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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
The Realist Chessboard
'Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago,' Zbigniew Brzezinski notes in the opening lines of The Grand Chessboard, 'Eurasia has been the centre of world power'. Russia, Austro-Hungary, France, the Ottoman Empire, Britain and Germany all wanted to dominate this bizarre landscape ranging from the French shores of the Atlantic down to the Persian Gulf, and from the Chinese land mass to Central Asia, the Black Sea, the Turkish Straits and the Suez. Brzezinski observes that all of the powers claiming mastery over Eurasia in the past were part of its landscape, but now 'for the first time ever, a non Eurasian power has emerged, not only as the key arbiter of Eurasian power relations, but also as the world's paramount power'. America is indeed the sole world superpower after the fall of 'really existing socialism' and has taken a firm grip of a great part of the economic and political resources of the vast Eurasian continent.
In the midst of the great debates about the future of NATO and the EU, Brzezinski, like many other Anglo-Saxon analysts, attempts to elaborate a comprehensive strategy for America, so as to make impossible the emergence of any other challenger capable of thwarting America's primacy in Eurasia. Quite rightly, he argues that 'Eurasia is the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played, and that strategy involves geo-strategy – the management of geo-political interests.' In other words, if America lacks the proper strategy to streamline the development of key Eurasian actors according to her national interests, then Eurasia will be lost and America's primacy in world politics will wither away too.
Brzezinski's account is clear, comprehensive and instructive. The overall message of his book can even be perceived by a tout court reading of it. He makes everybody understand that globalisation via power projection is not an 'illicit' method by which the US may promote its national interests across the globe. What is more, these interests are best served by making realist geo-political use of the power innate in certain Cold War institutions, such as NATO and the IMF, as well as of the US paramount military might per se. Brzezinski suggests not a contraction of American power after the eclipse of the USSR, but an expansion of it.
The second, more specific, message is a direct consequence of the first: there is no such thing as 'ethical foreign policy', or a power projection based on moral and 'human rights' values. 'In Paris in 1998 to promote the French edition of his book', Diana Johnstone acutely observed, 'he was asked about the apparent "paradox" that his book was steeped in Realpolitik whereas, in his days as National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski had been the "defender of human rights".' But the man waved the 'paradox' aside. 'There is no paradox', he replied. 'I elaborated that doctrine in agreement with President Carter, as it was the best way to destabilise the Soviet Union. And it worked.'
We have come to the crux of the matter. The world we live in is still a realist/neo-realist world dominated by states, national interests, geo-politics and power politics. The more 'globalised' and lopsided it becomes under the sway of the dominant power (i.e. the US) the more the possibilities for conflict, terrorist activities and ethnic and religious wars will be in the ascendant. The zones of conflict and conflicting regional micro-interests multiply, and with them the difficulties and contradictions of world-rule policies grow inexorably. The collapse of the USSR opened up new peripheral corridors and regions for US hegemonic engagement, but this US engagement proved to be not entirely problem-free. After all, not everything that happens in the world and which affects US interests is predicted by US strategic and contingency planning. The US engagement policies are, at times, reactive rather than proactive. This is due in part to pressure exercised by domestic political factors, such as public opinion, ethnic lobbies, legislative institutions, state departments and other organised class and corporate interests. This overall set of vicissitudes of US policy for world domination is the overarching theme that runs through the pages of this book, a theme that Brzezinski and the majority of US policy-makers fail to address critically. How do we explore and infuse that theme in the present discussion and what is the key set of arguments developed here?
My first objective is to present the ways in which the US has attempted to hold sway in Western Eurasia since the collapse of the USSR and its satellite states. Some of the vicissitudes of US policy necessarily take the form of contradictions inherent in the very process of formulation and implementation of US policy per se. Others pertain to the differences between peripheral states and regions that the US wants to engage and lead in a direction that serves its own national interest: not always coinciding, however, with the interests of those regional/peripheral powers. This overall nexus of contradictions, inherent in the politics of globalisation and world domination, is the explosive material that leads to conflicts and wars, rather than to peace and security. The EU, which has achieved a remarkable degree of economic prosperity and political security since the Second World War, finds itself in an awkward dilemma. It can either stand up to global challenges engaging itself with or without the US, with or against the US; or, alternatively, adopt a pacifist and democratic position, while making sure that it is able to defend and spread such a position around the globe. The fundamental prerequisite for each option is for Europe to produce a coherent federal polity, thus becoming an independent actor in world politics.
Brzezinski is against this reasoning. He wants the EU to expand eastwards, but not to deepen its political integration as this might challenge America's supremacy, particularly in the Middle East:
A larger Europe will expand the range of American influence – and through the admission of new Central European members, also increase in the European councils the number of states with a pro-American proclivity – without simultaneously creating a Europe politically so integrated that it could soon challenge the United States on geo-political matters of high importance to America elsewhere, particularly in the Middle East.
We now arrive at the second major objective of this book, which is to examine the potential of the EU to become an independent political actor in world affairs. This potential is limited because the US–EU partnership goes back a long way, as the hegemony of the US over EU political affairs was established during the Cold War and is thus very well embedded. Yet the evidence we possess to date shows that the development of a robust EU is not impossible. In the wake of the disappearance of the Soviet threat, European economic and political interests have gained more freedom of action in the 1990s and received an additional boost with Germany's reunification. The completion of the process of European economic integration and the launch of the euro are further indications fostering this aspect of emancipation of the EU from the US. I pay particular attention to the development of a potentially independent EU foreign policy guided by Germany and France, by looking into relations between Cyprus and the EU. I view the decision taken by the EU in the 1990s to open accession negotiations with Cyprus, a republic de facto divided since 1974, as a major step forward, showing the refusal of the EU to completely surrender its foreign policy to the demands of the US and Turkey. I compare and contrast the pivotal roles of Germany and Turkey for the US in Western Eurasia, and I conclude that the former is far more important a player than the latter. A major defect of Brzezinski's strategic assessment is his failure to compare and contrast the postures of both Germany and Turkey in Eurasia's Western belt, that is to say the geo-strategic significance of those countries in the formulation of US policies.
The principal guidelines of US foreign policy, as well as the institutions destined to produce strategies for global domination, were established in the wake of the Second World War and in the Cold War. The US–EU antagonism itself began during the Cold War period. In order, therefore, to decipher the range of difficulties of US policy in the Balkans and the Middle East, it is often necessary to adopt a historical perspective. We shall indeed become aware that some of the major problems facing the US and its allies today have their origins in the Cold War years.
The same applies to the case of Cyprus and the Middle East. The US's substantial engagement with Cypriot affairs is traceable back to the early 1960s, following a British decision to confine Britain's role on the island to the strategic maintenance of its two sovereign bases guaranteed by the Zurich–London constitutional arrangements of 1959–60. However, whereas the US schemes of the 1960s and early 1970s aimed at dividing Cyprus between Greece and Turkey in order to keep both NATO allies satisfied – thus also avoiding turning the dispute into a major Cold War confrontation – the EU has seen the issue in a different way. It has refused to surrender itself to the situation that arose in 1974 and has also rebuffed the Turkish notion of having two independent sovereign states on the island. The EU has expressed its preference to have, ideally, a united and independent Republic of Cyprus in its ranks. Moreover, the EU decided that the (Greek-led) Republic of Cyprus should join the EU regardless of whether a solution to the division of the island is found before accession. This was a major foreign policy initiative that strengthened further the leverage of the EU over Eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern affairs. In addition, it further distinguished the EU's policy towards these two Eurasian subregions from that of the US.
The Structure of the Book
This text is selective and, at times, discursive. It would have been impossible to discuss here in detail the foreign policy of the US towards every Balkan or Middle Eastern state: such a task goes beyond the real and ideal capacities of any one individual.
The opening chapter sets the overall scene of the discussion. I explain the nature of US policy in Eurasia in the 1990s by focusing on the 'energy factor'. There is a new type of geo-politics employed by the US and other Eurasian actors in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, that is to say the collapse of the centralised system of corporate economic governance. This new geo-political game is inextricably linked to oil and gas pipeline projects, connecting Asian and European zones. I examine the ways in which the US has tried to control the production and transportation of oil and gas from Central Asia to the Balkans and, from there, to Western markets. I also look at how the Balkans are geo-strategically and geo-politically linked with the Caspian region and the Middle East. The evidence I bring to the fore suggests that the US has not dramatically changed its policies since 1989 or, for that matter, since September 11, 2001. Rather, the US has extended its pre-existing Cold War policy framework towards global domination, precisely because since the Cold War it has encountered far less politically organised resistance. Demystifying the agreement reached between Russia and the US in May 2002, I lay out the parameters of an argument which holds that the Cold War has not really 'ended'. All the major Cold War actors fighting for diverse geo-political and geo-economic interests are still around, the sole difference being that European Germany and Asian China are economically stronger; Russia, although not a spent force, is fundamentally weak and the US is the aggressive and unstoppable politico-military global victor. This chapter also underlines that the 'energy factor' provided NATO and the US with an additional crucial reason to violently orchestrate developments in Yugoslavia via the Bosnian and Kosovo crises, thus halting and putting a check on both Germany's and Russia's influence in the Balkan zone.
But policies, either domestic or foreign, cannot be reduced to economics or the 'energy factor' alone. Foreign policy projection is a multidimensional strategic act, which is deeply political and diplomatic, and which has strong security, defence and preventive aspects. This has driven me to take up the example of Yugoslavia and go on to unravel the contradictions of NATO and US policies, particularly when their actions are justified by the doctrine of 'human rights' abuses. I contend that the Kosovo war was not intended to protect the Kosovo Albanians from Milosevic's brutal grip. Rather, it was a preventive war aiming to guarantee NATO's eastward expansion, US energy interests, as well as to halt German and European influence in the Balkans. Yet, this war inspired Albanian irredentism in the Balkans and threatened the cohesion of the multi-ethnic Republic of Macedonia, thus putting in jeopardy European security. Therefore, occasionally, I compare the EU and NATO eastward enlargements and I highlight the inability of the EU to put forward a comprehensive political agenda to solve the Yugoslav conflict. I also look at the roles of Greece and Turkey in the Balkans and the Near East. I offer a critical overview of NATO's reform and expansion processes of the 1990s, and I argue that its transformation from a defence pact into a political organisation, upholding and selectively implementing liberal-democratic principles, may lead the alliance into serious political deadlock in years to come.
US global leadership in parts of Eurasia during the Cold War was bound up not only with US leadership in Western Europe, but also with the control of developments in the Near Eastern theatre. In the main, the Truman Doctrine and the policy of containment (1947) had created a link between a successful defence of Western Europe and a successful defence of the Near/Middle East, with Greece, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan constituting the 'front-line' zone of politico-military engagement vis-à-vis the Soviet threat. I analyse this link and I place the Cyprus issue in the 1950s and 1960s in context. I argue here that UK/US policies towards Greece, Cyprus and Turkey were mainly unsuccessful, not least because they failed to produce a lasting and permanent solution to the Cyprus issue. In particular, the 'divide and rule' policy of the UK in the 1950s created further animosity between Greece and Turkey, and between the Greek and the Turkish Cypriots. The US had inherited this policy failure from the UK in the 1960s, but its inaction to prevent the Greek junta's coup in Cyprus (July 15, 1974), and the first Turkish invasion five days later, had brought two NATO allies to the brink of war. But I also see a connection between the strategic need of the US to defend Israel after the experience of the Yom Kippur war of October 1973, and the Turkish invasions of Cyprus in July and August 1974. I thus also dwell on the Arab–Israeli conflict, trying to link up the importance of Israel for the US, with the significance of defending Greece, Turkey and Iran from possible Soviet encroachments. This chapter is more systematically structured through a historical perspective.
An analysis of Turkish domestic and foreign policies follows. This is necessary because the US, today as well as during the Cold War, has connected its strategy in the Middle East and Central Asia with Turkey's geo-strategic primacy in South-western Eurasia, particularly since 1979 with the loss of Iran. An analysis of the 'Turkish pivot', will enable us to balance Turkey's weight in NATO and the EU in relation to that of Germany, France, Greece and the Republic of Cyprus. Although these issues constitute the main subject of discussion in the following chapter, my tentative, pre-emptive argument is that the US considers its strategic partnership with Germany and France as more important than that with Turkey. To put it another way, Germany matters for the US more than Turkey in the overall Western Eurasian zone, that is the thick security belt stretching from the Baltic states, southwards to the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. This is tantamount to saying that if the US was forced to choose between a European Germany leading the EU's eastward enlargement on the one hand, and Turkey on the other, then the superpower would opt for Germany. Although never officially said, I tend to believe that Greece's gamble in the 1990s that it would block the EU's eastward enlargement if the Republic of Cyprus was not admitted to the EU, was almost entirely placed within the remit of this strategic assessment.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Zones of Conflict"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Vassilis Fouskas.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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