Colloquy with Zbigniew Brzezinski - Is the West turning its back on Turkey?

Given the importance and relevance of this subject, we are enormously grateful for the opportunity to discuss these issues with Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) counselor, trustee and co-chair of the CSIS Advisory Board, which this year published a provocative new book, “Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power,” an indepth survey of the current state of international affairs. Some of these remarks will be familiar to readers of recent books by Bill Clinton (Back to Work), Dick Cheney (In my time), George W. Bush (Decision Points), but Brzezinski locates his strategic insight within a framework of keenly observed historical context, which provides deeper analysis and projections of the foreseeable future. In this colloquy, Dr. Brzezinski emphasizes that his main concern in regard to U.S. policy in Eurasia is the relationship with Turkey, and subsequently also with 14 Russia; that Eurasia as the central and most important continent in the world needs to establish a fundamental internal balance between what will hopefully become a more vital West and a more energetic East. In an increasingly unstable world, Dr. Brzezinski notes that Russia’s proposed Eurasian Union remains a pipe dream, fuelled by the dream of Russian imperial restoration. In brief, Dr. Brzezinski believes that Russia no longer has any alternative but to become part of the West, and that changes within Russia already indicate the development of a genuinely democratic civil society, which will have the power to stimulate democratic reform.

Authors: Joshua Walker
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