A Man of Vision in a Time of (Cold) War
A new book, Zbig, details the life and vision of a great strategist who, rooted in Poland, became a leading scholar and policy shaper in the United States. Written by Edward Luce, chief US commentator and columnist for the Financial Times, Zbig traces its subtitle, The Life of Zbigniew Brezinski, America’s Great Prophet (Simon & Schuster, 2025).
Like his older rival and eventual friend, Henry Kissinger, Zbig spent his earliest years abroad and later excelled in academia and then in government. His father was a Polish diplomat who had been posted to Kharkiv in the then-Soviet Ukraine from 1936-1937, during Stalin’s purges and in the wake of the Holodomor. He went briefly to Leipzig, and finally to Quebec in 1938, where he left government service after the communist takeover of Poland.
Starting in his teens. Zbig wanted to liberate his homeland from alien rule. His 1950 master’s thesis at McGill University laid out the incompatible realities between Moscow’s internationalist ideology and the national consciousness of the peoples the Kremlin sought to rule — beginning with Ukrainians, about whom Zbig heard from his dad.
From McGill, he moved to Harvard, where he earned his Ph.D. Denied tenure at Harvard in 1959, Brzezinski instead became a superstar at Columbia. He continued to write important books and articles such as Peaceful Engagement in Eastern Europe with MIT professor William Griffith in Foreign Affairs (Spring 1961). They rejected the diplomat George Kennan’s focus on containing Soviet expansion and the activist call of John Foster Dulles to roll back the Soviet empire. Instead, Zbig and Griffith called for bridge building — economic, cultural, political — to liberate the captive nations by peaceful means. This approach — a blend of hard, soft, and smart power — continued to serve as leitmotif of Brzezinski’s vision.
Having persuaded the investment banker David Rockefeller to underwrite the Trilateral Commission (Europe, Japan, US), he invited Jimmy Carter to New York to help plan its global aspirations. A peanut farmer, nuclear engineer, and state governor. Carter showed he could catch on quickly to international affairs and become a serious presidential candidate.
Zbig became Carter’s major foreign policy adviser during the 1976 campaign and, from 1977-1981 was National Security Assistant to the President. Could an opponent of Soviet imperialism collaborate with an idealist hoping to foster human rights? The two orientations blended to serve each other. Brzezinski’s worldview expanded from Poland to the entire Soviet bloc, to East-West relations, to trilateral relations linking Japan with Europe and the USA, and to the Middle East. Unlike Kissinger, Zbig saw the Soviet Union as an empty shell that a healthy push could splinter.
Carter and his National Security Assistant managed to normalize relations with China; sign the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or SALT, (not ratified after the USSR invaded Afghanistan); support anti-Soviet dissidents and human rights advocacy; and mediate the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. Carter’s most overlooked foreign policy success was the Soviet Union’s non-invasion of Poland in 1980. Brezinski played a key role in convincing the Kremlin that Poland would be indigestible, albeit at the cost of a martial law regime imposed by Poland’s communist authorities.
Still, hubris led Brzezinski and Carter to major mistakes with Iran and China. They failed to see that Washington’s ally, the Shah, would be replaced by a radical theocracy that blamed the United States for Iran’s problems. When US diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, the United States tried to rescue them in a 1980 raid with helicopters that had to be refueled in the desert, where mechanical and other issues produced a catastrophe that did not help Carter’s reelection later that year.
Meeting for hours with Deng Xiaoping, Brezinski helped distance Beijing from Moscow. To normalize relations, however, the Carter administration — without Senate approval — broke its treaty relations with Taiwan. The White House hoped that normal relations with China would foster democracy there, but this did not happen. As China became richer, it became more dictatorial and more active in trying to displace American influence. Forty-five years after Carter’s presidency, the leaders of China and Russia now claim to be best friends.
Yet despite the failures of Brzezinski’s strategy in some respects, it contributed to the peaceful liberation of Eastern Europe and achieved other successes in Asia and the Middle East. Given today’s challenges facing the US and its partners, the West again needs a consistent and enlightened vision such as that fostered by Zbig and, before him, by Churchill, Monnet, and Adenauer.
Remember the big picture; remember who your friends are; engage with your enemies but never forget they aim to destroy you.
Walter Clemens is Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University and Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Boston University, He wrote Blood Debts: What Putin and Xi Owe Their Victims (Washington DC: Westphalia Press, 2023).