Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Cold War Prophet

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Zbigniew Brzezinski was one of the key figures who helped bring about the demise of the Soviet Union. As National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, and counsel to presidents from John F. Kennedy onwards, Brzezinski converted his role as a leading American Sovietologist onto the global stage. George Kennan and Henry Kissinger are often held up as America’s most influential Cold War strategists but Brzezinski’s impact on helping bring about the end of the USSR was greater. As a Polish emigré to America who witnessed the destruction of his family’s home and country at the hands of the Nazis and the Soviets, Brzezinski became one of America’s foremost scholars of totalitarianism. He believed in the importance of understanding the enemy and in speaking their language. His friendship with Pope John Paul II—a Pole and the first non-Italian to hold that role in almost half a millennium—was critical in preventing the Soviet invasion of Poland.

Brzezinski’s lifelong competition—and on-off fraught relationship—with the more loquacious Henry Kissinger was perhaps the most important US rivalry of the Cold War and afterwards. Nixon and Kissinger opened up China to the West in the early 1970s.

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Brzezinski and Carter normalized US-China relations and decisively tipped the chessboard against Moscow at the end of that decade. Far blunter and more acerbic than Kissinger, Brzezinski was inevitably less of a darling with the global media. But his historic legacy—notably his critical role in bringing Kissinger’s stalled Détente to an end—is arguably greater. Brzezinski’s monumental contributions to American foreign policy have been underreported, leaving a hole in our understanding of Cold War history and its aftermath, notably America’s response to the 9/11 attacks, which he lamented. His role in having armed the Afghan Mujahideen to fight the Soviet invaders in 1980 was also latently controversial. Edward Luce’s biography corrects the underweighting of Brzezinski’s remarkable impact on America’s place in the world, telling the almost cinematic story of a life that spans most of the 20th century and beyond, and in doing so, narrating a new version of the end of the Cold War.