By Daniel Gross
"The West as such is not finished, but its global supremacy is over," Zbigniew Brzezinski writes in his new book, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power.
But that doesn't mean the U.S. should simply sit back, detach from the evolving world, and see its influence decline, as Great Britain did in the years after World War II. Rather, as Brzezinski tells me in the accompanying video, the U.S. has an extremely important twin role to play.
An adherent of the "realist" school of foreign policy, Brzezinski, a long-time national security expert, argues that in this evolving, interconnected world, it's simply impossible for one nation, or even one region, to dominate large chunks of the world the way Rome did 2000 years ago, or the Ottoman Empire did 500 years ago, or the British Empire did a century ago. "The world is now much more diversified," he says. "There is a new east in Asia, and there is a global population that is awakened politically." A chart in the book shows how the lifespan of dominant powers has grown significantly shorter as history has marched on.
Americans have to get used to the new world, in which their relative influence may decline. But his book makes the case that, as the world's largest economy, largest military power, and historic standard-bearer for democracy and stability, the U.S. has a significant bifurcated role to play.
A strong West is needed as a counterbalance to the rising developing economies. And Brzezinski says the U.S. has to act as the "promoter and guarantor of a greater and broader West." Specifically, he argues that the U.S. needs to lead a charge to enlarge the sphere of capitalist, democratic nations in North America and Europe, by helping to integrate Turkey and Russia. While the European Union has so far failed to make good on its promise to let Turkey in as a member, it's vital that this large, powerful, democratic, rising country ultimately align itself with the West. Brzezinski argues there are arrangements other than full membership of the Eurozone that would help draw Turkey more formally into the Western sphere. The country is already a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The situation with Russia is more complicated. The large economy is already integrated economically into the West in some key ways, but it has not yet shown a desire to pursue a political system and structure that would allow for closer integration.
In the East, the U.S. has a different role to play. Brzezinski argues forcefully that the U.S. needs to avoid getting into conflicts with China. We have to accept that country's economic and political rise and acknowledge that there isn't anything the U.S. can do to stop it. Instead, the U.S. should adapt a posture of being the "balancer and conciliator between major powers," in Asia. Here, the U.S. should take a cue from Britain in the 19th century, when it generally stood aloof from conflicts in continental Europe and instead tried to mediate. Rather than enter into formal alliances against any of the major powers in Asia — China, Japan, India, South Korea — the U.S. should seek to mitigate conflict and promote cooperation and conciliation between Asian powers.
It's not going to be as easy as it sounds.
Daniel Gross is economics editor at Yahoo! Finance
Follow him on Twitter @grossdm; email him at grossdaniel11@yahoo.com
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