Once, while shuttling between meetings in steamy Beijing during the summer of 2010, I asked Zbigniew Brzezinski who his single biggest foreign policy influence was. I was the great man’s research assistant back then and was awkwardly looking to fill the time. He paused for a moment, looking almost puzzled. “Nobody, really,” he answered.
On first impression I thought Brzezinski’s non-answer was boastful. But in retrospect, Zbig (as he was known) was just being honest. The Polish-born strategist, most famous as Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, evaded easy categorization. He was the Democrats’ Cold War sage who found admirers on Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy team; an inveterate Russia hawk who was an arch-nemesis of neoconservatism in the George W. Bush years; and early backer of Barack Obama.
Once, while shuttling between meetings in steamy Beijing during the summer of 2010, I asked Zbigniew Brzezinski who his single biggest foreign policy influence was. I was the great man’s research assistant back then and was awkwardly looking to fill the time. He paused for a moment, looking almost puzzled. “Nobody, really,” he answered.
On first impression I thought Brzezinski’s non-answer was boastful. But in retrospect, Zbig (as he was known) was just being honest. The Polish-born strategist, most famous as Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, evaded easy categorization. He was the Democrats’ Cold War sage who found admirers on Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy team; an inveterate Russia hawk who was an arch-nemesis of neoconservatism in the George W. Bush years; and early backer of Barack Obama.
Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet, Edward Luce, Avid Reader, 560 pp., $35, May 2025
Brzezinski is often compared to his contemporary and rival, Henry Kissinger. They were both European émigrés with thick accents and shared a professional path of star-academic-turned-national-security-advisor. But the two approached U.S. strategy from completely different perspectives. Kissinger, a German-born scholar of old-world European diplomacy, held a pessimistic view of the trajectory of the United States and inflated view of the USSR, seeking a balance of power between them through detente. Brzezinski, a scholar of the ideological and political weaknesses of the Soviet Union, bore a grudge against Moscow for the enslavement of Eastern Europe and had inherent confidence that the United States would prevail in the Cold War.
Brzezinski’s remarkable life is crisply retold by Financial Times columnist Edward Luce in his magnificent new biography, Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet. Luce’s book is the first real attempt to capture the full dimensions of Brzezinski as both a thinker and also a man: his acid wit, his preternatural competitiveness, his comical tight-fistedness, his tender and unbending dedication to his family. Luce does this beautifully in an essential new contribution that properly elevates Brzezinski’s standing in the pantheon of U.S. foreign policy thinkers.
Luce’s book leaves many impressions, but chief among them is that the United States no longer produces many grand strategists like Brzezinski or Kissinger. Some of this may be due to the uniqueness of their generation, which matured in the wake of World War II’s destruction and produced thinkers fixated on problems of world order. But perhaps more has to do with the requirements of success in U.S. foreign policymaking nowadays. The leviathan of the modern-day national security state and even the National Security Council itself—which has grown from a few dozen in Brzezinski’s time to hundreds today—increasingly demands as much operational expertise as strategic depth. At a time of immense global transition, this geostrategist deficit is unfortunate; as Kissinger wrote on the news of his rival’s passing in 2017, “The world is an emptier place without Zbig pushing the limits of his insights.”
Brzezinski was the son of a Polish diplomat, and though he only lived in Poland on and off through his first decade, the country and its tragic history loomed large over Brzezinski’s life. While coming of age in 1940s Montreal, little Zbig dreamed of Polish knights and heroes; his precocious essays in high school focused on the Polish problem in international relations.
As the Iron Curtain descended over Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, Brzezinski channeled his prodigious talents toward studying his adversary. He learned Russian and earned a PhD from Harvard in 1953 in the nascent field of Sovietology. Zbig’s 1960 book, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, based off of his master’s thesis, was both prescient and enduring: He argued that the Soviet Bloc’s centrifugal nationalities, and even the USSR’s own national patchwork (from Balts to Ukrainians), created an Achilles’ heel that would ultimately be its undoing. In response to claims—popular during the Cold War—that Moscow had successfully created a sense of pan-Soviet citizenship, Brzezinski would often retort: “So do they speak Soviet?”
As a professor at Harvard and then Columbia, Brzezinski’s energies increasingly turned toward Washington. During a brief tour at the State Department during Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, he advocated for peaceful engagement with Eastern Europe to pull it apart from Moscow. But it was Brzezinski’s turn as national security advisor that put him in the cockpit of U.S. foreign policy. Zbig’s chief rival within the Carter administration, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, favored stabilizing relations with the USSR, whereas Brzezinski saw detente as a one-sided bargain. In the internal struggle for influence, he ate Vance for lunch, decisively winning Carter’s ear. Part of this was due to Brzezinski’s proximity in the White House, but Zbig was also a wellspring of new ideas and entertaining company. Once, when Carter asked for a capsule history of the USSR, Brzezinski responded that, under Lenin, it “had been like a revival meeting; under Stalin it was like a prison; under Khrushchev it was a circus; and under Brezhnev it resembled a United States Post Office.”
Brzezinski used his influence to bury the knife into a faltering detente. Building on Nixon and Kissinger’s opening to China, Carter fully normalized relations with Beijing in 1979. This was all Zbig: He established a deeply trusting relationship with the diminutive Deng Xiaoping based on mutual antipathy toward Moscow. At a dinner at Brzezinski’s home in Virgina to help seal the deal, they giddily toasted to U.S.-China friendship with Leonid Brezhnev’s favorite vodka. Kissinger had argued that the opening to China created an elegant “strategic triangle” that would bring the United States closer to both Moscow and Beijing. Brzezinski instead operationalized U.S.-China relations against the USSR. With China’s help, the Carter administration aided the Afghan resistance when the USSR invaded on Christmas Day 1979, sinking the Soviet Union into an enduring quagmire that accelerated its demise.
Brzezinski also encouraged Carter’s advocacy for human rights as a way to put the Soviets on the ideological defensive, to the howls of those at State who wanted to preserve a working relationship with Moscow. In this pursuit Brzezinski found a fortuitous partner in fellow Pole Pope John Paul II, a critical historical relationship recalled vividly by Luce, who includes touching correspondences between the strategist and pope.
But it was Iran that permanently injured Brzezinski’s legacy. Ironically, Zbig was prescient about the dangers of the 1979 Iranian revolution. He saw shades of 1917 Russia, while others, like U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan, saw Ayatollah Khomeini as a potential “Gandhi-like” figure. But Zbig will be forever associated with Operation Eagle Claw—the high-risk raid to rescue American hostages in Tehran, which he advocated for and which failed disastrously, sealing Carter’s electoral fate.
Demonstrators set an American flag on fire as they stand atop the U.S. Embassy in Tehran amid the hostage crisis on Nov. 9, 1979.Everett Collection Historical/Alamy
Brzezinski was also unduly paranoid about a Soviet hand behind events in Iran. In Kai Bird’s magisterial biography of Carter, The Outlier, Brzezinski is depicted as a reckless superhawk, with a tendency toward “geostrategic gobbledygook” (as Strobe Talbott once put it in Time) and seeing a Soviet shadow around every corner. There’s a grain of truth to this caricature. Zbig was the author of the 1980 Carter Doctrine, which promised that the United States would block any attempt to control the Persian Gulf by an “outside force” (read: Moscow). In retrospect, the threat of Soviet expansion into the region was wildly overblown, as the USSR sputtered into terminal decline.
The fall of the Iron Curtain nine years later fulfilled Brzezinski’s boyhood and professional dreams. Brzezinski had predicted the impending collapse of communism only months earlier, arguing forcefully in his 1989 book, The Grand Failure, that Gorbachev’s reform efforts were doomed. “[It’s] hard to imagine an individual more vindicated by the actual course of historical events” than Brzezinski, wrote Francis Fukuyama. The Soviet Union then dissolved into its constituent nationalities, just as Zbig foresaw in his master’s thesis four decades earlier.
Luce astutely notes that Brzezinski was optimistic about U.S. capabilities during the Cold War yet turned cynical about the ability of the United States to shoulder the mantle of global leadership afterward. Zbig regretted George H. W. Bush’s inability to flesh out a vision for a “new world order” beyond sloganeering and criticized Bill Clinton’s administration for failing to make permanent peace between Israel and Palestine. To his immense credit, Brzezinski was an immediate and trenchant critic of George W. Bush’s Iraq War and dismissed the Global War on Terror as an “quasi-theological” absurdity.
On Russia, which Zbig knew so well, he was characteristically prophetic. Brzezinski predicted that the post-Soviet Russian Federation would soon be captured by revanchism, and advocated for an eastward expansion of NATO to consolidate the West’s gains. In this prophecy, Brzezinski trained his focus on the centrality of Ukraine. He wrote in 1994 that “without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.” How right he proved to be.
Clockwise from top left: Brzezinski with former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Washington in 2006; with former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Oslo in 2016; with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in Washington in 2008; and with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in Washington in 2012.Getty Images
What makes a good strategic thinker? Historical perspective, an ability to intuit political will, and a synthesis of disciplines—from military affairs to human psychology. Brzezinski brilliantly exhibited all of these qualities. His theories pulled together diverse strands of politics, ideology, and societal development, all communicated in an incisive though academic style, epitomized in titles such as Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, his 1970 book.
An often underappreciated trait of a good strategist is originality of thought, which Zbig protectively nurtured. Brzezinski wouldn’t be caught dead purveying Washington groupthink; he intentionally refrained from reading opinion essays on subjects on which he was writing or giving a major speech, to avoid unwelcome influence. As his research assistant, I compiled weekly briefs of international newspapers so that he could better inhabit and understand foreign points of view.
Also essential is intellectual fearlessness, which often comes with sharp elbows. Brzezinski could be quite charming, and his commitment to his family over the Georgetown social circuit set him apart from many of his peers. But his hawk-like facial features betrayed his sense of mission and no-nonsense approach to things. He cunningly outflanked his rivals at the State Department and elsewhere—and even reveled in it: He once boasted to me about a book on the Carter years in which his portrayal “made Machiavelli look like a boy scout.”
Brzezinski in his office in Washington on Dec. 1, 1981.Diana Walker/Getty Images
But Brzezinski’s most Machiavellian maneuvering was deployed in the pursuit of ideas, rather than power for power’s sake. According to Luce, in the Johnson administration Zbig likely invented a story about an upcoming speech by Robert F. Kennedy attacking Johnson’s Cold War policies, prompting the president to preempt his rival with a speech containing Brzezinski’s preferred strategy toward Eastern Europe. Brzezinski of course enjoyed popularity and press, but popularity was always secondary to advocating what he thought was right. Zbig’s early and forceful calls for a two-state solution and against the Iraq War ostracized him in many corners of Washington, but he never relented.
The requirements of leadership in U.S. foreign policy have fundamentally changed from Brzezinski’s heyday and make Zbig-like geostrategists more elusive than ever. Brzezinski ran his NSC like a college seminar: 20 or so staffers, each covering a different region, seated around a single table. But today’s national security bureaucracy is so massive, so complex, that deep geostrategic thinking is nice-to-have but insufficient. To handle the sheer flow of material and address cross-cutting economic and national security challenges requires a skillset and attitude that would have been alien to Brzezinski. Gone, too, are the international relations scholar-celebrities—academies, more atomized and specialized than ever, don’t produce them, and the public doesn’t value them as its attention turns inward.
Toward the end of his life, Brzezinski constantly lamented Americans’ ignorance of foreign affairs. He thickened his speeches with anecdotes about how, for example, a third of U.S. high schoolers couldn’t identify the Pacific Ocean on a map. In this way, Brzezinski followed a grand tradition of international relations thinkers like George Kennan who griped about the materialism and superficiality of the U.S. public, to the point of sounding fuddy-duddy. But as the United States now retreats from old alliances and finds itself captured by nativism and populism, perhaps, on this score, Brzezinski was prophetic yet again.
