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The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
An intimate and masterful biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski—President Carter’s national security advisor and one of America’s leading geopolitical thinkers—from one of the finest columnists and political writers at work today.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union’s demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe’s bloodlands—Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at his homeland’s razing by Nazi Germany and the Red Army into a lifelong quest for liberty. Born the year that Joseph Stalin consolidated power, and dying a few months into Donald Trump’s first presidency, Brzezinski was shaped by and in turn shaped the global power struggles of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As counsel to US presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, and chief foreign policy figure of the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski converted his acclaim as a Sovietologist into Washington power. With Henry Kissinger, his lifelong rival with whom he had a fraught on-off relationship, he personified the new breed of foreign-born scholar who thrived in America’s “Cold War University”—and who ousted Washington’s gentlemanly class of WASPs who had run US foreign policy for so long.
Brzezinski’s impact, aided by his unusual friendship with the Polish-born John Paul II, sprang from his knowledge of Moscow’s “Achilles heel”—the fact that its nationalities, such as the Ukrainians, and satellite states, including Poland, yearned to shake off Moscow’s grip. Neither a hawk nor a dove, Brzezinski was a biting critic of George W. Bush’s Iraq War and an early endorser of Obama. Because he went against the DC grain of joining factions, and was on occasion willing to drop Democrats for Republicans, Brzezinski is something of history’s orphan. His historic role has been greatly underweighted. In the almost cinematic arc of his life can be found the grand narrative of the American century and great power struggle that followed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sprawling biography, Financial Times columnist Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism) aims to re-situate Zbigniew Brzezinski as a major 20th-century foreign policy thinker. Brezinski (1928–2017) rose to prominence as Soviet relations adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, in which role he advocated "peaceful engagement," believing that "soft power" would counter communism more effectively than hostility. Later, however, as President Carter's national security adviser, he oversaw the arming of Afghanistan's mujahideen in their fight against the Soviets—the same kind of covert operation he maligned when done by President Nixon. According to Luce, such apparent wishy-washiness—another notable example being Brzezinski's temporary abandonment of the Democratic party in the late '80s—was actually the result of rigid integrity, as Brzezinski always stuck with what he deemed the most impactful anti-communist position. In contrast to "frenemy" Henry Kissinger (who was always willing to say convenient things to curry favor), Brzezinski frequently sparred with others, an irascibility that slowly shut him out of power, even as, in Luce's telling, his unpopular opinions repeatedly turned out to be ahead of the curve. Luce's depiction of Brzezinski is somewhat hindered by a lack of in-depth character analysis—sometimes, Brzezinski's single-mindedness seems more like obsessiveness, a flaw Luce doesn't mine for its implications. Still, this immersive history will appeal to foreign policy wonks.
