Qualche giorno fa la rivista Foreign Policy ha pubblicato una interessantissima intervista di David Rothkopf a Zbigniew Brzezinski, già consigliere per la sicurezza nazionale dell’amministrazione Carter e noto geostratega.
Tema: gli affari internazionali in questo inizio di secolo. Secondo l’esperto americano oltre a trovarci in un momento di ripetuti cambiamenti l’elemento che più caratterizzerebbe questa fase sarebbe l’incapacità della leadership statunitense di sviluppare visione e strategia che, unita ad una mancanza di attori internazionali realmente capaci di incidere globalmente, renderebbe difficile la gestione della complessità:

I would even say that this is historically unprecedented, in the sense that simultaneously huge swaths of global territory are dominated by populist unrest, anger, and effective loss of state control. One of my feelings about the United States is not that we’re declining and are faced with imminent crisis of survival, but that we are losing control of our ability at the highest levels of dealing with challenges that, increasingly, many of us recognize are fundamental to our well-being. And yet we cannot muster the forces or generate the leadership to deal with them. So that makes us, the preeminent power, increasingly devoid of strategic will and a sense of direction.

As for Europe, we saw in the wake of what happened in Ukraine that we cannot expect Europe to assert itself internationally (or even to join us effectively) when challenged for the first time since 1939 with a unilateral effort at territorial expansion by a state in the region. Asia is petrified by the prospects of a rising China, but also by increasing nationalist conflicts with its neighbors.

I skip, of course, the Middle East, which is in turmoil, and Africa, which is beginning to experience it. So I think we’re seeing the kind of world in which there is enormous turmoil and fragmentation and uncertainty — not a single central threat to everybody, but a lot of diversified threats to almost everybody.