The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives.

• Author: Schwarz, Benjamin

By Zbigniew K. Brzezinski Basic Books, $26

In The Grand Chessboard Zbigniew Brzezinski gives the public the fullest and frankest exposition of America's global strategy since the Pentagon's infamous draft Defense Planning Guidance was leaked in 1992. While President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright have repeatedly asserted that the United States is the "indispensable nation," Brzezinski explains--no doubt rather too baldly for the comfort of current officials--that what this role actually demands is American global dominance.

Appreciating Brzezinski's argument requires looking at America's Cold-War strategy through a new lens. By providing for Germany's and Japan's security and by enmeshing their military and foreign policies into alliances that it dominated, the United States contained its erstwhile enemies, preventing its "partners" from embarking upon independent foreign and military policies. This stabilized relations among the states of Western Europe and of East Asia, for by controlling Germany and Japan, the United States--to use a current term in policy-making circles--"reassured" their neighbors that these most powerful allies would remain pacific. The leash of America's security leadership thereby reined in the dogs of war. By in effect banishing power politics, NATO and America's East Asian alliances protected the states of Western Europe and East Asia from themselves.

Thus the real story of American foreign policy since the start of the Cold War is not the thwarting of and triumph over the Soviet threat, but the successful effort to impose an ambitious vision on a recalcitrant world. Freed from the fears and competitions that had for centuries kept them nervously looking over their shoulders, the West Europeans and East Asians were able to cooperate politically and economically, creating the unprecedentedly prosperous and stable international order that the advanced industrialized states enjoy today.

So even though the Cold War is over, American domination of the international system, Brzezinski argues, is still necessary to prevent the emergence of a dangerous multipolar world of independent great powers jockeying for advantage. Brzezinski is most revealing when he describes the mechanisms and purposes of America's strategy of preponderance, whose "three grand imperatives," he explains, are "to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to...