There have been many reviews of my books over the years. Grey Anderson’s NLR essay on Zbig, my recent biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, is only the second that has provoked me to respond (I took issue with The Economist’s review of my book, Time to Start Thinking, in 2012). Though authors obviously prefer praise, being criticized is part of the deal. Being thoroughly mischaracterized, as Anderson does of my book, is altogether different. Anderson’s inaccurate account of what is contained within Zbig extends also to his summations of my work at the Financial Times, where I am a columnist and US national editor. In his account, I have apparently shifted from being a critic of western liberalism to ‘the FT’s chief excoriator of Trump and Putin’. Anderson’s binary implication is that if you attack Trump (I seldom write about Putin), you drop criticisms of the system he is assaulting. Democrats in general, and officials in the Biden administration, whose China, Middle East and Russia policies I wrote about often, would be surprised to hear that.
Anderson goes on to imply that I am a warmonger. ‘Luce scorns “Putin’s nuclear red lines”, praises Kyiv’s “defanging of Russia as an adversary”, and holds out the hope that the self-styled Coalition of the Willing may keep the conflict alive for years to come’, writes Anderson. I have no idea where Anderson got the idea that I want to perpetuate war. I would like to see an end to Russia’s offensive. Only once, in 2022 have I written a column about Putin’s nuclear threshold, where I warned that ‘the world is entering its most dangerous period since the 1962 Cuba missile crisis’ – and that none of us could then be sure where Putin’s threshold lies.
Having misportrayed my journalism, Anderson devotes much of his essay to doing the same with Zbig. His chief gripe is that I failed to do justice to Brzezinski’s ideas by insufficiently grappling with his books. Instead, ‘Luce devotes endless time to DC gossip, US News and World Reports power rankings, and which bottles of wine were opened at suppers with Nixon’. Let me take each in turn – that I give short shrift to Brzezinski’s ideas and that I chase ‘gossip’. In Zbig I devote a lot of space to explaining Brzezinski’s seminal works, starting from his 1950 graduate thesis at McGill on Russo-Soviet Nationalism, and including detailed expositions of his scholarship, including his 1960 tome, The Soviet Bloc, Unity and Conflict, and his broader academic output. The works that I explore in most detail are those that made Brzezinski’s name as a scholar and formed the intellectual core of the Cold War strategy that he took into office in the Johnson and Carter administrations.
Anderson dismisses my claim that Brzezinski’s ‘peaceful engagement’ strategy with Eastern Europe put him in the company of doves, which he calls a ‘fundamental misunderstanding’. That failing belongs to Anderson. Brzezinski’s quest for ‘peaceful engagement’ was formulated as a non-kinetic alternative to the Eisenhower administration’s maximalist doctrine of communist ‘rollback’. Brzezinski supported Détente, albeit with mounting tactical criticisms, until the mid-1970s. As I set out, he was seen as a hawk and a dove at different stages of his life, though he rejected both labels. To Anderson, Brzezinski was always a hawk. His definition of the word appears to be anyone who resisted Soviet action, even if it was via peaceful means. His approach would lobotomize any serious effort to capture Brzezinski’s odyssey. Nuance in other minds does not seem to be Anderson’s thing.
His biggest complaint is that I fail to do justice to Brzezinski’s 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard. Perhaps I should have devoted more space to summarizing its contents, though in the narrative of Brzezinski’s life and public output over that decade I give plenty of airing to the ideas contained within that book. Unlike Anderson, however, and some others, I do not read Grand Chessboard as making a case for American empire, let alone the stark pitch that Anderson claims. Anderson writes: ‘Where the US was concerned, he [Brzezinski] spoke unambiguously of US empire, a usage completely absent from Luce’s account.’ He is right; I do not quote Brzezinski on US empire. That is because Brzezinski did not use such language. The phrases ‘US empire’, ‘American imperialism’, or any variation thereof appear nowhere in Brzezinski’s writings, and not once in Grand Chessboard. He often uses the word ‘primacy’ and occasionally ‘hegemony’ but these do not mean the same thing. The Grand Chessboard, which has acquired a fetish-like status in certain quarters, possibly because of constant citation of one quote about Ukraine’s importance to Russia’s imperial reconstitution, is not as exciting as Anderson thinks it is. In the book, Brzezinski lays out how America should play the role of offshore balancer to prevent a new globally dominant Eurasian empire from emerging (here he does use the word ‘empire’). Brzezinski argues that the US should aspire to be ‘regent’ before its primacy runs out, which he forecasts as inevitable. This is his conclusion: ‘Faced with an evolving global structure, America must work to draw Russia into a larger West and simultaneously pursue a long-term geopolitical vision that includes cooperation between the United States, China, and Russia.’ To underline, Brzezinski did not talk of American empire. It was a term imposed by his lazier critics.
One basic purpose of biography is to capture the subject’s life in full – their formative years, family, social life, professional disputes and whatever context explains how that person’s life evolved. To Anderson, this is extraneous tittle tattle. Among his examples are my account of Brzezinski’s later-life friendship with Nixon (and yes, that did involve an unforgettable anecdote about wine), a couple of sentences on Brzezinski’s changed ranking in the US News and World Reports versus that of his chief rival, the US Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, and general ‘DC gossip’. The latter, I presume, refers to accounts of the widely-reported personality and policy clashes in which Brzezinski was frequently embroiled. As Anderson points out, I also mention an alleged Brzezinski sex scandal that made the front page of the Washington Post. That Anderson sees such material both as trivial and coming at the expense of exploring Brzezinski’s mind further reveals his misunderstanding of what a biography is meant to do. Zbig is suffused with Brzezinski’s ideas but in the context in which he produced them.
In the interests of brevity, here are two (of several) wrong claims Anderson makes of inaccuracy or misjudgment in Zbig. In the first, he dismisses as a false ‘conceit’ my description of Brzezinski as having Jimmy Carter’s head and Vance having his heart. ‘Recent scholarship’ has apparently concluded that ‘Carter called the shots’. By definition, the president is always the decider. Anderson misportrays my account of Carter’s relationship with his two foreign policy principals to present me as stating something that I did not say. The Carter years were a battle for the president’s mind, which Anderson must know was what I was chronicling. In similarly omniscient style, Anderson dismisses my contrast between Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger’s handling of the media, the latter being an arch-flatterer, the former being notoriously combative. Anderson says this is ‘hard to credit’ because Brzezinski once hosted me for dinner. It is in fact super-easy to credit. I would defy him to find a single journalist from that era or more recent decades who would take issue with my characterization. Anderson also questions my use of the term ‘great power’ in the book’s subtitle on the grounds that Poles are allergic to that language. Even wrongly assuming that Brzezinski represents only the Polish – not the American – tradition, this is a book about Brzezinski, not by Brzezinski.
The role of a good reviewer is to give an accurate summary of the book to support their evaluation, whether it be negative or positive. Anderson’s essay fails at the first hurdle.
Read Grey Anderson’s response here.
Read on: Grey Anderson, ‘Primacy’s Calculus’, NLR 156.