War & Peace Quote by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Brzezinski’s sentence wears the language of benevolent enlargement like a well-cut suit, but the seams show the real tailoring: Europe isn’t just a place to be “larger,” it’s a geopolitical instrument to be made more useful. The key move is the cascade of moral nouns - “peace,” “prosperity,” “stable international system” - that sound like shared human goods while quietly functioning as strategic preconditions. If stability is the “necessary foundation,” then expansion becomes not a choice but a requirement, and U.S. preferences get recast as the architecture of order itself.

The most revealing phrase is “in which our leadership could be fruitfully exercised.” “Leadership” is the polite synonym for power, and “fruitfully” suggests returns on investment: more allied territory, more aligned markets, more predictable security arrangements. This is Brzezinski at his most characteristic - a Cold War and post-Cold War strategist translating influence into a moral narrative that can survive public scrutiny. A “larger Europe” reads, in subtext, as a Europe less vulnerable to Russian reassertion and more interlocked with U.S.-led institutions: NATO’s security umbrella, the EU’s regulatory gravity, the broader West’s economic and political norms.

Context matters: after the Soviet collapse, the big question was whether the vacuum in Central and Eastern Europe would become a gray zone or be absorbed into Western structures. Brzezinski’s intent is to foreclose ambiguity. Expansion isn’t framed as triumphalism; it’s framed as maintenance. That rhetorical choice is the whole point: if American leadership is “fruitful,” then it must be exercised, and Europe’s enlargement becomes the justification for keeping the American hand on the steering wheel.