Twenty-nine people have formally served as U.S. national security adviser since the National Security Act of 1947 established the post. Originally described as the “executive secretary” of a small coordinating body, the National Security Council, to “assess and appraise” U.S. national security objectives and consider policies to advance those goals, the position has evolved into one of the most demanding and powerful roles in the U.S. government. Two people who have held the title stand out from the rest: Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. They both came to North America from Europe as children before World War II—Kissinger from Germany, Brzezinski from Poland—arriving in New York Harbor within six weeks of each other in 1938. They clashed and competed in their professional lives for more than half a century. They were stars of the postwar generation of international relations scholars who, by the sheer force of intellect, ambition, and will, rose to the top of the U.S. national security establishment. Both had an outsize effect on U.S. history and grand strategy.
There have been more than a dozen biographies of Kissinger, yet far fewer of Brzezinski. The journalist Edward Luce has done his part to address this imbalance with Zbig. Luce is a gifted storyteller who chronicles Brzezinski’s personal life, his intellectual journey, and his successes and failures in vivid and honest detail, using a unique collection of primary sources that includes hundreds of interviews with Brzezinski’s family and contemporaries, his personal diaries, and even the files the Polish secret police kept on him for decades.
In writing this gem of a book, Luce has rendered a genuine service to history. Brzezinski played a significant but underappreciated role in opening the United States to China, bringing the Cold War to an end, and shaping the world that came after. Although his tenure as national security adviser was not without failure—most notably the Iran hostage crisis—Brzezinski’s deep understanding of historical forces gave him a unique appreciation of the United States’ advantages and how to leverage them for strategic gain. Today, the post–Cold War era that Brzezinski helped usher in has come to a close, and it has left in its wake a more perilous and competitive world. Navigating today’s challenges will require a new generation of policymakers to muster the kind of formidable insight that guided Brzezinski through his.
STUDENT OF HISTORY
I first encountered Brzezinski in the White House in 1977 when I was serving as one of President Jimmy Carter’s junior aides. Brzezinski exuded an air of confidence, his dignified, hawklike profile and clipped speech befitting the descendant of a family that traced its origins to a centuries-old line of Polish nobility. Brzezinski was born in 1928, the son of a Polish diplomat who was posted in Germany and the Soviet Union for much of the 1930s. Despite spending only three years of his life in Poland, he grew up with a deep reverence for his family’s Polish heritage, as well as an implacably anti-Soviet and anticommunist worldview. He came of age as Hitler consolidated power and invaded his homeland, and he watched in horror from his father’s wartime posting in Montreal as Stalin consolidated an increasingly brutal rule. Brzezinski felt a personal sting of betrayal after the Yalta conference in 1945, when the Iron Curtain drew shut across Europe—with Poland on the other side.
Brzezinski would dedicate his academic and professional life to studying and undermining the forces of totalitarianism and authoritarianism that had overtaken his homeland during his childhood. He was ambitious from the start; Luce recounts a 12-year-old Brzezinski describing himself in his school yearbook as an authority on “European Affairs,” while his peers claimed such areas of expertise as movies, romance, yawning, and arriving late to class. Brzezinski excelled in Montreal prep schools and later at McGill University, where he would obtain his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and pen an 80,000-word graduate thesis on Russian nationalism.
It was at Harvard, where Brzezinski enrolled in 1950 to pursue his doctoral studies, that he first crossed paths with his future rival Kissinger. Brzezinski was deciding between two potential mentors, the political scientist Carl Friedrich and the historian William Elliott, and visited each of their classrooms. Pressed for time, Elliott handed over his introductory seminar to his teaching assistant: a young Kissinger, whose reverence for Germanic philosophers Brzezinski found off-putting. Brzezinski ended up choosing Friedrich. For the next nearly 70 years, Brzezinski’s and Kissinger’s paths were intertwined. Both became Harvard professors—although, after not receiving tenure, Brzezinski moved to Columbia in 1960. In the 1968 election, they advised opposing candidates—Brzezinski, the Democrat, Hubert Humphrey, and Kissinger, the Republican, Richard Nixon. When Nixon won, he named Kissinger his national security adviser. Luce describes Kissinger’s elevation as trajectory-altering for Brzezinski, showing him what was possible for a foreign-born strategist. The day Brzezinski learned of the appointment, he bought a notebook to record the names of those he wanted to hire should he one day assume the role himself. He got his chance when Carter was elected in 1976. Many of the people listed in Brzezinski’s notebook became National Security Council officials.
Brzezinski’s relationship with Carter began as one of tutor and student, with Brzezinski, the tutor, selecting Carter, the student. In 1973, three years before Carter’s election, Brzezinski and David Rockefeller, an influential banker and longtime patron of Brzezinski who supported his rise in policy circles, recruited the then governor of Georgia to join the Trilateral Commission, a nongovernmental organization they had created to strengthen cooperation among the United States, Europe, and Japan. It was through the Trilateral Commission that Carter increased his knowledge of and participation in foreign affairs. The connection between Carter and Brzezinski was not a marriage of ideology or style, but one of mutual respect for the other’s intellect and political instincts. Carter selected Brzezinski as national security adviser over the objection of nearly every one of his other advisers, who were concerned about his hard-line ideology, abrasive style, and ability to work with a team—especially with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, an establishment icon. These concerns proved valid as Brzezinski clashed with Vance and other cabinet officials over the next four years.
COLD WAR PROPHET
Brzezinski spent decades trying to identify and exploit Soviet weakness. He foresaw the inevitability of communism’s “grand failure,” as he titled his 1989 book, well before most others did. His 1950 master’s thesis predicted that nationalism in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet republics would undermine Soviet control and that Moscow’s desire to serve a “civilizing role” in that region could backfire by fueling human rights demands and independence movements. He would expand on these ideas in his first essay for this magazine in 1961 and, as Luce highlights, eventually become one of Foreign Affairs’ most prolific authors. Later in the 1960s, Brzezinski shared with President Lyndon Johnson his view that U.S. technological advances could hasten Soviet decline; he eventually published those arguments in a 1970 book.
This belief that the effective use of the United States’ inherent strengths and exploitation of the Soviet Union’s inherent vulnerabilities could tip the scales of the Cold War guided Brzezinski while he served in the Carter administration. His strategy set out to undermine Soviet legitimacy, to counter and deter Soviet expansionism, and to strengthen the U.S. military posture to put more pressure on Moscow. These efforts set the stage for the success of President Ronald Reagan’s confrontation with Moscow the following decade.
Brzezinski and Carter took aim at the legitimacy of the Soviet system by promoting human rights within the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. During the negotiation of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, a landmark diplomatic agreement designed to improve relations between East and West, Brzezinski acted as an informal adviser to Western European parties to the talks. Luce describes how, from his position on the sidelines, Brzezinski successfully pushed Western European countries to insist that the pact include human rights commitments from Moscow—over the objections of Kissinger, who worried that the addition would sink the agreement. The Soviets, under the impression (encouraged by Kissinger) that the human rights commitments were mere rhetoric, ultimately conceded. Carter brought the issue into the spotlight in his 1976 campaign, most notably during an October 6 debate with his opponent, President Gerald Ford. Luce tells the story of Brzezinski prodding Carter ahead of the debate to push Ford on the deficiencies of his (and Kissinger’s) détente with Moscow and attention to human rights issues. Carter took this advice. A flustered Ford ended up making a historic gaffe when he confidently declared, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” Sensing blood in the water, Carter followed up with a call for better enforcement of the human rights provisions of the Helsinki agreement. In what proved to be a close election, Carter’s debate performance—and Ford’s forced error—may have won Carter the presidency.
Brzezinski thought primarily in terms of systems and historical forces.
Once in office, Carter maintained his emphasis on human rights. He worked to raise awareness of Moscow’s human rights violations, including by publicizing a letter he wrote to the Nobel Peace Prize–winning physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov and by inviting the human rights activist Vladimir Bukovsky to the White House. As Luce notes, Robert Gates, who served as Brzezinski’s White House aide and later became director of the Central Intelligence Agency and secretary of defense, wrote in his 1996 book From the Shadows that Carter and Brzezinski’s focus on human rights issues planted “fragile seeds” that later bore “lethal fruit.” Their efforts delivered a blow to the Soviet Union’s international reputation, gave oxygen to dissident movements across the Soviet bloc, and gave people behind the Iron Curtain a favorable view of the United States.
Brzezinski also pushed for a more confrontational U.S. response to Soviet adventurism abroad. Carter was skeptical at first but grew more hawkish as time passed—and when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he was ready to back a forceful response. Six months before the invasion, Brzezinski had asked the CIA to develop plans to support the growing mujahideen insurgency against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan. What began in 1979 as a program to supply communications equipment, leaflets, and radio broadcasts flourished over the next decade into a full-scale covert operation that funneled weapons, training, and funding to the Afghan forces fighting the Soviet army. The Soviet Union was thus drawn into a long, costly quagmire that would contribute to its eventual collapse.
Carter’s reckoning with Soviet interventionism spurred a late-term military buildup, too—a policy Brzezinski had consistently pushed as a means to counterbalance the Soviet Union, and a contribution Luce acknowledges but underemphasizes. The administration’s final military budget request, which Carter sent to Congress his last week in office, called for the highest level of U.S. defense spending, adjusted for inflation, since the end of the Vietnam War. Even Reagan, who continued to raise U.S. defense spending, did not always propose annual increases as high as Carter’s. Carter’s initiatives to modernize and upgrade the U.S. military, expand U.S. contributions to NATO, and accelerate the development of advanced systems such as stealth aircraft and precision-guided munitions were the crucial first steps in a transformation of American military power that conventional wisdom credits to Reagan.
The chain of events in the late 1980s that precipitated the fall of the Soviet Union—the loosening of Soviet controls over Eastern Europe; the rise of democratic movements and successful elections, including in Poland; and the fall of the Berlin Wall—was the payoff to the Cold War strategy Brzezinski put in place. In 1980, one of his fiercest critics, the Sovietologist and journalist Strobe Talbott, had condemned Brzezinski in a Time article titled “Almost Everyone vs. Zbig.” Nine years later, Talbott conducted a laudatory interview of Brzezinski for the same magazine; this time, the title was “Zbigniew Brzezinski: Vindication of a Hard-Liner.”
THE ESSENTIAL DIPLOMAT
When Carter came into office in 1977, the opening to China that Nixon and Kissinger orchestrated earlier in the decade had stalled. Nixon had resigned in 1974, and Washington’s main interlocutors, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, had both died in 1976. Opposition in Congress and tensions with Beijing over the war in Vietnam hampered progress. Luce notes that by the end of the Ford administration, “a demoralized and exhausted Kissinger said that he had never believed that normalization was possible.” Brzezinski arrived with what was at the time an unpopular view. Sizing up the U.S.-Chinese relationship through the lens of Cold War competition, he believed not only that normalization was still achievable but also that China could become a strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union. Luce recounts how Brzezinski was encouraged in this belief by an early conversation with Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who agreed. Brzezinski pried the China account out of the hands of the State Department, whose leaders did not support normalization. He badgered Carter for four months until the president approved—over Vance’s objections—Brzezinski’s May 1978 trip to China.
In Beijing, Brzezinski spent some 11 hours with Chinese officials, including Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. He went to great lengths to exclude the State Department from the key meetings. Luce recounts that on the flight back to Washington, the State Department’s Richard Holbrooke and the National Security Council’s Michel Oksenberg got into a physical fight over access to a memorandum on Brzezinski’s meetings with Deng. During those conversations, Brzezinski bonded with Deng over their shared distrust of the “polar bear”—the Soviet Union—but had to repeat many times that Washington had “made up its mind” to carry on with normalization before Deng and his colleagues started to believe him. The visit yielded follow-up engagements and new cooperative arrangements, including a major joint intelligence-gathering effort on the Chinese-Soviet border. It set the course for a partnership with China that went deeper than the surface-level ties brokered by Nixon and Kissinger.
The historical record gives Nixon and Kissinger vastly more credit for the Cold War masterstroke of peeling Beijing away from Moscow than it gives Carter and Brzezinski. That imbalance may simply be the function of the respective public affairs skills of Kissinger, who wrote extensively about his own role in the opening, and Brzezinski, whose accounts did not have the same reach. Luce, in writing Brzezinski’s history, has corrected the record. The Carter administration’s diplomatic initiative, together with the 1979 passage of the Taiwan Relations Act, established a durable basis for stable relations among the United States, China, and Taiwan. And given all that stood in the way of normalization—including Carter’s reluctance and the opposition of most other parts of the U.S. government—it simply would not have happened without Brzezinski driving the process to the finish line.
A RESPONSIBLE PARTY
If the opening to China was the high point of Brzezinski’s tenure as national security adviser, the nadir was the Iran hostage crisis, a 14-month standoff that likely cost Carter a second term and set the stage for four decades of implacable hostility between Washington and Tehran. The tragedy unfolded in three acts.
The first was the failure of the State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies to recognize the vulnerability of Iran’s leader, Mohammad Reza (Shah) Pahlavi, the United States’ key partner in the Middle East, to a growing movement to overthrow him. Four months before the shah fell, the Defense Intelligence Agency assessed that he “was expected to remain actively in power over the next ten years.” The U.S. ambassador to Iran did not contemplate the fall of the shah until two months before it happened, in a cable to Washington titled “Thinking the Unthinkable.” Luce points out that U.S. intelligence agencies had used Iran as a base to monitor the Soviet Union and had underinvested in operations to understand the country’s internal situation, relying instead on the shah’s security services for local intelligence. He concludes, with good reason, that Washington’s “serial blindness on Iran amounts to one of the most egregious failures in the history of America’s diplomatic, security, and intelligence apparatus.”
The second act was the decision to admit the shah into the United States for medical treatment in October 1979. At the time, Washington was working to establish a relationship with Iran’s new government. The senior U.S. official in Tehran, Bruce Laingen, warned that admitting the shah would put Americans in Iran in extreme danger and could destroy relations with the new leadership in Tehran.
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Brzezinski playing chess at Camp David, Maryland, September 1978 National Archives and Records Administration
Luce notes that Carter was subject to a “virtual siege” from the shah’s allies in the United States, led by Rockefeller—Brzezinski’s longtime patron—as well as Kissinger and the influential foreign policy lawyer John McCloy. Brzezinski himself pressed Carter on the issue repeatedly and even arranged for Rockefeller to make the case to Carter directly. Carter was unmoved until the State Department shared a report from doctors brought in by Rockefeller that falsely claimed the shah had become so gravely ill that he could be saved only by American medical treatment. Before he agreed, Carter asked, “What are you guys going to advise me to do if they overrun our embassy and take our people hostage?” The shah was admitted to the United States on October 22. On November 4, the American embassy in Tehran was overrun, and 66 Americans were taken hostage. Fifty-two remained in custody for 444 days.
The final act was Operation Eagle Claw, the failed mission to rescue the hostages. At the start of the crisis, Brzezinski had tasked the military with devising a rescue plan. Over the course of six months of failed diplomatic efforts to free the hostages, their fate became a national obsession. The military mission ended in a fiery helicopter crash in the Iranian desert in April 1980, killing eight American service members, and was a spectacular embarrassment for the United States and for Carter.
I studied Operation Eagle Claw while serving as national security adviser under President Barack Obama, in preparation for overseeing the administration’s 2011 raid into Pakistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden. The Carter administration’s plan was impossibly complicated, underresourced, and never rehearsed. As Luce notes, some members of the rescue team met for the first time on the night of the mission. Luce concludes that the blame for its failure rests mainly with the U.S. military leadership. I have a different view: responsibility for assessing the plan’s feasibility, coordinating between agencies, and judging the likelihood and consequences of failure fell on Brzezinski. As national security adviser, it was his job to anticipate challenges; explore alternatives; run a rigorous process to test proposals, especially military plans; and protect the president.
AMERICA’S BALANCE SHEET
Brzezinski remained active as a foreign policy adviser and geopolitical thinker-at-large for decades after leaving government. He counseled Reagan, who delivered the endgame of the Cold War strategy for which Brzezinski and Carter had laid the groundwork, and maintained his iconoclastic, hard-line views into the 1990s in books such as The Grand Chessboard. Over time, however, Brzezinski tacked further to the left and grew skeptical of U.S. military entanglement. According to Luce, he stood by earlier U.S. support for the mujahideen, disputing post-9/11 criticism that this policy abetted the rise of the Taliban, which had harbored al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan. But he became one of the fiercest opponents of the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq and maintained his opposition throughout the war. Brzezinski was also one of the earliest foreign policy figures to endorse Obama’s presidential bid, continuing his career-long streak of picking political winners.
In his final book, Strategic Vision, published in 2012, Brzezinski proposed using a “balance sheet” of assets and liabilities as a rubric for judging the United States’ strengths and weaknesses. I have always been and remain optimistic, as Brzezinski was, that the assets—including alliances and global influence, economic and technological strength, cultural appeal and soft power, and demographic dynamism—if properly managed, will keep the United States in a dominant position for decades to come. Today, however, I believe Brzezinski would be concerned that these assets are in danger. He would worry most of all about the divisions in American society and the health of the country’s democracy.
Brzezinski was the last U.S. national security adviser who thought primarily, almost obsessively, in terms of systems and historical forces. This outlook was surely shaped by his Polish roots and his intimate knowledge of the Central and Eastern European “bloodlands,” to borrow the historian Timothy Snyder’s term, that endured Stalin’s and Hitler’s horrors in the mid-twentieth century. The sensibility that history never ends, that societies and governmental systems are more brittle than they may appear, and that protecting them requires constant vigilance is less prevalent today than it used to be. Yet the world now holds more threats to U.S. values and interests than at any time over the last half century. Brzezinski’s example can help American policymakers appreciate the risks and chart a path forward.
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