U.S. Should Pursue 'Open Door,' not Primacy

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THE GRAND CHESSBOARD – American Primacy And It's Geostrategic Imperatives

A War in the Planning for Four Years

by Michael Ruppert
From The Wilderness Publications, November 2001

Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG) at globalresearch.ca 11 November 2001


Zbigniew Brzezinski and the CFR Put War Plans in a 1997 Book – It is "A Blueprint for World Dictatorship," Says a Former German Defense and NATO Official Who Warned of Global Domination in 1984, in an Exclusive Interview With FTW

Summary

"THE GRAND CHESSBOARD – American Primacy And It's Geostrategic Imperatives," Zbigniew Brzezinski, Basic Books, 1997.

These are the very first words in the book, "Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power." - p. xiii. Eurasia is all of the territory east of Germany and Poland, stretching all the way through Russia and China to the Pacific Ocean. It includes the Middle East and most of the Indian subcontinent. The key to controlling Eurasia, says Brzezinski, is controlling the Central Asian Republics. And the key to controlling the Central Asian republics is Uzbekistan. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Uzbekistan was forcefully mentioned by President George W. Bush in his address to a joint session of Congress just days after the attacks of September 11 as the very first place that the U.S. military would be deployed.

As FTW has documented in previous stories, major deployments of U.S. and British forces had taken place before the attacks. And the U.S. Army and the CIA had been active in Uzbekistan for several years. There is now evidence that what the world is witnessing is a cold and calculated war plan - at least four years in the making – and that, from reading Brzezinski's own words about Pearl Harbor, the World Trade Center attacks were just the trigger needed to set the final conquest in motion.

FTW, November 7, 2001, 1200 PST – There's a quote often attributed to Allen Dulles after it was noted that the final 1964 report of the Warren Commission on the assassination of JFK contained dramatic inconsistencies. Those inconsistencies, in effect, disproved the Commission's own final conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone on November 22, 1963. Dulles, a career spy, Wall Street lawyer, the CIA director whom JFK had fired after the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco - and the Warren Commission member who took charge of the investigation and final report - is reported to have said, "The American people don't read."

Some Americans do read. So do Europeans and Asians and Africans and Latin Americans.

World events since the attacks of September 11, 2001 have not only been predicted, but also planned, orchestrated and – as their architects would like to believe – controlled. The current Central Asian war is not a response to terrorism, nor is it a reaction to Islamic fundamentalism. It is in fact, in the words of one of the most powerful men on the planet, the beginning of a final conflict before total world domination by the United States leads to the dissolution of all national governments. This, says Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member and former Carter National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, will lead to nation states being incorporated into a new world order, controlled solely by economic interests as dictated by banks, corporations and ruling elites concerned with the maintenance (by manipulation and war) of their power. As a means of intimidation for the unenlightened reader who happens upon this frightening plan – the plan of the CFR - Brzezinski offers the alternative of a world in chaos unless the U.S. controls the planet by whatever means are necessary and likely to succeed.

This position is corroborated by Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl, Ph.D. a former German defense ministry official and advisor to former NATO Secretary General Manfred Werner. On November 6, he told FTW, "The interests behind the Bush Administration, such as the CFR, The Trilateral Commission – founded by Brzezinski for David Rockefeller – and the Bliderberger Group, have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens."

Brzezinski's own words – laid against the current official line that the United States is waging a war to end terrorism - are self-incriminating. In an ongoing series of articles, FTW has consistently established that the U.S. government had foreknowledge of the World Trade Center attacks and chose not to stop them because it needed to secure public approval for a war that is now in progress. It is a war, as described by Vice President **** Cheney, "that may not end in our lifetimes." What that means is that it will not end until all armed groups, anywhere in the world, which possess the political, economic or military ability to resist the imposition of this dictatorship, have been destroyed.

These are the "terrorists" the U.S. now fights in Afghanistan and plans to soon fight all over the globe.

Before exposing Brzezinski (and those he represents) with his own words, or hearing more from Dr. Koeppl, it is worthwhile to take a look at Brzezinski's background.

According to his resume Brzezinski, holding a 1953 Ph.D. from Harvard, lists the following achievements:

Counselor, Center for Strategic and International Studies Professor of American Foreign Policy, Johns Hopkins University National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter (1977-81) Trustee and founder of the Trilateral Commission International advisor of several major US/Global corporations Associate of Henry Kissinger Under Ronald Reagan – member of NSC-Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy Under Ronald Reagan – member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board Past member, Board of Directors, The Council on Foreign Relations 1988 – Co-chairman of the Bush National Security Advisory Task Force.

Brzezinski is also a past attendee and presenter at several conferences of the Bliderberger group – a non-partisan affiliation of the wealthiest and most powerful families and corporations on the planet.

The Grand Chessboard

Brzezinski sets the tone for his strategy by describing Russia and China as the two most important countries – almost but not quite superpowers - whose interests that might threaten the U.S. in Central Asia. Of the two, Brzezinski considers Russia to be the more serious threat. Both nations border Central Asia. In a lesser context he describes the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Iran and Kazakhstan as essential "lesser" nations that must be managed by the U.S. as buffers or counterweights to Russian and Chinese moves to control the oil, gas and minerals of the Central Asian Republics (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan).

He also notes, quite clearly (p. 53) that any nation that might become predominant in Central Asia would directly threaten the current U.S. control of oil resources in the Persian Gulf. In reading the book it becomes clear why the U.S. had a direct motive for the looting of some $300 billion in Russian assets during the 1990s, destabilizing Russia's currency (1998) and ensuring that a weakened Russia would have to look westward to Europe for economic and political survival, rather than southward to Central Asia. A dependent Russia would lack the military, economic and political clout to exert influence in the region and this weakening of Russia would explain why Russian President Vladimir Putin has been such a willing ally of U.S. efforts to date. (See FTW Vol. IV, No. 1 – March 31, 2001)

An examination of selected quotes from "The Grand Chessboard," in the context of current events reveals the darker agenda behind military operations that were planned long before September 11th, 2001.

""¦The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world's paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power"¦ (p. xiii)

""¦ But in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book. (p. xiv)

"The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (pp 24-5)

"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia"¦ Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia – and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained. (p.30)

"America's withdrawal from the world or because of the sudden emergence of a successful rival – would produce massive international instability. It would prompt global anarchy." (p. 30)

"In that context, how America 'manages' Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources." (p.31)

Two basic steps are thus required: first, to identify the geostrategically dynamic Eurasian states that have the power to cause a potentially important shift in the international distribution of power and to decipher the central external goals of their respective political elites and the likely consequences of their seeking to attain them;"¦ second, to formulate specific U.S. policies to offset, co-opt, and/or control the above"¦ (p. 40)

""¦To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together." (p.40)

"Henceforth, the United States may have to determine how to cope with regional coalitions that seek to push America out of Eurasia, thereby threatening America's status as a global power." (p.55)

"Uzbekistan – with its much more ethnically homogeneous population of approximately 25 million and its leaders emphasizing the country's historic glories – has become increasingly assertive in affirming the region's new postcolonial status." (p.95)

"Thus, even the ethnically vulnerable Kazakhstan joined the other Central Asian states in abandoning the Cyrillic alphabet and replacing it with Latin script as adapted earlier by Turkey. In effect, by the mid-1990s a bloc, quietly led by Ukraine and comprising Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and sometimes also Kazakhstan, Georgia and Moldova, had informally emerged to obstruct Russian efforts to use the CIS as the tool for political integration." (p.114)

""¦Hence, support for the new post-Soviet states – for geopolitical pluralism in the space of the former Soviet empire – has to be an integral part of a policy designed to induce Russia to exercise unambiguously its European option. Among these states. Three are geopolitically especially important: Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine." (p. 121) "Uzbekistan, nationally the most vital and the most populous of the central Asian states, represents the major obstacle to any renewed Russian control over the region. Its independence is critical to the survival of the other Central Asian states, and it is the least vulnerable to Russian pressures." (p. 121)

Referring to an area he calls the "Eurasian Balkans" and a 1997 map in which he has circled the exact location of the current conflict – describing it as the central region of pending conflict for world dominance - Brzezinski writes: "Moreover, they [the Central Asian Republics] are of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and more powerful neighbors, namely Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China also signaling an increasing political interest in the region. But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold." (p.124) [Emphasis added]

The world's energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the U.S. Department of energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia's economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea." (p.125)

"Kazakhstan is the shield and Uzbekistan is the soul for the region's diverse national awakenings." (p.130)

"Uzbekistan is, in fact, the prime candidate for regional leadership in Central Asia." (p.130) "Once pipelines to the area have been developed, Turkmenistan's truly vast natural gas reserves augur a prosperous future for the country's people. (p.132)

"In fact, an Islamic revival – already abetted from the outside not only by Iran but also by Saudi Arabia – is likely to become the mobilizing impulse for the increasingly pervasive new nationalisms, determined to oppose any reintegration under Russian – and hence infidel – control." (p. 133).

"For Pakistan, the primary interest is to gain Geostrategic depth through political influence in Afghanistan – and to deny to Iran the exercise of such influence in Afghanistan and Tajikistan – and to benefit eventually from any pipeline construction linking Central Asia with the Arabian Sea." (p.139)

"Moreover, sensible Russian leaders realize that the demographic explosion underway in the new states means that their failure to sustain economic growth will eventually create an explosive situation along Russia's entire southern frontier." (p.141) [This would explain why Putin would welcome U.S. military presence to stabilize the region.]

"Turkmenistan"¦ has been actively exploring the construction of a new pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea"¦" (p.145)

"It follows that America's primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it." (p148)

"China's growing economic presence in the region and its political stake in the area's independence are also congruent with America's interests." (p.149)

"America is now the only global superpower, and Eurasia is the globe's central arena. Hence, what happens to the distribution of power on the Eurasian continent will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy and to America's historical legacy." (p.194)

""¦the Eurasian Balkans – threatens to become a cauldron of ethnic conflict and great-power rivalry." (p.195)

"Without sustained and directed American involvement, before long the forces of global disorder could come to dominate the world scene. And the possibility of such a fragmentation is inherent in the geopolitical tensions not only of today's Eurasia but of the world more generally." (p.194)

"With warning signs on the horizon across Europe and Asia, any successful American policy must focus on Eurasia as a whole and be guided by a Geostrategic design." (p.197)

"That puts a premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America's primacy"¦" (p. 198)

"The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role." (p. 198)

"In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last." (p.209)

"Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat." (p. 211) [Emphasis added]

The Horror – And Comments From Someone Who Worked With Brzezinski

Brzezinski's book is sublimely arrogant. While singing the praises of the IMF and the World Bank, which have economically terrorized nations on every continent, and while totally ignoring the worldwide terrorist actions of the U.S. government that have led to genocide; cluster bombings of civilian populations from Kosovo, to Laos, to Iraq, to Afghanistan; the development and battlefield use of both biological and chemical agents such as Sarin gas; and the financial rape of entire cultures it would leave the reader believing that such actions are for the good of mankind.

While seconded from the German defense ministry to NATO in the late 1970s, Dr. Johannes Koeppl - mentioned at the top of this article - traveled to Washington on more than one occasion. He also met with Brzezinski in the White House on more than one occasion. His other Washington contacts included Steve Larabee from the CFR, John J. McCloy, former CIA Director, economist Milton Friedman, and officials from Carter's Office of Management and Budget. He is the first person I have ever interviewed who has made a direct presentation at a Bliderberger conference and he has also made numerous presentations to sub-groups of the Trilateral Commission. That was before he spoke out against them.

His fall from grace was rapid after he realized that Brzezinski was part of a group intending to impose a world dictatorship. "In 1983/4 I warned of a take-over of world governments being orchestrated by these people. There was an obvious plan to subvert true democracies and selected leaders were not being chosen based upon character but upon their loyalty to an economic system run by the elites and dedicated to preserving their power.

"All we have now are pseudo-democracies."

Koeppl recalls meeting U.S. Congressman Larry McDonald in Nuremburg in the early 80s. McDonald, who was then contemplating a run for the Presidency, was a severe critic of these elites. He was killed in the Russian shootdown of Korean Air flight 007 in 1985. Koeppl believes that it might have been an assassination. Over the years many writers have made these allegations about 007 and the fact that someone with Koeppl's credentials believes that an entire plane full of passengers would be destroyed to eliminate one man offers a chilling opinion of the value placed on human life by the powers that be.

In 1983, Koeppl warned, through Op-Ed pieces published in NEWSWEEK and elsewhere, that Brzezinski and the CFR were part of an effort to impose a global dictatorship. His fall from grace was swift. "It was a criminal society that I was dealing with. It was not possible to publish anymore in the so-called respected publications. My 30 year career in politics ended.

"The people of the western world have been trained to be good consumers; to focus on money, sports cars, beauty, consumer goods. They have not been trained to look for character in people. Therefore what we need is education for politicians, a form of training that instills in them a higher sense of ethics than service to money. There is no training now for world leaders. This is a shame because of the responsibility that leaders hold to benefit all mankind rather than to blindly pursue destructive paths.

"We also need education for citizens to be more efficient in their democracies, in addition to education for politicians that will create a new network of elites based upon character and social intelligence."

Koeppl, who wrote his 1989 doctoral thesis on NATO management, also authored a 1989 book – largely ignored because of its controversial revelations – entitled "The Most Important Secrets in the World." He maintains a German language web site at www.antaris.com and he can be reached by email at [email protected].

As to the present conflict Koeppl expressed the gravest concerns, "This is more than a war against terrorism. This is a war against the citizens of all countries. The current elites are creating so much fear that people don't know how to respond. But they must remember. This is a move to implement a world dictatorship within the next five years. There may not be another chance."
 
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When a Leader Missteps, a World Can Go Astray

In the months before the American invasion of Iraq, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, was one of the few members of the foreign policy establishment (along with Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to President George H. W. Bush) to speak out strongly about the dangers of going to war unilaterally against Saddam Hussein, and to warn, presciently it turns out, of the possibly dire consequences of doing so without a larger strategic plan. In August 2002, as the current Bush administration was already hurrying toward an invasion, Mr. Brzezinski cautioned that war "is too serious a business and too unpredictable in its dynamic consequences — especially in a highly flammable region — to be undertaken because of a personal peeve, demagogically articulated fears or vague factual assertions." In February 2003, just weeks before the invasion, he added that "an America that decides to act essentially on its own regarding Iraq" could "find itself quite alone in having to cope with the costs and burdens of the war's aftermath, not to mention widespread and rising hostility abroad."

In his compelling new book, "Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower," Mr. Brzezinski not only assesses the short- and long-term fallout of the Iraq war, but also puts that grim situation in perspective with the tumultuous global changes that have taken place in the last two decades. He dispassionately analyzes American foreign policy as conducted by the last three presidents — George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush — and he gives the reader a sobering analysis of where these leaders' cumulative decisions have left the United States as it now searches for an exit strategy from Iraq, faces potentially explosive situations in Iran and North Korea and copes with an increasingly alienated Europe and an increasingly assertive China.

Mr. Brzezinski's verdict on the current president's record — "catastrophic," he calls it — is nothing short of devastating. And his overall assessment of America's current plight is worrying as well: "Though in some dimensions, such as the military, American power may be greater in 2006 than in 1991, the country's capacity to mobilize, inspire, point in a shared direction and thus shape global realities has significantly declined. Fifteen years after its coronation as global leader, America is becoming a fearful and lonely democracy in a politically antagonistic world."

"Second Chance" is, in some respects, a continuation of the author's earlier books "The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership" (2004) and "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives" (1997), which examined the responsibilities and perils of global leadership facing America as the one superpower in a post-cold-war world. As in those books, Mr. Brzezinski employs a brisk, no-nonsense style here, using his erudition in history and foreign policy to lay out his views succinctly. A confirmed realist (a school of thinking willfully dismissed by the idealists and ideological hawks in the current Bush administration), the author writes with a keen understanding of the ways in which military or political actions in one part of the world can affect developments in another region, as well as a shrewd appreciation of the fallout of a global zeitgeist that is increasingly anti-imperialist, anti-Western and anti-American.

What this book does most strikingly is remind the reader just how drastically things have changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. At that point, Mr. Brzezinski writes, America was "globally admired" and "faced no peer, no rival, no threat, neither on the Western front nor the Eastern front, nor on the Southern fronts of the great cold war that had been waged for several decades on the massive Eurasian chessboard."

A mere decade and a half later, he argues, the United States is "widely viewed around the world with intense hostility," its "credibility in tatters," its military bogged down in the Middle East, "its formerly devoted allies distancing themselves."

Although Mr. Brzezinski holds the current president, George W. Bush, most responsible for undermining the United States' "geopolitical position" and for misunderstanding "the historical moment," he also points to misjudgments and missed opportunities on the part of his two predecessors in office.

Mr. Brzezinski gives the first President Bush high marks for handling "the collapse of the Soviet Union with aplomb" and mounting an international response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait "with impressive diplomatic skill and military resolve," but says he failed to "translate either triumph into an enduring historic success." The senior Mr. Bush, Mr. Brzezinski says, neither used "America's unique political influence and moral legitimacy" to help transform Russia into a genuine democracy, nor used the victory in the first gulf war strategically to press for an Israeli-Palestinian accord and help transform the Middle East. In the dozen years that followed, the author goes on, perception of the United States' role in the Middle East steadily deteriorated, as America "came to be perceived in the region, rightly or wrongly, not only as wearing the British imperialist mantle but as acting increasingly on behalf of Israel, professing peace but engaging in delaying tactics that facilitated the expansion of the settlements."

In Mr. Brzezinski's opinion, Bill Clinton deserves credit for setting forth parameters for a Middle East peace settlement at Camp David II, for expanding and consolidating the Atlantic alliance and for helping to stabilize the Balkans. But in the end, he contends that Mr. Clinton's "casual and politically opportunistic style of decision-making was not conducive to strategic clarity, and his faith in the historical determinism of globalization made such a strategy seem unnecessary."

By 1995, Mr. Brzezinski goes on, America's "global status was probably at its peak," but a "multiplicity of complex" situations that had surfaced in the wake of the cold war's end had metastasized: "As a result, the global totem-pole atop which Clinton stood tall rested on shaky ground."

Though the terrorist attacks of 9/11 wrought a moment of "global solidarity with America," Mr. Brzezinski writes, the Bush administration's swaggering unilateralism and "neocon Manicheanism" would turn a moment of opportunity into "a self-inflicted and festering wound while precipitating rising global hostility toward America." Indeed, he argues that the Iraq war "has caused calamitous damage to America's global standing," demonstrating that the United States "was able neither to rally the world to its cause nor to decisively prevail by use of arms."

Further, he says, "the war in Iraq has been a geopolitical disaster," diverting resources and attention from the terrorist threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan, even as it's increased "the terrorist threat to the United States" by fomenting resentment toward America and providing "fertile soil for new recruits to terrorism."

This precarious situation, Mr. Brzezinski says, means that "it will take years of deliberate effort and genuine skill to restore America's political credibility and legitimacy," placing enormous importance on the diplomatic and strategic skills of the next president "to fashion a truly post-cold-war globalist foreign policy."

"Nothing could be worse for America, and eventually the world," he writes at the end of this unsparing volume, "than if American policy were universally viewed as arrogantly imperial in a postimperial age, mired in a colonial relapse in a postcolonial time, selfishly indifferent in the face of unprecedented global interdependence, and culturally self-righteous in a religiously diverse world. The crisis of American superpower would then become terminal."
 

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The New Rules: U.S. Should Pursue 'Open Door,' not Primacy


Thomas P.M. Barnett | Bio | 21 Feb 2011

The decline of the American "empire" has been a persistent theme of the punditocracy these past several years, with the underlying logic being Washington's inability to extend, ad infinitum, the primacy seemingly conferred upon it at Cold War's end. The global financial crisis has now further revealed a suddenly -- and stunningly -- rebalanced global order, and as a result, Americans are supposed to dread the vast uncertainties of our allegedly "post-American world."

Worse, Americans are also being presented with a patently false binary choice: Should the U.S. do what is necessary to regain its primacy or simply let it slip away? Those who argue for renewed primacy take for granted the American-ness of their ambition, for surely only the unpatriotic among us will accept anything less than no. 1 as a grand strategic objective. Even those who argue against such "insane" ambition subtly buy into its logic, by presuming it has animated U.S. foreign policy these past several decades, with only our recent "hubris" having cost us our "greatness."

Both viewpoints could not be further from the truth.

The pursuit of primacy as a grand strategy is completely un-American in both its conception and execution. In fact, the Bush-Cheney neocons brought us far closer to an ideological coup d'état than any previous foreign policy scandals of note, including the secret wars of Nixon and Reagan. America's clear and succinct grand strategy, first enunciated by Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt when the U.S. was coming of age as a great power, has been the "open door." Primacy was never its prize or its purpose.

Instead, the goal was to end Europe's corrupt colonialism through the extension of our model of multinationalism based on states united, economies integrated and security provided for collectively. In this model, no one state is allowed primacy over the union's other members. Conversely, no one state's economic success is viewed as a zero-sum loss by the others, for all find ultimate benefit in the shared economic connectivity.

America's revolutionary impulse here is insidious: by empowering individuals through trade, we dis-intermediate the dictators. These United States are the original peer-to-peer ideology, with no false gods -- as in, monarchs -- required. Facebook and Twitter are simply its latest technological expressions, and they are exquisitely American in their deprimacizing impact -- the plaintive voices of the many overwhelming the self-serving dictates of the one.

If the "2.0 revolutions" of North Africa tell us anything, it's that America remains firmly on the side of the transformational future, unlike China and the rest of the authoritarian ranks. More to the point, America cannot be the world's most-consistent revisionist power and, at the same time, the keeper of any empire. Indeed, when it comes to the great empires of the 20th century, America played a profound role in dismantling all of them. On this score, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong combined can't hold a candle to Franklin Roosevelt.

The anti-empire crowd, which is still allergic to the Iraq War despite the emerging democracy that resulted from it, now condemns Washington's slowness in abandoning "useful" dictators. Instead, we should all regret how few true opportunities come along for truly liberating action, whether pre-emptively, through regime change, or retroactively, by supporting popular uprisings that show despots the door.

If we need a standard to guide our actions, let it be the sheer connectivity that we still instinctively spread with our open-door grand strategy. Where that connectivity is generally rising among a populace trapped in tyranny, we should bide our time, waiting on the citizens themselves to schedule their decisive action. But where autocrats go to obscene lengths to deny such connectivity in all its normal forms, we should opportunistically exploit events as they arise.

But we should not pretend that any of these choices, however skillfully or rashly they are made, mark us as imperialists. The American flag adds no stars against their will. If anything, we've abandoned our open-door mindset in its most crucial form, by pulling up the drawbridge on new members to our own union, at a time when the European Union continues to add members and China actively seeks to regain its lost colonial jewels. In other words, the American brand is sitting out a historically hot market.

But neither decline nor primacy accurately describes this world that we have so purposefully "flattened."

First of all, there is nothing post-American about it. The same Hispanics, Africans and Asians who will account for the bulk of the world's future population growth have already generated the vast bulk of America's population growth these past two decades. Americans of European ancestry are no longer the majority in our nation's zero-to-five age cohort, with "power-sharing" agreements being worked out right now in preschools all across the country to avert the potential resulting clashes. That means that in the peer-to-peer environment fostered by globalization, our kids will be more than all right, because they are already ahead of the curve.

Second, our alleged new masters are hampered by their own vast domestic burdens. India and China, to the extent they can be described as budding near-peers, are at best ball-and-chain superpowers, with the "ball" being their vast interior impoverished populations -- roughly 700 million each -- and the "chain" being their political systems' pursuit of "social harmony" between city and village. Unlike in today's America, the Chinese and Indian equivalents of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton still battle it out fiercely each day.

Third, we should remember that we originally got into this superpower game after World War II because we simply grew tired of all the killing. So we went, and we fought. Then we stayed until things got better. Now, for the first time in Eurasian history, a quartet of powers peacefully coexists in both the West -- the U.K., France, Germany and Russia -- and the East -- India, China, Korea and Japan -- where previously upwards of 100 million souls perished in two world wars.

America did not create the most peaceful and prosperous period in world history for the mere pursuit of primacy. We did it because it was the right thing to do -- the American thing to do.

Now we live with the consequences, meaning both the rewards and the challenges of this super-empowered world.

New Rules
US' ambition to remain No #1 in the world has made it compromise on many of its cardinal principles of democracy and the supremacy of law.

Dictators and repressive regimes have been bolstered and gross violation of international law and diplomacy has led it to topple regimes and prop up puppets.

It appears now the worm turns.

North Africa and the Middle East is in turmoil. In Bahrain, the cry is to oust the al Khalifa monarchy, Pakistan has been rocketed on a schizophrenic path and Gadaffi is in a going, going, gone mode (though not totally supported by the US).

Yet, there is no doubt that if the US withdraws from its quest to be No #1, there will be void and since it natural human tendency to attempt superiority over others, there will be other players who will rush into the vacuum. China and even Russia will surely contest for the 'plum'.

There can never be a totally 'multipolar' world.

In view of this, will the status quo of the US being No #1 be beneficial for world and world peace?
 

Ray

The Chairman
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What should be the policy?
 

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