The Grand Chessboard: A cold and unemotional look at the US proxy war in Ukraine
War is a game. A tactical game, a game of strategy, a game of high stakes. Planned, analysed, revised, strategised, fought, and ultimately won or lost. Rarely does war end in a stalemate. The stakes are too high. It’s brutal, unforgiving and impartial.
There’s perhaps no book that reflects this gamified aspect of geopolitics (of which war is at the heart) as much as Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. It reduces conquest and neo-imperialism to nothing more than the shuffling of a few pawns, or the careful positioning of key players at strategic places on the great chessboard of the earth.
Brzezinski was at the heart of American foreign policy from the 1950s, working closely with presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter. They say he was a key mentor to Barack Obama.
It was in the abovementioned book penned in 1997 that he laid out the geostrategic objectives essential to the United States if they were to maintain their global preeminence in matters military, financial and economic. He identified France, Germany, Russia, China, and India as the five major powers in competition with the US (note the absence of Britain and Japan). He identified five more as what he called ‘geopolitical pivots’…
