it with the doctrines of Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, with the demise of the Soviet Union and the growth of the United States as a unipolar power, geopolitics and the Heartland doctrine were once again openly avowed by U.S. strategic planners, generating a new post-Cold War imperial grand strategy (John Bellamy Foster, “The New Geopolitics of Empire,” Monthly Review 57, no. 8 [January 2006]).
The most important architect of this new imperial strategy was Brzezinski, who earlier on, as Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, had laid the trap for the Soviets in Afghanistan. It was under Brzezinski’s direction, following a secret directive signed by Carter in July 1979, that the CIA, working together with the arc of political Islam stretching from Muhammad Zia-ul Haq’s Pakistan to the Saudi royals, recruited, armed, and trained the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. The CIA’s buildup of the Mujahideen and various terrorist groups in Afghanistan precipitated the Soviet intervention, leading to an endless war that contributed to the destabilization of the Soviet Union itself. To queries as to whether he regretted establishing the arc of terrorism that was to lead to 9/11 and beyond, Brzezinski (who posed in photos with Mujahideen fighters) responded by simply saying that the destruction of the Soviet Union was worth it (Natylie Baldwin, “Brzezinski’s Mad Imperial Strategy,” Natylie’s Place, August 13, 2014; Ted Snider, “Living with Brzezinski’s Mess,” Antiwar.com, August 26, 2021, “Brzezinski’s Prophecy About Ukraine,” Teller Report, February 15, 2022).
Brzezinski remained a key advisor to subsequent U.S. administrations but did not have a prominent official role, given his hawkish reputation and the extremely negative view of him in Russia, which, in the early 1990s under Boris Yeltsin, had a close, puppet-like connection to Washington. Nevertheless, more than any other U.S. strategic thinker, it was Brzezinski who articulated the U.S. grand strategy on Russia that was enacted over three decades by successive U.S. administrations. The NATO wars that dismembered Yugoslavia in the 1990s overlapped with the onset of NATO’s eastward expansion. Washington had promised the Kremlin under Mikhail Gorbachev, at the time of German reunification, that NATO would expand “not one inch” to the East into the former Warsaw Pact countries. Nevertheless, in October 1996, Bill Clinton, while campaigning for reelection, indicated that he favored the expansion of NATO into the former Soviet sphere and a policy was put into motion the next year, followed by all subsequent U.S. administrations. Shortly afterward, in 1997, Brzezinski published his book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, in which he declared that the United States was in a position “for the first time ever [for] a non-Eurasian power” of becoming “the key arbiter of Eurasian power relations,” while also constituting “the world’s paramount power.” In this way, the United States would become the “first” and the “last” global empire (Brzezinski, Grand Chessboard [Basic Books, 1997], xiii, 209; Diana Johnstone, Fool’s Crusade [Monthly Review Press, 2002]; “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard,” National Security Archive, George Washington University; “President W. J. Clinton to the People of Detroit,” United States Information Agency, October 22, 1996).
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