15. Imperial Crisis in Afghanistan and the World Island, Part I

America's capitulation in Afghanistan has provoked an humanitarian disaster, an imperial crisis, and a change in the balance of power between great states in Eurasia. The crisis threatens not only American prestige in the world but some of the basic historical and strategic ideas undergirding American geostrategy for the last fifty years. The Burning Archive explains the persistence in America's disastrous Afghanistan adventure of the ideas of Halford Mackinder about the "World Island" of Eurasia and and of former USA National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski about the imperatives for America to control Central and West Asia.

Credits:

• Halford Mackinder "The Geographical Pivot of History" (1904)
• Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997)
• William Dalrymple, Return of a King: the Battle for Afghanistan 1838-42 (2013)
• The wonderful Kimiko Ishizaka and the Open Goldberg project, for the public domain recording of the Aria from J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations https://opengoldbergvariations.org/ 
• Ezra Pound reading from Canto 81.

Read more of my writing at www.theburningarchive.com including my posts related to Afghanistan - The fall of the American Empire’s Potemkin Province, and The World Island vs the Atlantic.

Buy my new book - Gathering Flowers of the Mind: Collected Poems 1996-2020 in print and e-book editions at major online retailers.

Check out me reading poems from the book at The Burning Archive Youtube channel