Plain truths about Washington’s place in the international system more often than not are spoken in a foreign accent. American diplomats, Henry Kissinger lamented, felt no need for a ‘geopolitical design’. ‘The American people, blessed by geography, have historically been reluctant to think in geopolitical terms’, agreed Zbigniew Brzezinski, his successor at the White House and fellow mitteleuropäischer émigré. ‘They see foreign crises as isolated moral challenges rather than pieces of a strategic puzzle.’
Edward Luce’s biography aims to lift Brzezinski from comparative obscurity. While Kissinger’s career is chronicled in shelves of books, treatments of Carter’s National Security Adviser can be counted on one hand. In addition to Brzezinski’s own memoirs, there is a life in Polish by the American academic Patrick Vaughan; Andrzej Lubowski’s journalistic portrait; a Festschrift edited by Charles Gati; and French diplomat Justin Vaïsse’s Zbigniew Brzezinski: America’s Grand Strategist (2018), the first serious study available in English. Zbig is not an authorized biography, Luce insists, though he enjoyed enviable access. The project originated with Brzezinski’s youngest son, Mark, who provided his father’s nsc diaries. Research funding serendipitously arrived from a Rockefeller outfit and other benefactors. The Polish ambassador hastened to share secret police files and Brzezinski’s correspondence with the Pope; more than a hundred interviewees (Kissinger, Albright, Balcerowicz, etc.) are thanked. A gale of Beltway plaudits met the book on its appearance, praised in Foreign Affairs, fêted at the Aspen Institute, with publicity assists from Brzezinski’s daughter and her talk-show-host husband catapulting it onto the New York Times best-seller list.
Financial Times us national editor in Washington—where he got to know his subject and appreciate his ‘penetrating brain’—Luce was born in Shoreham on the English south coast, son of the local Tory mp and descendant of generations of decorated colonial governors and naval commanders. After Lancing College and ppe at Oxford, he abandoned an entry-level position at the European Commission in Brussels for the freewheeling life of a journalist, covering 1990s world-trade talks and Bosnia for the Guardian, then the Philippines, India and dc for the ft, with a year out as speechwriter for Clinton’s Treasury Secretary in 1999–2000. In his earlier books, Luce’s attachment to liberal Atlanticism did not bar sharp-eyed assessment of its contradictions. In Spite of the Gods (2006), punctured Western boosterism about Indian democracy; Time to Start Thinking (2012) and The Retreat of Western Liberalism (2017) analysed the maladies of his adoptive country, eroded by inequality and bereft of coherent orientation abroad in the wake of the financial crisis. More recently, Luce’s criticisms of Western liberalism have subsided. He has emerged as the ft’s chief excoriator of Trump and Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine has made his subject ‘unexpectedly relevant’. Replete with lessons for today, Zbig casts its protagonist as both exemplar of American grand strategy and measuring rod for its ‘intellectual poverty’ in the present.
Born in Warsaw in 1928, Brzezinski spent only three early years in Poland, the rest divided between Lille and Leipzig. Tadeusz Brzeziński, a young officer turned diplomat, instilled in his son the belief that Poland was a civilized outpost crushed by predatory neighbours, Russia above all. Of szlachta descent on both sides, Zbigniew was raised in the nationalist cult of Marshal Piłsudski, revering the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’—the 1920 battle that halted Bolshevism’s westward march—and the Polish dictator’s Promethean project of rallying non-Russian peoples against Moscow, an interpretive frame Luce takes as the seed of Brzezinski’s later strategic thinking. ‘We were Westerners in the East’, Tadeusz liked to say. From this background, Luce traces a sensibility shaped by tales of cavalry charges, military parades and weekly Mass. Montreal, where Tadeusz took up the post of Polish Consul General in October 1938, gave Brzezinski fluency in French, while the émigré circuit gave him a taste for political intrigue. Germany’s defeat came as bittersweet news to the teenager, overshadowed by the Red Army’s advance across Polish soil. At McGill, he produced a master’s thesis on ‘Russo-Soviet Nationalism’, arguing that stirrings among the ‘captive nations’ constituted the Soviet Union’s ‘Achilles heel’. This ultra-Pilsudskian essay ‘contained in embryo’, Luce writes, ‘the worldview that he took into government decades later’.
At Harvard in the early 1950s, Brzezinski trained as a Sovietologist and was invited by Carl Friedrich to co-author Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956), a treatise on Nazism and Stalinism soon overtaken by Khrushchev’s thaw. The Soviet Bloc (1960) established him as a pioneer of ‘comparative communism’. Already an operator—moonlighting for the cia, hustling funds from front organizations—by the turn of the 1960s Brzezinski’s ascent began in earnest. Denied tenure at Harvard, he decamped to Columbia and the Council on Foreign Relations. Throughout his career, Brzezinski would face charges of émigré bias from wasp eminences like Averell Harriman who thought him ready to drag America into war with Russia ‘for the sake of Poland’. Luce discounts any suggestion of ‘dual loyalty’, though he does cite a 1958 letter, a month before Brzezinski gained citizenship, confessing his sense of not feeling fully at home in the United States and the pull of diasporic obligation. Reclaiming a nation, he told his father, required persistence—‘as is evident from the Zionist movement’.
Luce’s account of the 1960s traces Brzezinski’s deepening ties in Washington. A minor adviser to Kennedy—‘his first real American hero’—he later joined Johnson’s Policy Planning Staff, urging ‘peaceful engagement’ to prise satellites from Moscow and backing escalation in Vietnam. His rise, as Luce records, owed much to East Coast patronage networks. Marriage to Emilie Beneš, grand-niece of the Czech statesman, anchored him socially; links to McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger Jr opened Kennedy’s circle to him. Through Northeast Harbor summers he cultivated David Rockefeller, who sponsored the creation of the Trilateral Commission in 1973, a forum for elite coordination founded to address tensions in the us alliance system and remedy the exclusion of Japan from Atlanticist synods like Bilderberg. Its founders proposed ‘interdependence’ as an antidote to the Nixon–Connally unilateralism of the fiat-dollar system and called for greater emphasis on North–South relations, hitherto subordinated in the rigid Cold War frame.
Two convictions underpinned Brzezinski’s strategic outlook over the following decades, in and out of power. He regarded the Soviet system as inherently incapable of reform, a judgement he stuck to even as the vocabulary of totalitarianism fell out of fashion; change could only come with its overthrow. At the same time, he viewed the international order as permanently susceptible to breakdown, a condition that demanded active American leadership and cooperation among the advanced capitalist states. The East–West confrontation retained its primacy, yet did not exhaust Washington’s duty to regulate instability and systemic flux elsewhere. Unaffected by ‘Vietnam syndrome’, Brzezinski retained confidence in the use of coercion, faulting the war in Indochina chiefly for eroding domestic consensus and ceding strategic momentum to Moscow. Luce notes his disdain for the McGovernite left and search for a Southern Democrat receptive to the Trilateral agenda. Carter, impressed by his writings, answered the call. By 1975 Brzezinski was drafting attacks on Nixon and Kissinger’s ‘amoral’ policy of détente, borrowing rhetoric from the hard right. ‘Brzezinski is a total whore’, Kissinger fumed. ‘He’s been on every side of every argument.’ Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin took a longer view: between Nelson Rockefeller’s patronage of Kissinger and David’s of Brzezinski, the family was ‘running a virtually no-risk political game’.