The Coldest Cold Warrior
How a sharp-elbowed Polish academic with an unpronounceable name helped defeat the Soviet Union.
Zbig
The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski,
America’s Great Power Prophet
by Edward Luce
Avid Reader, 560 pp., $29
LAST WEEK, EDWARD LUCE JOINED ME on Shield of the Republic, the podcast I cohost with Eliot Cohen, to discuss his compulsively readable biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor and longtime scholar of the Soviet Union and its relations with its East European satellites during the Cold War. Although there have been a handful of other books on Brzezinski’s intellectual evolution and aspects of his public life, this is the first biography based on access to his personal papers (including his private diary) that brings together his public and private life in one volume.
As we discussed on the podcast, it’s a puzzle that there have been so many biographies of Brzezinski’s predecessor as national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, but so few of Brzezinski. There are probably several explanations for this. Kissinger served eight years in office, including more than two years during which he was concurrently secretary of state in the Nixon-Ford administrations. By contrast, Carter’s policy failures ended up limiting him to one term and casting a loser’s pall on his administration’s reputation.
The two men’s personalities may have also had something to do with it. Kissinger was more accessible, with a finely honed self-deprecating sense of humor, and he assiduously wooed the press. Brzezinski was witty, but more pointed and razor-sharp. His wit was largely aimed at others, and he could be extremely prickly with members of the fourth estate. One anecdote Luce recounts—thoroughly footnoted—illustrates how quick Brzezinski could be to inconvenience or annoy others if he perceived a rationale to doing so:
At 3:00 a.m. on March 5, 1953, Merle Fainsod, Harvard University’s leading Sovietologist, awoke irritably to a telephone call from his twenty-four-year-old research assistant. The excited Zbigniew Brzezinski was calling to let him know that the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, had died. Fainsod said that Stalin would “be just as dead in the morning” and hung up. The dictator passed away later that day. Brzezinski justified his intrusion by saying that the professor would want to be prepared for journalists to ring him at dawn for comments on Stalin’s death. Brzezinski’s rude awakening offers an inimitable glimpse of how his mind worked: since Fainsod’s sleep would in any case be interrupted, Brzezinski would save him the trouble by getting in first. Besides, what Cold War scholar would not want to know as soon as possible about the demise of one of history’s greatest monsters?
After leaving government service in 1977, Kissinger continued to seek high office and courted senior officials in successive administrations, both Democratic and Republican. Brzezinski was more focused on public debate on national security policy, and his intellectual style, which consisted largely of bludgeoning his opponents in debate, won him more enemies than friends. As Luce recounts, for Brzezinski “the visceral and the intellectual . . . were never far apart.” While Kissinger was supremely gifted in dealing out flattery, Zbig treated fools (and some who were not so foolish) with disdain.
Both men, émigrés from war-torn Europe who never lost their foreign accents, were fired by relentless ambition for power and prodigious skill in networking, including scoring patronage by the Rockefeller family (Nelson in Kissinger’s case and David in Brzezinski’s). As a result, perhaps improbably, they both ended up operating at the highest levels of government.
Since both received their graduate educations at Harvard (and Kissinger his undergraduate degree as well) and taught there in the 1950s, it was probably inevitable that myths would grow up about their rivalry. Kissinger received tenure and Brzezinski didn’t, and therein, so the story goes, lay the seeds of lifelong jealousy and competition. Luce provides a valuable corrective to this tall tale. Although it is true that Brzezinski was initially denied tenure at Harvard, Kissinger actually supported him for the professorship, and Brzezinski subsequently turned down no fewer than three opportunities to return to Harvard. The two men remained in friendly contact (more or less) for the rest of their lives, and as Luce recounts, there is real pathos in Kissinger’s heartfelt condolence message to Brzezinski’s family when the slightly younger Brzezinski predeceased him in 2017.
That said, their “friendship” retained more than small traces of rivalry as both sought to influence national security policy, one for mostly Republican presidents and the other for Democrats (although, as hard it is to imagine in these highly polarized times, both managed to provide advice across party lines during their long post-government careers).
Kissinger’s years as national security advisor were marked by high drama, including the opening to China, major arms control agreements reached (SALT I and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty), vivid summits in Beijing and Moscow, and the tumultuous negotiations and tragic exit from the Vietnam war that Nixon and Kissinger inherited from their predecessors. Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Vietnam peace talks, although the catastrophic collapse of South Vietnam in the aftermath of U.S. withdrawal cast a shadow on that achievement.
The Carter years were a bit more prosaic. The administration completed the establishment of formal relations with the People’s Republic of China begun by Nixon and Kissinger, and the Camp David accords (for which Carter deserves enormous credit—although the catalyst for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem was Carter’s and Brzezinski’s wrongheaded determination to bring the USSR back into the Middle East by convening a multilateral peace conference in Geneva).
The positive achievements, however, were obscured by the larger failures. The last year of Carter’s term, especially, was an almost Dickensian study in contrasts in which Brzezinski played a large part. Most people overlooked the investment in technologies like stealth and precision targeting that started a revolution in warfare (largely because they were secret). Much more visible were the breakdown of arms control negotiations in response to Soviet adventurism in the Third World culminating in the invasion of Afghanistan, as well as the collapse of the Shah’s regime in Iran and the subsequent hostage crisis.
FOR ALL THAT, HOWEVER, I suspect that readers of Luce’s biography will come away thinking that Brzezinski was, perhaps, a more consequential figure in the history of American national security that the admittedly more seductive personage of Kissinger. For one thing, he was more prescient, in big ways and small. Luce recounts:
In the midst of [the 1976 Entebbe hostage crisis], Brzezinski was invited to dinner at the home of Shimon Peres, Israel’s defense minister. Peres kept having to leave the room to take calls. Somewhat flippantly, Brzezinski quipped to Peres that Israeli commandoes should storm the airport and free the hostages. Peres gave Brzezinski an enigmatic stare and went silent. The following day it became obvious why he had kept his counsel: Israeli forces raided the airport in one of the most daring rescue operations in modern history.
On many of the big questions, as well, Brzezinski saw things more clearly, or at least more creatively, than Kissinger. Kissinger accepted that the Cold War was a long twilight struggle and that, in a world of nuclear parity with the USSR and limited support in Congress for spending on national defense, it was his job to manage American decline (as he allegedly said to Adm. Elmo Zumwalt). Brzezinski, on the other hand, was more upbeat about American prospects, more fixated on Soviet weaknesses, particularly nationalism in Eastern Europe and the nationalities problem in the USSR.
The comprehensive net assessment of U.S. and Soviet strengths and weaknesses that Brzezinski (working closely with Samuel Huntington and Andrew Marshall) conducted at the outset of Carter’s term found that only in the area of military power, particularly the nuclear balance, did the Soviet Union outstrip the United States. The policy shifts that Brzezinski helped initiate—the MX missile, the dual-track decision in NATO (modernizing America’s arsenal of theater nuclear weapons in Europe while also negotiating more arms control agreements), counterforce nuclear targeting, emphasis on improvements in command and control of nuclear weapons and continuity of government, covert action to undermine the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and Poland, increases in the topline spending on defense in the last two years of Carter’s administration, and the inclusion of strategic defense in assessments of the nuclear balance—set the stage for the Reagan Revolution that was to come as the result of the 1980 election and, in no small measure, contributed to the overall collapse of Soviet power in 1991.
BRZEZINSKI’S JUDGMENT, HOWEVER, was far from flawless. Luce largely acquits Brzezinski of the charge of antisemitism that dogged him throughout the last forty years of his career, and recounts the fascinating relationship that Brzezinski enjoyed with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin:
Although Begin was Israel’s most hawkish leader, he and Brzezinski hit it off. Indeed, their shared hawkishness may even have helped. . . . There was something about Begin’s inveterate nationalism that struck a romantic chord in Brzezinski. That both men had been born in Poland—although raised in very different milieus—helped. They could switch easily from English to Polish. Their shared compendious knowledge of the Polish Home Army’s wartime resistance and the Warsaw Uprising gave them plenty to talk about. Begin had been imprisoned for part of the war by Stalin’s NKVD, which meant that they also shared an allergy to communism. Their discussion ranged to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the . . . father of revisionist Zionism, who had been Begin’s mentor.
Brzezinski’s assessments of Middle East events (about which he knew far less than Europe or even Asia, where he had spent considerable time) were sometimes catastrophically off. The most prominent examples were Iran during the crisis over the future of the Shah’s regime and, at various points, Israel.
Perhaps Brzezinski’s his greatest lapse, and one which rekindled charges of antisemitism, was his endorsement of The Israel Lobby, the scurrilous book by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer on the supposedly determinative role of shadowy, unpatriotic, scheming forces in setting U.S. Middle East policy.
LUCE’S VALUABLE VOLUME will have to serve as just a foundational effort to give Zbig his due. Although it is grounded in Brzezinski’s personal papers, it only scratches the surface of the broader array of primary sources (both published and unpublished) that have become available in the last few years—not to mention a growing secondary literature on many of the topics that Luce covers in this book. The official Defense Department history of Harold Brown’s tenure as Secretary of Defense and the rich documentation in the State Department’s series Foreign Relations of the United States as well as the declassified documents available at the National Security Archive could all have been used to great advantage in fleshing out some of the details in episodes that Luce covers. Recent important secondary accounts of the Iran crises like Ray Takeyh’s The Last Shah and Mark Bowden’s Guests of the Ayatollah would have enriched his account of that climactic experience of the Carter presidency. Finally, a cursory citation of William Inboden’s Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink would have prevented an ill-advised overreliance on sketchy sources arguing that Reagan and his campaign minions were responsible for colluding with Iran to hold the hostages until after the election of 1980.
Although Brzezinski became more pessimistic about the United States and its prospects, particularly in his last few years, close study of his broader optimism about America and his indefatigable pursuit of American advantage in strategic competition with the USSR as his life’s work will yield valuable lessons for today’s even more complicated era of great power competition.
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