‘I hate reviewing books’, the young Zbigniew Brzezinski informed a journal editor in 1960, explaining that he found it ‘debilitating intellectually, demoralizing personally and destructive collegiately’. Might Edward Luce feel the same way? My review in NLR, he complains, gives an ‘inaccurate account’ of his book that reveals a basic ‘misunderstanding of what a biography is meant to do’. He argues that I fail to grasp the ‘peaceful means’ inherent in Brzezinski’s anti-Soviet strategy; that – contrary to my suggestion that Luce bowdlerizes his subject’s sharper formulations on American power – Brzezinski never spoke of ‘US empire’; and that I misconstrue his political commentary at the Financial Times. Let me try to set the record straight.

The biographer’s task is to present a life whole, Luce observes. This is what Zbig does best, giving a vivid sense of its subject’s personality, imprinted by ‘wounded Polishness’. Luce is also insightful on his formative years as a diplomat’s son in émigré Montreal. This is a real contribution. Less satisfactory is the treatment of Brzezinski’s political outlook and mature strategic thought.    

Luce objects to my comment on Brzezinski’s case for ‘peaceful engagement’, which he takes to have been a doveish, ‘non-kinetic alternative’ to strategies of counterrevolutionary reversal in Eastern Europe. Yet Brzezinski criticized Eisenhower and Dulles not for preferring military rollback to accommodation with the USSR but for their reluctance to translate words into action. In 1956, Brzezinski wrote at the time, acquiescence to Soviet actions in Poland and Hungary represented a lack of resolve, exposing the doctrine of ‘liberation’ as a verbal mask for ‘passive neo-isolationism’. Rejecting such hollow rhetoric as well as the ‘passivity’ of containment, he advocated an ‘offensive strategy’ of intensifying ideological struggle against the Communist bloc and exploiting ethno-nationalist fissures in it, with the aim of provoking the ultimate dissolution of the system. ‘Admittedly’, he noted in his 1957 article introducing the concept, such an approach ‘might increase world tensions’ and ‘the argument is always raised that this will lead inevitably to a Third World War’, but the risks of lopsided de-escalation were worse still. As Carter’s National Security Advisor Brzezinski carried this view into the White House, ramping up psychological warfare and covert action aimed at destabilizing the USSR by stoking unrest in its non-Russian republics; priorities included Ukraine, where his team operated through the pogromist Mykola Lebed’s zpUHVR, as well as Muslim Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Characterizing Brzezinski’s White House role, Luce portrays a ‘conscience-stricken’ Carter torn between rival advisers, conciliatory Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and the Machiavellian Brzezinski. The notion of ‘a battle for the president’s mind’ is colourful but misleading. Carter arrived in office a Cold Warrior, campaigning against détente and congressional oversight that he felt ‘crippled’ the CIA. Nor did his moralizing religiosity rule out the ruthless application of hard power when it was required. As for his counsellors, while Carter took advice he decided in solitude, with little of the horse-trading and bureaucratic brokerage of a Johnson or Clinton. ‘The most striking aspect of Jimmy Carter’s leadership’, Nancy Mitchell concludes in her monumental archival history, ‘is that he so rarely listened to anyone’.

Luce likewise overdraws the contrast between Kissinger’s flattery of the media and Brzezinski’s stubborn aloofness. ‘If I wanted Cy [Vance] to sit down with four or five of the top columnists’, Carter recalled, ‘he wouldn’t do it . . . Brzezinski on the other hand was always eager to be the spokesman and he liked to be on Meet the Press, or brief the White House press corps on a non-attributable basis’. Like Kissinger, Treasury Department spokesman Joseph Laitin remembered, ‘Brzezinski was one of the biggest leakers in government’. Assisted by his press secretary, former Time correspondent Jerrold Schecter, Brzezinski tirelessly courted publicity. Contemporary magazine profiles (Elisabeth Drew in the New Yorker, James Wooten in Esquire) and Sally Quinn’s articles in the Washington Post document these efforts and make plain why they weren’t more successful. Luce himself is evidently of two minds here, writing that ‘Brzezinski was very conscious of his media image’ and a hundred pages later ‘more than ever, Brzezinski did not appear to give a damn about what people thought of him’.

Luce’s most jaw-dropping claim is that ‘Brzezinski did not talk of American empire’. On the contrary, he returned repeatedly to the theme: as early as 1964 he and Huntington spoke of the United States as a ‘continental empire’, and by the eighties he reflected on ‘the American imperial system’ that ‘emerged full-blown only after World War II’. ‘The political and military ties that can be said to have codified the American empire’, he summarized in Game Plan (1986), ‘grew out of the emerging cold war’:

The American-Soviet contest is not only between two nations. It is between two empires. Both nations had acquired imperial attributes even before their post-World War II collision, but that collision has heightened the strategic importance of their respective imperial assets and has intensified their imperial growth. Some might say that this view is tantamount to asserting that there is a kind of ‘moral equivalence’ between the Soviet Union and the United States. I do not suggest that. I use the term ‘empire’ as morally neutral to describe a hierarchical system of political relationships, radiating from a center. Such an empire’s morality is defined by how its imperial power is wielded, with what, degree of consent on the part of those within its scope, and to what ends.

Not only did Washington’s rule outlast Moscow’s, its magnitude exceeded all precedent. That novelty is one of the central themes of The Grand Chessboard (1997). The book merits only fleeting mention in Zbig, and Luce now concedes that perhaps he should have paid it more attention. Far from a modest charter for the US as ‘offshore balancer’, Brzezinski offered a bold panorama of post-Cold War Eurasia, dominated for the first time in history by an external power, and a long-term strategy for its management. Candid regarding the extent of American supremacy, Brzezinski was sober in his forecast of its longevity. ‘Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization’, he reflected, and without the Soviet menace an increasingly multicultural and hedonistic United States could not be expected to bear the costs of supracontinental overlordship indefinitely. Far-sighted statesmen would need to prepare the transition from ‘an enduring and sometimes costly imperial engagement’ to a more collaborative structure of ‘shared responsibility’, probably in a generation or two.

What relation does the political and intellectual project of Zbig bear to Luce’s fluent opinion-making in the Financial Times? Publicizing his book in the paper, he emphasized Brzezinski’s relevance to the present geopolitical moment, arguing that he would surely have taken a tougher line on Putin than Trump’s. (The ageing Brzezinski’s 2014 appeal for a neutral Ukraine as a non-aligned buffer between NATO and Russia is dismissed as ‘a dose of autumnal softening.’) Brzezinski himself took a stoic view of American primacy in decline. In 2016, the year before he died, he concluded that despite its formidable capabilities the US was ‘no longer the globally imperial power’. Six years later Luce offered a different reading, cheered on the morrow of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that ‘the US has been given an unexpected lease on life as the world’s top dog by Putin’s over-reach’. He assured Financial Times readers in summer 2022 that ‘Russia has lost this war’, and told them in late 2023 that ‘every artillery piece that America sends to Ukraine is another reason for China to think twice on Taiwan’. He praised Trump’s shakedown of European NATO allies last summer to increase arms spending to 5% of GDP (‘something they should have done years ago’). In October he was hoping for the spoliation of Russian central bank assets to ‘tide Ukraine through the next couple years’. He is mystified by the suggestion that he wants the war to continue. He simply wants to ‘see an end to Russia’s offensive’. Eliding the means while embracing the end: in classical rhetoric, the passage between the two is effected by enthymeme, whose art consists in omission. As the Atlanticist foreign policy commentariat struggles to come to terms with military realities on the Dnieper, we can expect plenty more of it to come.

Read on: Grey Anderson, ‘Primacy’s Calculus’, NLR 156.