From Poland With Love

A review of Ed Luce's "Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet"

American foreign policy could use more strategic thinkers and doers like Zbigniew Brzezinski—and fewer in the cynical, self-serving mold of Henry Kissinger.

At least that’s the conclusion I drew from Financial Times columnist Ed Luce’s Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet, his lucid and entertaining biography of President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser. Though not above ambition or self-promotion—far from it, as Luce makes clear—Brzezinski by and large refused to tailor his views to flatter his interlocutors and preserve the illusion of influence Kissinger did so much to cultivate. That left the Polish émigré with a reputation for brusqueness that did little to endear him to the contemporary journalists and intellectual tastemakers who fawned over the supposed oracular wisdom of his inveterately self-aggrandizing predecessor. Despite a latter-day public renaissance fueled by his opposition to the Iraq war and the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy, Brzezinski has been strangely underestimated as a strategic thinker—until now.

Indeed, Luce’s account demonstrates that Brzezinski’s life and career has much to tell us about our own foreign policy problems and domestic political challenges today. We’re still dealing with many of the issues Brzezinski faced before, during, and after his time as America’s chief foreign policy strategist: a needlessly fragmented and fractured view of national power, chronic and sometimes vituperative disputes with long-time allies, and a still-unresolved battle for the soul and ultimate direction of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy.

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Born in 1928 to parents descended from minor nobility and civil servants in a newly independent Poland, Brzezinski followed his diplomat father to France, Germany, and Canada. (Brzezinski pere deemed a posting in Soviet Kharkiv, today part of Ukraine, too dangerous to bring his family along.) With Hitler’s invasion and then Stalin’s postwar domination of Poland, Brzezinski and his family became permanent exiles from their native country. In fall 1950, Brzezinski made his way from Montreal to Harvard and embarked upon a career as a prominent scholar of the Soviet bloc and, eventually, one of America’s preeminent strategic thinkers.

Brzezinski bounced from Harvard to Columbia, visiting the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe as part of his academic research. Here, Brzezinski first formulated his overarching theory of victory over the Soviet Union: engage with and peel off the Kremlin’s satellites in Eastern Europe, whose communist governments retained a degree of independence from their ultimate masters in Moscow and whose populations retained their own sense of nationality despite official adherence to Marxist-Leninist dogma. In 1960, Brzezinski began dipping his toes directly into national politics by advising John F. Kennedy’s presidential bid. Later, he served briefly on the State Department’s Policy Planning Council and then as foreign policy coordinator for Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s ill-fated 1968 campaign; he would consult with Humphrey and other prominent Democrats as the party wandered in the political wilderness of the 1970s.

But it was in his capacity as the intellectual driver of the Trilateral Commission—an effort supported by Brzezinski’s benefactor David Rockefeller to bring together American, European, and Japanese elites to examine pressing foreign policy issues—that Brzezinski met Jimmy Carter, then the governor of Georgia and a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 1976. Though they had an existing relationship, Brzezinski became Carter’s chief foreign policy adviser “almost by accident.” When Carter improbably won the presidency over incumbent Gerald Ford, he offered Brzezinski his pick of foreign policy posts—and Brzezinski chose national security adviser, a role he characterized as “the integrator and energizer of policy for the president.”

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As national security adviser, Brzezinski could be too hawkish for his own good—perhaps as an overcorrection against dovish sparring partners like Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and other lower-ranking State Department officials. At times, Brzezinski’s recommendations could go well beyond the requirements of a given situation, such as his inclination to elevate a territorial dispute between a Soviet-backed regime in Ethiopia and an American-backed one in Somalia into a crisis between the United States and Soviet Union. But as Luce notes, “Soviet archives suggest that the truth about Moscow’s designs lay somewhere in between Brzezinski and State’s [dovish] reading of them.” During the Iran hostage crisis, Brzezinski also repeatedly recommended aggressive military action to Carter as part of an effort to coerce the release of the hostages.

Despite this hawkish reputation, Luce’s account shows that Brzezinski thought about national power in a far more holistic sense than many gave him credit for at the time—or than many of us in twenty-first century foreign policy debates do. In practice, Brzezinski’s expansive idea of national power transcended today’s siloed and kludged-together notions of “smart” or “integrated” or “sharp” power, well-intentioned efforts that mostly manage to fragment our own conceptions of power and put them in effective competition with one another. As both an academic and a policymaker, Brzezinski championed political warfare against the Soviet Union via political, economic, and diplomatic engagement with its erstwhile satellites in Eastern Europe. He fought to double the budget of Radio Free Europe, for instance, while establishing a confidential back-channel relationship with the newly-elected pope (and fellow Pole) John Paul II. For all the complaints about Brzezinski’s hawkishness, he saw the various facets of power as part of a greater whole—and not mutually exclusive in the way our contemporary debates do.

Brzezinski’s time as national security adviser also goes to show that tensions and divides between America and its NATO allies are nothing new—and it’s not as if relations were all sunshine and rainbows before Donald Trump and his acolytes arrived on the scene. Indeed, Brzezinski’s feud with German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt ought to be the stuff of foreign policy and diplomatic legend. Though it certainly had its personal aspects, the dispute between the German leader and the American national security adviser was grounded in substantive differences in policy toward the Soviet Union: Schmidt sought to court the Kremlin above all else through trade and energy deals that he claimed would moderate Soviet behavior, while Brzezinski wished—correctly, as it turned out—to engage the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe and demand stringent reciprocity in diplomacy with Moscow.

Carter’s relations with other allied leaders like the UK prime ministers James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher were better—indeed, Carter early on proclaimed America was back at NATO “following years of neglect under Ford and Nixon.” But still allied relationships had their fair share of ups and downs. Disputes over nuclear missile deployments, for one, required significant diplomacy to resolve. And it’s worth noting that under Carter that the G7 became a going concern—a reflection in part of Brzezinski’s own thinking and work on the Trilateral Commission. It all goes to show just how difficult even successful alliances can be to manage.

Ultimately, however, the problems and challenges Brzezinski faced from the early 1970s on were part and parcel of a still-unresolved war for the soul and direction of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy—a fight, Luce observes, in which Brzezinski himself played a central role both in and out of office. It’s a struggle that played out in Carter’s own mind and heart over the course of his presidency, and though Brzezinski eventually won the battle for Carter’s foreign policy (with a large assist from events like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), the larger conflict over national security within the party persisted.

This battle began in the late 1960s as the war in Vietnam came to be seen more and more Democrats as a bloody exercise in futility. Brzezinski had initially supported the war, but, as Luce archly notes, so too did many of his future Carter administration rivals and critics. During the 1972 campaign, Brzezinski advised Humphrey as well as Senators Edmund Muskie and Henry “Scoop” Jackson—but publicly disassociated himself from the eventual nominee, the left-wing neo-isolationist George McGovern, privately writing that the South Dakota senator “talked as if the US were the only power in the world spending money on arms” and “simply pretends that if the problems of power are ignored they will somehow disappear.”

In the Carter administration, Brzezinski chronically butted heads with Vance and his State Department. Though often presented as a clash of personalities, the dispute was substantive: Vance and his team sought to preserve détente with the Soviet Union at all costs and hewed close to the isolationist attitude that the best thing the United States could do in the world was nothing. Focused obsessively on clinching a new nuclear arms control deal, known as SALT II, Vance consistently advised Carter not to stand up to the Kremlin out of fear that his negotiations would fail if the United States did. Human rights—a preoccupation of both Carter and Brzezinski, particularly when it came to the Soviet Union and its European satellites—would, in Vance’s view, have to take a back seat to arms control. Luce summarizes the Vance camp’s underlying logic: “For the sake of mankind, SALT II had to be the overriding priority. No cause, however just, could compete with the lessening specter of nuclear war.”

Vance’s school of thought—common enough to many on the American left during the Cold War—represented a perverse mirror image of the oft-criticized tendency of hardline Cold Warriors to connect every problem or conflict around the world to the ideological struggle between the superpowers, whether warranted or not. In the view of Vance, McGovern, and others, America could do nothing lest it jeopardize the supreme priority of arms control or avoidance of nuclear war, which in practice meant refusing to offend the Soviet Union or take robust countervailing action against it when necessary.

That mindset led, in turn, to the incisive critique of détente offered by Brzezinski: it placed all responsibility for relieving tensions on the United States and required nothing from the Soviet Union in return. At the same time, he advocated for engagement with more pragmatic Warsaw Pact satellites like Poland and Romania, Brzezinski pushed for a “reciprocal and comprehensive” version of détente to replace the pessimistic, one-sided edition pursued by Kissinger during the Nixon and Ford administrations and, tacitly at least, advocated by Vance. If Brzezinski erred in seeing peripheral conflicts like the skirmish between Ethiopia and Somalia as more important to American interests and Cold War geopolitics than they were in reality, Vance and his State Department blundered grievously with their inordinate fear of potential Soviet reactions to American policy as well as their solicitous attitude toward the Kremlin—to the point where Vance declared that Carter and superannuated Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev possessed “similar dreams and aspirations about the most fundamental issues.”

Matters improved only marginally when Vance resigned in protest when Carter ordered the U.S. military to rescue hostages held by the revolutionary regime in Iran. Rather than attack his Soviet counterpart over Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan, for instance, new Secretary of State Edmund Muskie “seemed to apologize for America’s resolve” by telling his communist interlocutor that Carter’s tough rhetoric was mere electioneering. By this point in the Carter presidency, however, it was clear that Brzezinski had won the battle for the administration’s foreign policy.

But the war for the soul and direction of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy persists to this day, and on virtually identical intellectual battlelines. We saw it in the refusal of the Obama administration to respond assertively to Iran’s actions in the Middle East lest the United States jeopardize the negotiations that produced the 2015 nuclear agreement—and then overestimated what the agreement itself achieved. It was also apparent in the Biden administration’s acute fear of Russian nuclear threats during the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine, particularly in the fall of 2022. Or take the China policy preferred by many progressives today, which posits that cooperation on climate change outweighs any other possible concerns or issues the United States may have with Beijing.

Time and again, Democrats have seen this movie play out. Democratic presidents from Carter on have invariably learned the hard way that the world does not work the way that many progressives believe it does, and often tack toward more assertive foreign policies. Nonetheless, the “contractual-litigational” view of foreign affairs, as Brzezinski dubbed Vance’s diplomatic style, remains prominent among elite Democratic foreign policy circles. Unfortunately, earnest negotiations and diplomatic agreements have not displaced what Brzezinski called “the problems of power.”

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It may seem beside the point to discuss foreign policy divisions among Democrats when the Trump administration seems hellbent on appeasing the Kremlin and damaging or destroying virtually every aspect of American national security—and much else besides. But if a future Democratic president is to refound American foreign policy in the more dangerous world that will inevitably follow Trump, a conclusive resolution of the enduring struggle for the soul of the party’s foreign policy becomes all the more important. In that respect, Democrats would do well to discover their own inner Brzezinski and recover a more holistic view of power, remember that alliances have never been without challenges, refuse to pursue deals with autocratic powers at the expense or to the exclusion of other, more important foreign policy goals and values.

Thanks to Luce, though, Democrats—and the nation—has this compelling biography of an unjustly neglected strategic thinker to help guide us just when we need it.