A long-awaited biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski examines the foreign-policy adviser’s complex legacy
Edward Luce MARCH 15, 2018
Shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev gave the go-ahead for something almost as bold as the opening of Checkpoint Charlie. He allowed Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of America’s leading cold war hawks and a Pole by birth, to visit the site of the Katyn massacre. There in the forests around Smolensk lay the mass graves of 22,000 Poles who Moscow claimed had been murdered by Nazi Germany.
Zbig, as Brzezinski was known, always suspected otherwise. He learnt of the massacre as a teenage exile in Canada, inheriting his scepticism from his father, a Polish diplomat. Almost half a century later, the last Soviet leader let Brzezinski junior visit the site. On the wreath Brzezinski wrote: “For the victims of Stalin and the NKVD [Soviet secret police].” It was a moment of surpassing vindication.
It would be impossible to tell America’s side of the cold war without tracing the careers of Henry Kissinger and Brzezinski. Born five years apart, one in Germany, the other in Poland, the two dominated America’s “Cold War University” of the 1950s and 1960s. Neither lost their central European accents. One ran foreign policy for a Republican president, Richard Nixon, the other for a Democrat, Jimmy Carter.
They bestrode 1970s Washington much as they had the Ivy League campuses before. Their ascent broke the stranglehold of the Wasps — the “Boston Brahmins” who thought it ungentlemanly to read other people’s mail and who went to the same east coast prep schools. America’s urgent need for people who understood Russia shattered that monopoly. With the exception of George Kennan, America’s first great cold war strategist, the Wasp elites were out of their depth. “Never before did so many know so little about so much,” went the quip.
Kissinger and Brzezinski both knew a lot. Which makes it even odder that this is the first full biography in English on Brzezinski (there is one in Polish). There are more than a dozen books on Kissinger; we await volume two of Niall Ferguson’s authorised biography. This one on Brzezinski, furthermore, is a translation from French. The author, Justin Vaïsse, is head of policy planning at the French foreign ministry. What accounts for such imbalance?
Partly it is the presidents they served. Nixon is credited as a Machiavellian genius for having prised China from the Soviet orbit in 1972. Carter is remembered for having botched the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-81. Partly it is their personalities. Kissinger loved the limelight and cultivated journalists. Brzezinski was “almost negligent” in his lack of interest in the media, says Vaïsse. Kissinger’s memoirs ran to around 4,000 pages. Brzezinski’s came in at a more modest 573.
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Kissinger is a master of flattery. Brzezinski, who died last year, aged 89, was too blunt for his own good. His ability to be objective was under constant suspicion. Years before Brzezinski achieved influence, he learnt that Averell Harriman, one of postwar America’s grandest names, had dismissed him as a biased Pole. Brzezinski wrote to Harriman to protest that his origins no more disqualified him from dealing with US-Soviet relations than “your background as a millionaire capitalist prevents you from dealing intelligently with the Soviet communists”.
It was no surprise that establishment figures urged Carter not to make Brzezinski his national security adviser. One of them was Cyrus Vance, who became Carter’s secretary of state, and who was routinely outmanoeuvred by Brzezinski. When asked why the adviser had been allowed to get the better of Vance, Carter replied: “Because Zbig sent me 10 ideas a night, and I was lucky to get a single idea a month out of the State Department”.
For better — and occasionally for worse — Brzezinski’s ideas shaped history. Among these were the 1977 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, which remains the Middle East’s only durable peace. Having invented the term “peaceful engagement”, Brzezinski pursued Detente with the Soviets, and pushed for human rights behind the Iron Curtain. Vaïsse argues that Carter’s emphasis on human rights — and Brzezinski’s support for Samizdat dissident literature — takes insufficient credit in hastening the USSR’s demise.
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Likewise, Brzezinski deserves more kudos for completing America’s normalisation with China. The restoration of US-China relations was sealed over dinner with Deng Xiaoping in Brzezinski’s Virginia farmhouse. They toasted it with vodka that had been given to Brzezinski by Anatoly Dobrynin, the USSR’s hardline ambassador to the US. Even that triumphal evening was marked by tut-tutting. Brzezinski’s young daughter, Mika, now a well)-known television anchor, spilled caviar on Deng’s suit. Vance was seen shaking his head in disapproval.
Zbigniew Brzezinski: America’s Grand Strategist, by Justin Vaïsse, translated by Catherine Porter, Harvard University Press RRP£25.95/$35, 544 pages
Edward Luce is an FT columnist and author of ‘The Retreat of Western Liberalism’ (Little, Brown)
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