The Grand Chessboard

The Grand Chessboard represents Zbigniew Brzezinski’s plan for the United States in its relations with key nations that make up the region known as Eurasia. Brzezinski believes that Eurasia, which stretches across the entire European and Asian continents, is the key arena where America will have to be engaged and will have to lead other nations in the course of a comprehensive strategy for international relations with Europe, Russia, and the Far East, the major players on the Eurasian stage. 

Brzezinski’s grand plan is not really a Eurasian strategy per se, but a strategy designed to maintain American dominance around the world. While many aspects of Brzezinski’s thesis are valid, there are significant gaps in his grand strategy that ignore key facts and regions, particularly the Middle East. This paper will begin with a brief overview of Brzezinski’s thesis, and will explain the relative decline of European power and the rise of American global dominance. It will then discuss Brzezinski’s explanation of why Eurasia is important and his plan for an American strategy for relations with Europe, Russia, and the Far East. Finally, the paper will conclude with an assessment of Brzezinski’s text as a whole. 

BRZEZINSKI’S THESIS 

Brzezinski’s thesis is best described in his own words: “The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is…the purpose of this book” (Brzezinski, 1997, p. xiv). As mentioned before, this strategy is really designed to maintain American dominance on the global scene. Brzezinski recognizes this in his introduction to the book when he says, “…the issue of how a globally engaged America copes with the complex Eurasian power relationships—and particularly whether it prevents the emergence of a dominant and antagonistic Eurasian power—remains central to America’s capacity to exercise global primacy (Brzezinski, pp. xiii-xiv).