A Geopolitical Handbook for the 2026 Multipolar World
Deconstructing “The Grand Chessboard” and the Geopolitical Realities of 2026
A concise handbook that reads Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard against the multipolar realities of 2026.
Synopsis
In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski pictured Eurasia as a chessboard that the United States could direct as its arbiter, and he named his greatest fear: a coalition of Russia, China and Iran.
In this concise handbook, Sedika Weingärtner sets his best-known theses beside the world of 2026 as she reads it, from Ukraine and Afghanistan to the petrodollar, Russia’s resilience and China’s technological rise. Her argument is that the pieces on the board no longer follow the old grandmaster’s rules.
Written with diplomats and policy readers in mind, each chapter places one of Brzezinski’s theses beside the author’s reading of the present and closes with a diplomatic commentary. The handbook ends with principles for a diplomacy that must work without a single arbiter, and gathers realist, Chinese, Singaporean and Gulf perspectives on the multipolar turn.
The geopolitical assessments summarised on this page are the author’s own arguments and perspectives, developed in the book.
And the myth of the “regional power”
The Heart of Asia and the vacuum filled by the East
When the arbiter becomes a player
From “black hole” to “active disruptor”
The illusion of internal collapse
The art of navigating a world without an arbiter
Excerpt
From the Introduction · Excerpt from the English edition.
When Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote his monumental work The Grand Chessboard in the late 1990s, he proceeded from an irrefutable premise: The United States of America is the unquestionable, unipolar superpower that must act as the arbiter and supreme player directing the geopolitical game on the Eurasian continent. His greatest strategic fear was the emergence of an “antihegemonic coalition” between Russia, China, and Iran.
Today, in the year 2026, this nightmare has become a geopolitical reality. Brzezinski’s fundamental assumptions lie buried beneath the rubble of recent global developments.
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English edition
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German edition
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