THE GRAND CHESSBOARD.<i> By Zbigniew Brzezinski</i> .<i> BasicBooks: 224 pp., $26</i> : THE AMERICAN ENCOUNTER.<i> Edited by James F. Hoge Jr. and Fareed Zakaria</i> .<i> BasicBooks: 656 pp., $35</i>

Power in America today is what sex was in Victorian Britain: a primal, life-shaping force shrouded in denial and hypocrisy. This is true in domestic affairs when it comes to subjects like class, race and wealth; it is equally true in international relations, a field in which few Americans think, and even fewer write, clearly and frankly about the nation’s international role.

Two important new books on foreign affairs, “The Grand Chessboard” by Zbigniew Brzezinski and “The American Encounter,” a collection of essays from 75 years of Foreign Affairs magazine, don’t quite drive our secret obsession with power out of the closet. Yet they air the national closet out a bit. That, in a puritanical society like ours, is a significant step.

Brzezinski, national security advisor from 1977 to 1981 to then-President Jimmy Carter and widely considered the mentor of current Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, attacks the taboo subject of American power head on. In words that will shock the tenderhearted, he argues that the United States is an imperial power dominating international life much the way Rome and earlier empires did. Indeed, as the first truly global power, the American empire is far more extensive and powerful than any of its predecessors. Furthermore, insists Brzezinski, the proper goal of American statesmanship is to maintain and strengthen our empire. Strange as that may sound to American ears, Brzezinski’s view is certainly in the mainstream of Western thought about the nature of foreign policy and interstate rivalry.

Power is also the subject of “The American Encounter,” essays selected by the editors of Foreign Affairs, America’s premier journal of international affairs. Like all anthologies, “The American Encounter” is a mixed bag. Some essays, like George Kennan’s “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” and Karl Kautsky’s blistering and eloquent attack on the follies of Allied treatment of Germany at Versailles in “Germany Since the War,” remain as cogent today as on the day of publication. Others, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s screed denouncing the West for appeasing the USSR and predicting victory after victory for the dynamic Communist leadership of Leonid Brezhnev against the enfeebled West--as recent as 1980!--do their authors less credit.

The best essays, like the Kennan article and a lucid essay on democracy and foreign relations by Elihu Root, Teddy Roosevelt’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning secretary of state, manifest a firm grip on the nature and uses of American power. But many others do not. Margaret Mead’s somewhat incoherent essay on “The Underdeveloped and the Overdeveloped” will not enhance her reputation; more surprisingly, two essays by Henry Kissinger (“Reflections on American Diplomacy” and “The Viet Nam Negotiations”) betray something less than the steady hand of a master.

Taken together, however, “The Grand Chessboard” and “The American Encounter” do not so much clarify our understanding of American power, as they exemplify the confusion in which the subject is too often wrapped. Although the genteel tradition of American politics recoils from the subject, American foreign policy from the earliest days of the republic has, in fact, been guided by a sophisticated and realistic approach to international power relations.

A sense for this American diplomatic tradition is what distinguished great American strategic thinkers like Alexander Hamilton, John Hay, the four Adamses, the two Roosevelts, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, Kennan and Root from the wannabes. Blame national hypocrisy for the lamentable fact that this tradition is little known and little valued by educated public opinion. Americans, especially our genteel professional classes, want American foreign policy to embody moral principle. The realities of international life often dictate otherwise.

That is a problem for a democracy; American statesmen have generally resolved it by describing pragmatic policies with pious rhetoric. The result is a public conversation about foreign policy that bears little resemblance to actual events. The tradition of hypocrisy is almost as old as the history of American foreign policy.

Take, for example, the Monroe Doctrine. It was presented to public opinion as a virtuous declaration of America’s intention to block Old World meddling in the Western hemisphere while remaining isolated ourselves from the corrupt and immoral diplomatic power games of Europe. In fact, the Monroe Doctrine was a sophisticated, even cynical, intervention on the European chessboard and was known to be such by those who formulated it. Thomas Jefferson congratulated his protege James Monroe for his alliance with Britain. The two English-speaking powers agreed to keep other European powers out of the Western Hemisphere. Britain wanted a formal treaty; Monroe cleverly avoided one, with the result that the United States had all the advantages of a formal defensive treaty with none of the obligations.

Although American rhetoric in the 19th and 20th centuries contrasted our virtuous republicanism with Britain’s evil imperial greed, leading American statesmen understood that the United States and Britain were joined at the hip. Both were maritime trading powers. Insulated by water from the land powers of Europe, they remained deeply concerned about the European balance of power. Britain and America were safe so long as no single land power could dominate Europe and mount a challenge to British superiority at sea. Meanwhile, the British and the Americans could flourish in a global trading order.

Nineteenth-century American diplomats from Monroe through Root understood that as long as Britain accepted the independence of the United States and allowed it free trading rights in the British Empire, the United States could enjoy virtually all of the benefits of British power while avoiding most of the risks.

The United States and Britain had many quarrels, but that bedrock understanding was the basis of American foreign policy until World War I, when for the first time Britain failed to build a European coalition strong enough to defeat the German Empire. World War I, often seen as a break with the Monroe Doctrine, was actually its logical extension. American security depended on Britain’s ability to maintain a balance of power in Europe; Britain’s inability to defeat Germany in World War I forced America to enter the war at Britain’s side.

As British power declined through the 20th century, the United States was reluctantly forced to assume more and more of the costs that Britain once paid. As the United States took over Britain’s role, it also gradually took over Britain’s traditional strategy, a strategy that dates to the Renaissance. When any foreign power grows too great, the English-speaking empires form a coalition of weaker states against the stronger one, block the enemy’s access to international trade and subsidize their coalitions with the profits that grow from a worldwide trading system.

This tactic is basically what Elizabeth I and Cromwell used to fight Spain; how the Duke of Marlborough and Pitt fought France; how Lloyd George and Winston Churchill fought Germany--and it is how the American presidents from Harry Truman through George Bush fought the Soviet Union. It is the classic strategy of the English-speaking world: In peace, we make money and stabilize the balance of power; in war, we contain our opponents and use our wealth to crush anyone mounting a challenge to the global status quo.

Great American statesmen are steeped in this approach to world affairs; it goes beyond conscious thought with them. It is instinctive. The containment strategy, which Kennan advocated in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” was an adaptation of this strategy for the special conditions of the struggle against the Soviets. This strategy taught Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to bring Germany and Japan into the American coalition as checks on China and the USSR. This is the consistent long-term approach to world politics that has guided the English-speaking world since the era of the Spanish Armada. Our national shame about power prevents our elites from avowing it openly, even as they follow its precepts.

Surprisingly enough, many people, including academic historians, politicians and foreigners, take this rhetoric at face value and assume that American diplomacy and American public opinion are as bland, passive and naive as our public discourse suggests. Moralists think this is as it should be and want policy as pious as our speeches. Others, like Kissinger, think this is horrendous and spend whole careers laboring to instruct the pacific and otherworldly American elite in the harsh realities of international life.

Brzezinski, we learn in “The Grand Chessboard,” works within the core Anglo-American tradition but adds an eccentric and unhelpful twist. Brzezinski sees “Eurasia,” the super-continent extending from Spain to Siberia and Singapore, as the key to world power. If any single power ever controlled China, Russia, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia and Japan, the United States could just as well throw in the towel. The combined power of Europe and Asia would place the United States in permanent danger. Preventing any rival state or coalition of states from achieving such a position is and must ever be the core concern of American foreign policy, Brzezinski insists.

True enough; Pitt, Churchill, Roosevelt and Marlborough would agree. Yet Brzezinski’s formulation is subtly off. Half a millennium of Anglo-American success suggests that the key to world power isn’t actually control of Eurasia or the world continent. It is control of the world’s trade and communication routes, of the global economy. The British and American empires were both weaker on the mainland of Eurasia than other great empires. Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin all appeared to dominate, or were poised to dominate, the Eurasian land mass. All three empires were ultimately crushed by opponents able to draw on the resources and the trade of the outside world.

Brzezinski’s slightly skewed take on world politics contributes to the fundamental error in his analysis of the international system: his excessive fear of Russia and a consequent misreading of United States interests in Europe. Brzezinski considerably overrates the importance of Central and Eastern Europe to the United States and wants Russia pushed to the fringes of Europe. Specifically, he sees not only the expansion of NATO but also the consolidation of Ukrainian independence as vital elements in American policy in Europe.

This is both dangerous and wrong. Actually, the American goal is to balance the Eurasian power equation, not to dominate Eurasia ourselves. From an American point of view, Russia needs to be strong enough to keep the Western Europeans looking nervously in its direction. By the same token, a strong Russian presence in North Asia would help keep U.S.-China relations on an even keel. We need a stronger Russia in both Europe and Asia today, not a weaker one. Sadly, the Clinton administration seems to be heeding Brzezinski’s advice about NATO expansion; the result is a European policy that is undermining America’s international position.

Where Brzezinski’s considerable intellectual powers operate outside the warp field of his European obsessions, however, the result is some of the best strategic thought being produced in the contemporary world. His analysis of East Asian realities and of the complicated U.S.-China-Japan relationship is lucid and constructive and a joy to read.

At its best, “The Grand Chessboard” makes permanent contributions to the national debate over American foreign policy and power. At its worst, it demonstrates the need for contemporary statesmen and political thinkers to immerse themselves more deeply in the rich tradition of Anglo-American strategic thought that brought first Britain and now the United States to global preeminence at an astonishingly low cost.