When Giants Walked...

The Emigre Pole Zbig, The German Jewish Refugee Henry the K and Much More

Edward Luce has written a terrific book, Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet. It is thorough, balanced, and anecdotally colorful, reflecting access to reams of diaries, memoranda, letters, private thoughts, and even some regrets. It also disturbingly frames today’s realities compared with those in Zbig and Henry Kissinger’s times.

Nothing I say below should diminish my admiration for the book. If you are intrigued by Zbig’s ascendancy, the extent of his Polish identity — in office he exchanged many heartfelt letters in Polish with Pope John Paul II — and the competitive machinations of two geniuses, this is the book for you.

It is also the most intricate dissection I have read of events during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, when Zbig as national security adviser was indispensable in the establishment of diplomatic relations with China on the positive side and the debacle of upheaval in Iran on the downside.

I am not a typical reader. My family background is Polish, a country I have visited often and written about. From 1977 to 1982, I was the foreign editor and then the national editor of the Washington Post. I published a half dozen books with President Carter after he left Washington (and two with Rosalynn). There are very few major characters in this book that I did not know – or had strong views about.

So, what could I possibly have to say about Zbig that would shift the focus from admiration of this biography to serious concern about where the United States is in 2025? Too much, unfortunately.

Henry Kissinger was a bona fide celebrity for his mind, an undeniable charisma, and a willingness to shape his messages for the limelight and, cynically, for what he would say in private. Brzezinski was rarely duplicitous, less charming, and ultimately more honorable.

And therefore, in this tag team, he was the lesser star.

But these two men, who both maintained the accents of their ancestral homelands were giants, whereas the current secretary of state and national security adviser, Marco Rubio came to my attention when Donald Trump called the Florida senator “Little Marco.”

His retort was that Trump had “small hands.”

The decline of stature in the foreign policy leadership of the country is profoundly troubling. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the bizarre role of outsider Laura Loomer in deciding who can serve the nation — this is a disgrace and also very dangerous.

Which brings me to the second reason why Zbig illustrates how serious the present global situation is.

The core of Luce’s book is a meticulous reconstruction of all the major challenges of the Carter presidency. Every issue is debated in memos, meetings, diary entries, triumphs, and embarrassments. The competition for influence between Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance plays out as a class clash, the WASP paragon against the not-quite-American émigré.

And, fifty years later, every one of those major issues remains either unresolved or in worse condition than they were in the 1970s.

Relations with the Soviet Union and the nuclear arms race were at the top of the Carter agenda. The possibility of a superpower conflict and the annihilation of civilization was considered a distinct possibility.

But less than fifteen years later, in 1991, the USSR imploded. Progress in arms control made the nuclear threat somehow less ominous. A decade later came the Global War on Terror. The Soviet failure in Afghanistan evolved into America’s similarly unsuccessful effort to manage the country. American support in the 1980s for the mujaheddin became a triumph for the Taliban four decades later — and a tragic fate for the people of that nation.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is arguably much more a problem than Leonid Brezhnev’s USSR. Luce quotes from documents that reflect Brezhnev’s “horror” at the prospect of a nuclear exchange. Putin is rattling the nuclear saber while he pursues a war to the finish against the people of Ukraine.

In the Middle East, the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt and the possibility that the Palestinian people might get a state of their own has produced, for now, a catastrophe in Gaza and an Israeli government at the extremes of ferocity.

The revolution in Iran, which emerged as the U.S. badly misjudged the viability of the shah’s rule is now a fifty-year tyranny of the mullahs. Will the Iranians ever get the nuclear weapons they were developing? Or might they simply acquire the weaponry from North Korea or with Russia’s help?

And China is a superpower with an extraordinary capacity for military and economic expansion. This is most assuredly not the country whose leader Deng Xiaoping, Luce writes, spent his first night on a visit to the United States at Brzezinski’s Virginia home exchanging warm toasts over a homecooked dinner.

Edward Luce has made a significant contribution to the historical record. I can’t imagine anyone delving more thoroughly into the persona of Zbigniew Brzezinski.

On the other hand, Brzezinski’s “Spenglerian” pessimism — in which the future of the world was fraught and U.S. power was destined to decline — seems for now a valid prediction. My guess is that Zbig, an American patriot (and a Polish nationalist), would wish it were otherwise.