Edward Luce, Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet (Avid Reader, 2025)
A 1957 Polish Communist secret police file described Zbigniew Brzezinski as “definitely an enemy—ideologist, very active, gifted, and very clever. . . . He’s also a Besserwisser [know-it-all], driven by the eternal need to show off.” That assessment, bitter and begrudgingly admiring, captures something real about Brzezinski’s relentless drive and unapologetic intellect. Ed Luce, the lead American commentator at the Financial Times, offers us a fascinating and flattering portrait of President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor in Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet. Luce’s Zbig depicts both the prophet and the human. Brzezinski’s story, which took him from refugee during the combined Nazi-Soviet invasion and occupation of his home country, Poland, to the height of power in Washington as President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, is uniquely American. This triumph of expertise, grit, and wisdom reflects the best of America—values we will need to remember as we embark on a new great power competition with China and Russia.
Exile’s Insight: The Soviet Achilles’ Heel
Luce’s Zbig builds upon previous biographies of the subject, including Justin Vaisse’s 2018 Zbigniew Brzezinski: America’s Grand Strategist and Charles Gati’s 2016 edited volume on Brzezinski’s statecraft. Luce’s highly readable contribution adds humanity to his subject, befitting the author’s journalistic background. Using personal diaries, Luce captures the unique geopolitical and familial circumstances that shaped Brzezinski’s unique outlook. Brzezinski’s father, Tadeusz, fought in the newly formed Polish Army that repelled Lenin’s invading Red Army in the 1920 “miracle on the Vistula.” His father’s subsequent experience as a diplomat in Soviet-occupied Ukraine, where he witnessed the aftermath of Stalin’s man-made famine, was passed down in tableside stories to his son. As storm clouds descended over Europe in October 1938, Tadeusz and ten-year-old Zbigniew travelled to their next diplomatic posting in Canada.
Young Zbigniew remained fascinated with the world they left behind. In Newman House School’s 1939–1940 yearbook, children were asked to write one subject in which they were experts. While other boys listed whimsical topics like “eating,” “Hollywood,” and “yawning,” the precocious Zbigniew wrote “Europe (foreign affairs).” Later in life, critics, especially those from the WASP (white Anglo-Saxon protestant) foreign policy establishment, charged that Zbig’s Polishness gave him a hatred of the Soviet Union that was incompatible with directing American foreign policy. Robert Lovett, President Harry Truman’s secretary of defense, went further, charging that “we shouldn’t have a national security advisor like that who’s not really an American.”
Zbig’s Polish background provided him with a clarity of purpose that drove his relentless journey, but Luce rejects the WASPs’ claims of dual loyalty. Zbig’s personal experiences illuminated the Soviet Union’s brutal imperial character. They also germinated his most important ideas about the Achilles’ heel of the Soviet Union: captive nationalities like the Poles. Young Zbig saw Moscow’s behavior for what it was—Russian imperialism disguised in the universalist rhetoric of communism. Brzezinski’s early insights into Soviet weaknesses were captured in his master’s thesis at McGill University. His McGill yearbook entry reads, “When one is right, victory is only a matter of time.” That confidence powered both his scholarship and his policymaking.
Scholar-Strategists: Brzezinski, Kissinger, and the Geopolitics of Ambition
Brzezinski’s star rose quickly at the intersection of policy and academia. He completed his PhD at Harvard in three years, published to national acclaim, and earned a prestigious tenured position at Columbia University (after a disappointing rejection from Harvard). From the outset, Brzezinski proved unwilling to confine his contributions to the academy. He wanted to be more than an academic: “I said to myself that I don’t want to be crossing the Harvard Yard year after year carrying a folder, lecture number 7, ‘joke used last year,’ ‘class reaction,’ tweed jacket.”
Henry Kissinger, another European-émigré scholar at Harvard, held similar policy ambitions. Luce paints a nuanced picture of the relationship between these two intellectual giants. Despite their shared academic pedigree, ambition, and European accents, Kissinger and Brzezinski were a study of contrasts. Zbig was cutting and combative—including with the media. Kissinger, by contrast, was charming, agreeable, and flattering. Luce portrays their greatest difference of all as an intellectual disagreement about the relative trajectories of Soviet and American power. Kissinger’s Spenglerian pessimism about America’s decline led him to pursue policies, like détente with Moscow, designed to make the most of a weakening hand. Brzezinski, in contrast, sensed that it was in fact the Soviet Union whose power had peaked. Zbig’s policymaking flowed from this confident foundation.
While the Kissinger-Brzezinski relationship represents an interesting subplot of the work, Luce downplays Kissinger’s immense contributions during his time in government in favor of his protagonist. Indeed, while senior members of the Carter administration sought rhetorical distance from what they called the “Nixon-Kissinger-Ford” years, much of their initial approach represented a continuation of Kissinger’s policies. As Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis noted, many of these initiatives, such as the 1979 diplomatic recognition of Communist China, simply represented the “logical conclusions” of “Kissinger’s strategies.”
The Prophet’s Power Struggles
Like Kissinger, Brzezinski was a centralizing and directive national security advisor. He took little interest in being an honest broker of various ideas to the president in the model of his immediate predecessor, Brent Scowcroft. A young Richard Holbrooke, who as Carter’s assistant secretary of state for East Asia frequently found himself an active belligerent in the State Department’s struggle against Brzezinski, accurately predicted these issues prior to Zbig’s appointment. “I think Brzezinski is too combative and has too strong a personal agenda for that job,” he advised.
Holbrooke wasn’t the only Democrat in the foreign policy establishment with hesitation over Zbig’s appointment. Averell Harriman, the éminence grise of the old WASP establishment, thought Brzezinski was too opinionated for the duty. To Harriman, the ideal national security advisor should be somebody who could quietly facilitate the interagency process and “should behave like a child at a formal dinner, seen but not heard.”
Brzezinski was certainly heard. Over time, President Carter came to concur with his combative perspective on the Soviet Union. While Carter began his term asking Americans to see beyond “an inordinate fear of communism,” by 1980, following Soviet aggression in the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan, he charged that Soviets needed to “pay a concrete price for their aggression.”
Much has been made over the vicious bureaucratic infighting between Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance on this account. Like other recent historical observers of the Carter presidency, Luce accurately diagnoses Carter’s own leadership style and two-mindedness as the taproot of this disfunction. However, Luce underestimates Brzezinski’s own agency in the debilitating rivalries and incoherence that came to define Carter’s foreign policy. As national security advisor, Zbig himself bore responsibility to harmonize the various chords of Carter’s agenda into a coherent grand strategy.
Nevertheless, Luce makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing reconsideration of the Carter foreign policy. While overly sympathetic in some areas, Luce deservedly highlights Brzezinski’s contributions to America’s eventual Cold War triumph. Brzezinski’s long-held ideas, finally translated into policy, hastened the demise of the Soviet Union. The administration’s emphasis on human rights behind the Iron Curtain, engagement with Solidarity in Poland, investments to rebuild the military after Vietnam, and early efforts to support the mujahideen in Afghanistan get their deserved moment of recognition in Zbig. Indeed, these actions represented the kernels of the strategy that saw the United States finally overcome the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
After departing the White House, Brzezinski continued to earn Luce’s moniker of “prophet.” Days after 9/11, he faxed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, warning him to get in and out of Afghanistan quickly to avoid a quagmire. Unlike Kissinger, he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq—earning him the enduring scorn of the George W. Bush administration. His written prognostications, meanwhile, of the impending arrival of a great power competition for the Eurasian landmass proved astute. In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, Brzezinski warned of the dangers of a new coalition of Eurasian autocracies opposed to Western power and ideals. He foretold a “grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.” As Iran and China offer material support to Russia’s brutal war of conquest in Ukraine, this warning appears unfortunately accurate.
An American Above All
Brzezinski’s was an American story. Luce aptly highlights how Zbig believed in the attraction and potential of American ideals. Zbig’s Polish roots gave him an appreciation for America’s unique place—and role—in the world. Kissinger noted after Brzezinski’s passing, “As immigrants we knew about the fragility of societies and we had an instinct for the transitoriness of human perceptions.” Brzezinski knew the brutality, ugliness, and ultimate fragility of Soviet rule. In times of domestic turmoil—like the 1970s or today—it’s easy to exaggerate rivals’ power and doubt the capacity of our own democracy. However, Brzezinski never lost faith in America’s messy but enduring advantages in its “long twilight struggle” with authoritarian empires. We would be wise to heed his example. After all, “when one is right, victory is a matter of time.”
Sam Wilkins is an active duty US Army Special Forces officer. Sam is currently a US Army Goodpaster Scholar and PhD student in Yale’s History Department, where his research focuses on how American elites shaped Cold War competition with the Soviet Union in Africa in the 1970s.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.