Grand Jeu

Grand Jeu names the geopolitical contest that Noam Chomsky sees taking shape around Central Asia: a struggle over resources and influence in which military access, energy routes, and the ability to intervene reinforce one another. His account links the establishment of major U.S. bases in the region after September 11 to a wider network oriented toward the energy reserves of Central Asia and the Persian Gulf, while presenting this strategic reading as an interpretation of U.S. policy rather than a documented account of confidential plans.

Central Asia, energy, and access

Chomsky places Afghanistan within a larger strategic landscape. The country, he argues, is a relatively minor piece on the geopolitical board, but pipelines proposed for years could help the United States maneuver to control Central Asian resources. The stakes extend beyond Afghanistan: the world’s principal energy reserves lie mainly in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf region, with substantial reserves in Central Asia as well.

The geography shapes the risks surrounding any intervention. North of Afghanistan are unstable states, including Uzbekistan, which Human Rights Watch had condemned for serious abuses and which was fighting an Islamist rebellion. Tajikistan was also confronting a similar conflict and had become a major route for drugs bound for Europe. Chomsky notes the apparent shift of opium production toward Tajikistan after the Taliban suppressed poppy cultivation, and observes that the Northern Alliance controlled almost the entire Afghan border with Tajikistan. The movement of Afghan refugees north could add further internal strain.

Pakistan presents a different but connected vulnerability. It had been the Taliban’s principal supporter and contained a powerful Islamist movement; if it openly served as a base for U.S. operations in Afghanistan, Chomsky warned, its reaction might be violent. The possibility mattered all the more because Pakistan possessed nuclear weapons. Its military wanted U.S. military assistance but remained wary after a history of troubled relations, and feared a potentially hostile Afghanistan joining with India, its eastern enemy. It was also uneasy that the Northern Alliance was led by Tajiks, Uzbeks, and other Afghan minorities hostile to Pakistan and supported by India, Iran, Russia, and now the United States.

Bases and the strategic board

Chomsky describes the post-September 11 establishment of major U.S. bases in Central Asia as a consequential change: for the first time, the United States had built a substantial military presence there. In his analysis, the bases could support multinational corporations operating under U.S. dominance and aligned with the contemporary Grand Jeu, while also helping to surround the world’s largest energy resources in the Gulf region.

He sets this new presence against an existing arc of U.S. bases directed toward the Gulf, stretching from the Pacific to the Azores. Before the Afghanistan war, Diego Garcia had been the most secure base in that system. The new Central Asian positions, he argues, improved the strategic situation and made forceful intervention easier if Washington judged it appropriate. The point is not simply that bases exist, but that their locations can increase both access to resources and the practical reach of military power.

Coalition, unilateral power, and credibility

The effort to assemble an international coalition did not, in Chomsky’s view, signal a new willingness to share decision-making. He traces the policy of acting multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary to Bill Clinton’s 1993 notification to the United Nations, a position later reiterated by Madeleine Albright and, in 1999, by Defense Secretary William Cohen. Cohen described reliance on unilateral military power to defend vital interests, including access to essential markets, energy sources, and strategic resources.

Chomsky says George W. Bush went further, alarming allies. The need for a coalition might soften the rhetoric, he argues, without changing the underlying policy: coalition members were expected to support Washington quietly and obediently, not to participate in shaping its decisions. The United States continued to reserve the right to act as it chose while carefully avoiding reference to international institutions where the law would require their involvement. In this account, coalition-building and unilateral freedom are not opposites so much as complementary features of a power arrangement.

He connects this arrangement to the language of credibility. The NATO bombing of Serbia, he observes, had been justified in part as necessary to ensure NATO’s credibility, as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton explained. But the credibility at issue was not that of Norway or Italy; it was that of the United States and its principal arms client. Chomsky places this alongside Afghanistan as an established diplomatic logic: military action can demonstrate what a dominant power is able to do when others fail to observe the rules it sets.

Strategic interpretation and its limits

Chomsky explicitly distinguishes his inference about Afghanistan from proof based on secret documents. He says that such documents are unavailable, but considers it reasonable to imagine that the consequences of the bombing were calculated and that a principal aim was to warn the world of U.S. capabilities. This is an interpretation of strategic purpose, not a claim that the evidence presented establishes a confidential decision or a single motive.

The term Grand Jeu therefore gathers several strands of his argument: proposed pipelines, concentrated energy reserves, the placement of military bases, coalition politics, and the demonstration of force. Its significance lies in the way these elements form a connected map of influence. In Chomsky’s reading, the aftermath of September 11 did not displace older contests over strategic resources; it gave the United States new positions from which to pursue them and made the prospect of intervention more immediate.