The 1970s were a perilous time for the West. The United States, riven with internal divisions, skyrocketing inflation, urban blight, and failed wars abroad, wrestled with a crisis of confidence not unlike today. Two unlikely figures—both European-born professors with thick accents from the Old World—promised to bring order out of the chaos: Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The former was destined to be the foil to the latter. Kissinger, caricatured as “Super K” by the media that he fervently courted, has been the subject of numerous biographies and portraits, many focusing on his role as President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. Kissinger’s articulation of realpolitik stood in sharp contrast from much of the American tradition of foreign policy.
But as Edward Luce notes in his highly readable new biography, Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet, Brzezinski was an important figure in his own right. As President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Brzezinski was at the helm during a period when America’s role in the world was very much up for debate.
Carter’s was the first full presidency after Watergate and the subsequent resignation of Richard Nixon. A former one-term Georgia governor, Carter promised a breath of fresh air for a country overcome with revelations of political corruption, CIA skullduggery, and the fiasco of Vietnam. Yet, Carter was soon overwhelmed by events. Ultimately, instead of fixing the nation’s problems, his idealism and penchant for micromanagement contributed to the sense that he was not up to the moment. But Carter’s failures weren’t for a lack of trying.
Indeed, Carter had some tremendously capable advisers, Brzezinski foremost among them. Born in Poland in 1928, Brzezinski arrived as a young child in Canada just as his native country was invaded by both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. His parents were members of the Polish nobility, his father a diplomat. Unsurprisingly, Brzezinski displayed an interest in foreign affairs from an early age. As an adolescent, his diary was dotted with more entries on World War II than girls or music.
Like Kissinger, another émigré from war-torn Europe, Brzezinski had a keen appreciation for the inherent fragility of the world. He had seen firsthand how it could all come apart. But unlike his future rival and sometime collaborator, Brzezinski remained an optimist.
Contrasting the two, Luce cites the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” wherein “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Kissinger, Luce argues, was the hedgehog: he interpreted the world through one big idea—realist equilibrium with the Soviets and the management of great-power rivalry. Brzezinski was more foxlike, drawing on multiple factors (nationalism, ideology, internal legitimacy) and therefore more readily anticipating the Soviet system’s brittleness. In this sense, it was Brzezinski, not Kissinger, who had the more accurate vision. And as Luce documents, he had it for years.
Long before he was Carter’s National Security Advisor, Brzezinski foresaw the Soviet Union’s collapse. Indeed, perhaps the most illuminating portions of Luce’s biography are the chapters that focus on Brzezinski’s long and uneven path to power. Like Kissinger, Brzezinski spent years toiling in academia, largely at Columbia University, studying the very problems that he would one day be tasked with solving. Like his Harvard counterpart, “Zbig” as his friends called him, longed for power and influence, coveting friends and allies on his way to the top of the greasy pole. As Luce recounts, he even displayed a talent for intrigue, undertaking some rather underhanded methods in order to get President Lyndon B. Johnson to take certain positions on West Germany.
But ultimately, Brzezinski wasn’t nearly as Machiavellian as his German-born rival. He was more consistent in his positions and less willing to flatter his opponents or the media (the two were often synonymous). Unlike Kissinger, Zbig had no problem making enemies, and was often strident and forthright in his positions.
Yet by the time that he took office, Brzezinski’s foremost rival wasn’t Kissinger. Rather, it was Cyrus Vance, Carter’s distinguished, but largely hapless, Secretary of State. A former Wall Street lawyer, Secretary of the Army, and Deputy Secretary of Defense, Vance was a scion of the so-called “Wise Men,” the aristocratic class of Americans who helped set up America’s national security architecture at the dawn of the Cold War. Like a number of those men, such as Chip Bohlen and Averill Harriman, Vance preferred a more conciliatory approach to the Soviets. Zbig did not.
From the onset, Carter was warned that having Vance and Brzezinski as the two dueling figures of his foreign policy would be a recipe for disaster. The two men were diametrically opposed on nearly everything—“oil and water” as one contemporary observed. And Vance’s State Department was particularly prone to leaks, many of them attacking Zbig. Carter was torn between the two, undercutting his effectiveness. What emerges is a portrait of a well-meaning, if indecisive, president. As Soviet aggression became harder to ignore, Carter sided more and more with Zbig, yet Carter’s response was viewed as too little and too late and his legacy as weak and ineffective sealed. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. Communism was on the march in the Third World. The Islamic Revolution deposed the Shah in Iran, helping create the modern age of terror and leading to a hostage crisis that crippled an already weakened presidency.
After leaving office, Brzezinski continued to be a force in policy debates. He kept pushing for a harder line against the Soviet Union and later Russia and was unafraid to buck his party to do so, even crossing the aisle to endorse George H.W. Bush in 1988 and declining to support Al Gore in 2000. In the 1990s, while others were basking in the glory of America’s victory in the Cold War, Zbig had the foresight to recognize the dangers of a Russo-Chinese alliance, warning that America’s short attention span would prove costly. But in other respects, notably the Israel-Islamist conflict, Brzezinski was less prophetic. That conflict was—and is—inherently religious; it wasn’t a territorial dispute that Western-style compromises and give-and-take can solve. Reared on European history, Brzezinski often proved incapable of grasping the dynamics of that troubled region.
Luce ably chronicles a complicated man. What emerges is a portrait of someone who was uncompromising in a town where the opposite is often expected; a trait both admirable and counterproductive. It certainly makes for good reading. And with the clear parallels between Zbig’s era and our own, it is a reminder of the necessity of thoughtful policymakers who can think strategically about the world and America’s place in it.
