The Deep State Still Plays Brzezinski’s Game

Presidents change, the grand strategy does not.

Raphael Machado argues that despite elections and presidents, Washington still follows the grand strategy of encircling Russia.

Trump’s election is — everyone knows — the result of the fraying of the American social fabric, in a context of growing contradiction between the “elites” and the “people.” But another divide is also relevant for understanding Trump’s return.

Trump would never have managed to come back without the consent of part of the Deep State — that is, a portion of the permanent establishment of the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, and the federal bureaucracy.

Now, considering the level of mobilization put in place to prevent Trump’s reelection in 2020 and the intensity of the campaign against him, what explains this change of perspective towards him?

First of all, to reinforce the thesis, anyone who was paying attention in the run-up to the 2024 elections could have noticed that the anti-Trump campaign by the mass media diminished in intensity by mid-2024, especially after the first assassination attempt against the future president of the United States.

It was as if some sectors had recognized the inevitability of Trump’s victory. We saw nothing close to the same level of hysteria, nor the same funereal mood of 2020, when The New York Times and The Washington Post warned that a Trump victory would mean the “death of democracy.”

Everything was quite calm, in fact.

Possibly, certain geopolitical events were central to this shift in stance by the Deep State.

First, the Ukrainian failure. Predictions that the Russian economy would collapse under sanctions proved wrong. Predictions that Russian ammunition and missiles would run out were equally wrong. The belief that Ukrainian counteroffensives could halt Russia’s advance also proved misplaced.

Instead of a Russian defeat, the United States found itself financing a “war of attrition” in which the adversary held the advantage on the ground. Biden spent 200 billion dollars on this endeavor, at a time when the U.S. faced numerous internal challenges: deficit, fentanyl, polarization, and more.

In the Middle East, Hamas compelled Israel into a drawn-out war of attrition — albeit an asymmetric one — in Gaza, while it also faced skirmishes with Hezbollah and the looming threat of Iran. A state as small as Israel inevitably struggles to sustain such pressures, and the Zionist lobby has pressed the United States to deepen its involvement in order to safeguard Tel Aviv’s security. Compounding this, Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing has severely undermined the credibility of its allies.

Also under Biden, unnecessary provocations — such as Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan — accelerated China’s anti-Western pivot and hardened Chinese support for Russia.

The real problem is that all this happened simultaneously, with other latent conflicts around the world still threatening to erupt. Clearly, Washington was failing to cope with it all.

Conclusion: the U.S. must disengage from Ukraine in order to redirect its attention to other theaters.

Here, however, lies something beyond merely situational concerns — the question of the “grand strategy” adopted by the United States.

Zbigniew Brzezinski has been one of America’s most influential geopolitical thinkers since the 1970s, when, in addition to cofounding the Trilateral Commission, he served as National Security Advisor in the Carter Administration. A realist, his thinking rests firmly on Nicholas Spykman’s theories regarding the importance of controlling the Rimland in order to subjugate the Heartland.

To some extent, Brzezinski’s worldview can indeed be summarized as a fundamental anti-Russian focus. Brzezinski criticized the euphoria of the post–Cold War era, as well as the Gulf War, the Iraq War, and all of America’s entanglements in the Middle East under the banner of the “War on Terror.”

Pacifist? Quite the opposite. For Brzezinski there was only one true enemy: Russia, which had to be encircled and broken down into irrelevance. Any other U.S. foreign engagement was, in his eyes, a waste of resources — unless it served the larger goal of surrounding or weakening Russia. (This was why, for example, Brzezinski urged Clinton to act in Yugoslavia.)

For Brzezinski, the task was to weave a cordon sanitaire around Russia and to apply pressure on its borders until it could no longer resist. In this sense, Brzezinski can be considered one of the chief architects of NATO’s eastward expansion after the Cold War.

In fact, it is striking how The Grand Chessboard serves as the perfect counterpart to Alexander Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics. The sections of both books dealing with Ukraine explain with precision the geopolitical underpinnings of the conflict in that country.

Turning now to the present geopolitical situation: the “Ukrainian card” has failed, but it is only one card in the broader Spykman–Brzezinski deck. Regardless of the inevitability of Russia’s advance, the West succeeded in imposing a cost on Russia’s victory.

Moreover, Russia’s international outreach proved essential in preventing its defeat. It built useful, if not always harmonious, relations with Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Syria, Iran, the Central Asian states, China, and North Korea within its immediate strategic environment. Beyond that, it developed important connections in Venezuela, West Africa, and India.

With all this in mind, it becomes easier to understand the perspective of those sectors of the Deep State that accepted Trump’s victory and smoothed his return.

Biden’s foreign policy was clumsy and ineffective. He provoked conflicts, squandered vast sums of money, and pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war.

Therefore, the United States must scale back its involvement in Ukraine in order to concentrate on toppling the “dominoes” that sustain Russia’s international reach, thereby weakening its ability to project power and compensate for lost ties with Europe.

While Russia is being worn down in Ukraine, the West has been working to bring down Syria. Belarus, for the moment, remains impenetrable. Yet an ambiguous Turkey under Erdoğan will likely give way to a progressive Turkey under Kılıçdaroğlu or İmamoğlu — both staunchly anti-Russian. Iran has withstood the assaults of Israel and the United States. But in the Caucasus, Washington simultaneously secured France’s expulsion, a U.S. presence, and the concession of the Zangezur Corridor to Azerbaijan, which poses a threat to both Iran and Russia. This offsets the Western setback in Georgia, where the color revolution failed. Further east, the West also lost ground in Afghanistan, but the trend points towards rising pressure in the Central Asian republics, particularly through terrorism. Beyond that, India faces tariff pressure for its role in trading Russian oil. At the same time, it has also lost its former “satellite,” Bangladesh. Against China and North Korea, for the moment, nothing can be done.

All of this demonstrates beyond any doubt that the West continues to follow a consistent strategy in its geopolitical maneuvers, even if it does not always succeed in its undertakings.

And this consistent strategy, to a large degree, had already been mapped out by Zbigniew Brzezinski.

(Translated from the Portuguese)