The Benevolent Hegemon

Zbigniew Brzezinski is a hawkish foreign policy spokesman for the centrist wing of the Democratic party. As national security advisor under Jimmy Carter, he organized U.S. support for the Afghan mujaheddin via Pakistan, and opposed the Islamic revolution in Iran. He has been mentioned this year as a foreign policy advisor to the Obama campaign, though the level of his involvement is not clear.

In The Grand Chessboard (1997), Brzezinski demonstrated his realist approach to foreign policy. Eurasia is the indispensable chessboard of global politics, just as it has been ever since Friedrich Ratzel founded the discipline of geopolitics in the late 19th century. America stands supreme in military, economic, technological, and cultural leadership, but because it's not a Eurasian power, its hold on world dominion is insecure.

Europe is America's natural ally. In Europe, France and Germany are 'players', seeking to represent the European project, but Britain is a bystander. In the center of Eurasia, Russia is in retreat, having lost control of its periphery. The Central Asian states are the field of competition among Turkey, Iran, and Russia. In the Far East, Brzezinski foresaw a slow rise of China, counterbalanced by a continued adherence of Japan to the U.S. umbrella.

The U.S.' overall mission is to be a gentle hegemon, "benign and visionary: to shape a truly cooperative global community, in keeping with long-term trends and the fundamental interests of humankind." The goal is "to perpetuate America's own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer still... a functioning structure of global cooperation, based on geopolitical realities, could then emerge and gradually assume the mantle of the world's current 'regent'."

Alarmed by America's reaction to 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, Brzezinski updated his analysis in The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership (2004). Europe is still disunified, Japan and Russia are out of the race, China is too poor. There is no alternative to U.S. global hegemony in the foreseeable future. However, the democratization spread worldwide by American culture is undermining American hegemony.

The end result is to be the same. The U.S. is self-absorbed, obsessed with its own security, in danger of provoking an anti-American reaction. "Given its global security role and its extraordinary global ubiquity, America thus has the right to seek more security than other countries... But it should also define its security in ways that help mobilize the self-interest of others...."

Brzezinski is trying to hold onto his framework in which the benevolent hegemon keeps the world in order for some decades, then gradually transitions to a regime of multinational cooperation. He acknowledges that the U.S., the agent of this smooth transition, is not cooperating - it is insensitive and unjust, aggravating the situation and heedless of the common good. "American priorities could acquire a cold imperial cast." However, the only explanation for this apparently strange behavior he can offer is the insecurity of the American people.

He cannot acknowledge that the U.S lunge into Iraq reflects the naked struggle for geopolitical influence, not of a benevolent hegemon, but of one struggling to the death for control of Eurasia and the world. Brzezinski's original realist assumptions are basically right, he just needs to apply them to the U.S. The multilateral global cooperation Brzezinski says he seeks will not be achieved by a gradual transition from U.S. hegemony but by opposing it.

We await more information to find out what view Barack Obama's administration will take on the benevolent hegemony line.