UKRAINE: ZBIG’S GRAND CHESSBOARD & HOW THE WEST WAS CHECKMATED Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives has long been the operative canon for State Department Hawks, Neoconservatives and Russophobes. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the implementation of Zbig’s Grand strategy has moved at a feverish pace, gobbling up former Soviet satellites and then converting them into NATO forward bases. The endgame for the West, via these moves, has always been to quash Russian and ostensibly Chinese independence, economic viability and, thus, their ability to project power in Eurasia. Ukraine: ZBIG’s Grand Chessboard & How the West Was Checkmated speaks to the historical and geostrategic moves by the West to control the Eurasian landmass: the broken promises and treaties, the geostrategic missteps and, finally, how Grand Chessboard fundamentalism actually catalyzed Russia’s re-emergence as a global power, shifted geostrategic power eastward and, proverbially, snatched defeat from the jaws of a U.S./NATO victory. Natylie Baldwin, a graduate of Cal State East Bay, lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in various publications including Sun Monthly, Dissident Voice, Energy Bulletin, Newtopia Magazine, The Common Line, New York Journal of Books and The Lakeshore. She is currently working on two novels. Kermit Heartsong, management consultant, author, and empirical scientist, has been a keen observer of the geostrategic developments of social, economic, and political systems for nearly three decades. He has written two nonfiction books-The United States of Mammon (2013) and Illusions, Dystopia & Monsters (2014), which speak to the reality of life in the US, its wars, and climate change. Heartsong studied at the University of California Davis for his B.S. Electrical Engineering & Systems with minors in Global Politics and Writing.
