Zbigniew Brzezinski​ was a difficult man. As a child, he stood out from his three brothers in being ‘emotionally detached and hard to please’, according to his sympathetic biographer, Edward Luce. He slept on hard floors to feel the discomfort experienced by the less fortunate. In his high school yearbook photo, ‘the eye is drawn to his hawklike nose and piercing gaze,’ Luce writes, and despite his desire to feel what the poor feel, ‘there is a hauteur about him.’ The young Zbig was long on language skills, short on introspection. As a PhD candidate at Harvard, ‘he would bludgeon, set traps, ambush and trip up. His manner, which did little to disguise that he thought he was cleverer than most people, left many of his interlocutors feeling bruised.’ Relentless combativeness became his signature style of argument throughout his career. And when he was at his most powerful, as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, he won most of the arguments.

Brzezinski became a powerful force in the reshaping of US foreign policy at a critical historical moment – the immediate aftermath of the failure in Vietnam. For a few years it seemed that the US leadership class might be willing to re-examine the dangers of Cold War dogma and overextended imperial reach. The New York Times had published the Pentagon Papers, revealing the systematic mendacity behind the Vietnam War, as well as Seymour Hersh’s investigations into the illegal covert operations of the CIA. The Senate had convened an inquiry into CIA misconduct, and even the fanatical cold warrior Richard Nixon had promoted détente with the Soviet Union and opened a diplomatic door to China. One could be pardoned for hoping that a reorientation of policy was underway.

But almost as soon as the last helicopter left the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, pundits and politicians began to warn against learning the wrong lessons from Vietnam. They fretted that the body politic was infected by ‘Vietnam syndrome’ – a reluctance to use force in a foreign land which was viewed as a pathology the US needed to cure. Brzezinski shared this worry. And as a Polish émigré and fervent Polish nationalist, he focused most of his fear on the Soviet Union. A visceral hostility to the USSR became the driving force behind his career as a policy intellectual, followed by a strong suspicion of post-Soviet Russia. He steered US foreign policy into a militant anti-Russian turn from which it has never recovered.

Luce’s Zbig aims to present Brzezinski as a ‘Cold War prophet’ who was prescient in his time and is relevant to ours. When Brzezinski came to Washington in the mid-1970s, Russophobia had been dormant since the near cataclysm of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it returned in the shadow of the Vietnam debacle and started to spread in the late 1970s. It receded briefly during the Reagan-Gorbachev rapprochement and the crumbling of communism but resurged in the late 1990s, in tandem with the eastward march of Nato. When the idea of Nato expansion first surfaced in policy circles in the mid-1990s, Brzezinski – no longer in office but still influential – was among its most strenuous advocates. To him the plan simply acknowledged the new order of things: the triumphant spread of democracy after the collapse of Soviet communism.

In 1998, Congress approved Nato expansion into Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic with substantial bipartisan majorities. In 2004, the Baltic states, three more Warsaw Pact nations and Slovenia were added. Diplomats from George Kennan to Jack Matlock (Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union) and William Burns (later head of the CIA under Biden) all warned against extending Nato eastwards. They predicted that the siting of potential adversaries – perhaps eventually nuclear-armed ones – along its border would exacerbate Russia’s fears of encirclement and invasion. Brzezinski dismissed those anxieties as paranoia. In his world, dogmatic sentiment – disguised as rationality – trumped realities on the ground.

We have already paid a steep price for Brzezinski’s decisions, and we are likely to pay more. Despite Luce’s hagiographic inclinations, he faithfully records the problems created by his subject’s obsession. His exhaustive research provides more than enough evidence to create an alternative story, revealing a man whose attachment to his ancestral home transformed him into a monochromatic ideologue. Brzezinski brought covert operations back into vogue after they had briefly been discredited by revelations of CIA misconduct. He revived the Cold War after a promising period of détente by secretly backing the insurgency in Afghanistan. This policy inaugurated the dubious practice of making common cause with jihadist groups and provoked the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. He opposed the nuclear freeze movement in the 1980s on the nonsensical grounds that it would condemn the US to permanent inferiority, although both sides had more than enough weapons to incinerate the planet. Like other policymakers in his time and ours, Brzezinski seemed unable to grasp that nuclear weapons were not weapons like any other. Finally, Brzezinski rejected any possibility of a ‘peace dividend’ when the Cold War ended by insisting on Nato’s expansion. This led to the confrontation with Russia that Kennan and his colleagues had warned against, and which now threatens us with world war.

Brzezinski​ was born in 1928, during Poland’s interwar interlude as an independent state. His father, Tadeusz, was consul general for the Polish republic, posted to various European cities. As a child Zbigniew lived in Poland for only three consecutive years, between 1935 and 1938, when the family was settled in Warsaw and his father commuted to Kharkiv in Soviet Ukraine. In 1938, the Polish government sent Tadeusz to Montreal and the entire family left Poland. Zbig would not return for decades. Still he imbibed the Polish nationalism served up by his diplomat father and his aristocratic, devoutly Catholic mother, Leonia. Poles of their privileged class ‘were in no doubt that their country had been occupied and dominated by inferior cultures’, Luce writes, ‘the Russians and the Prussians in particular’. Tadeusz, melding geopolitics and theology, believed Poland to be ‘the Christ among nations’. It’s hard to imagine a more straightforward statement of divinely ordained national mission – a messianic vision based on a merging of the nation and the godhead itself. The notion of the nation as Christ was popular in Polish literary circles, where writers saw themselves as ‘Westerners in the East’, who had been brought low by their crude neighbours.

Brzezinski’s family had fled Leipzig, where his father was posted, after the Nazi takeover; they also fretted over Soviet influence in Ukraine. On visits home to Warsaw when he was posted in Kharkiv, Luce writes, Tadeusz ‘would tell Zbigniew dark tales of what he believed was Stalin’s deliberate destruction of Ukraine’. Like other Polish nationalists, the Brzezinskis felt a strong attachment to Ukraine: the shifting borders between the two countries suggested their linked fates. After Tadeusz was posted to Canada, the news from Europe grew relentlessly grimmer. One night in October 1939, the usual Chopin on Radio Warsaw was replaced by ‘Deutschland über Alles’. For the Brzezinskis, the disappearance of Poland’s most famous composer was like the death of a close relative – ‘as tangible a note of darkness as any other news’.

When the darkness finally began to lift, Brzezinski and his family witnessed what they saw as the abandonment of Poland by its erstwhile British and American friends, fearful of offending their new (and necessary) ally. Brzezinski, in later life, called Stalin’s offer to hold free and fair elections in Poland ‘a transparent fig leaf for Soviet domination’. When the victorious Allies recognised the new communist-led government of Poland at Potsdam in July 1945, he was outraged. Despite the reality of Red Army boots on the ground in Poland and the crucial role played by the Soviet Union in defeating Hitler, he viewed any compromise with Stalin as a moral failure.

Brzezinski’s career as a Cold War strategist began in earnest when he was an undergraduate and later an MA student at McGill University in the late 1940s. He tangled often with the campus left, which remained sentimentally attached to Soviet communism. ‘I always felt that the coup – any coup – the manipulation, the getting at the levers of power, was [Brzezinski’s] understanding of what politics was all about,’ one of his antagonists recalled. This may be the temperamental source of Zbig’s later enthusiasm for covert operations. The most important part of Brzezinski’s McGill experience was the master’s thesis he produced there. In it, he unveiled his core prophetic idea, that ‘neither Lenin nor Stalin ever resolved how to reconcile socialism with the diverse range of scripts, ethnicities, languages and religions of the vast Eurasian landmass they had seized,’ as Luce summarises it. All this diversity would ultimately prove ungovernable, he predicted, even by a totalitarian state with deep roots in Russian soil.

Yet for all his sensitivity to the potential for fragmentation, Brzezinski embraced an essentialist vision of Russian culture as a foundation for dictatorship. Russia, he wrote, was a country where ‘absolutism had held sway for centuries, where men have been taught to obey and not to think, to prostrate themselves and not assert themselves, to bow and not to shake hands.’ Brzezinski’s thesis challenged Western scholarly wisdom, which depended on the assumption that the USSR had developed a new national identity – a notion he dismissed as Stalinist propaganda. All the nationalistic sentiment mobilised in Stalin’s Great Patriotic War against Hitler, he believed, was merely a dictatorial imposition on a submissive population. But recent scholarship, particularly Jochen Hellbeck’s oral-historical work Stalingrad (2015), has revealed the depth and intensity of Russian patriotism. If Brzezinski ‘could recite the USSR’s worldview in his sleep’, as Luce claims, his dubious achievement only underscores the limits of an understanding based on official pronouncements rather than the detail of everyday life.

Brzezinski argued that winning the Cold War ‘would require repudiation of Russia’s claim to having a legitimate “sphere of interest” in Europe’, Luce writes. This would be a little like repudiating the comparable US claim to a sphere of interest in North America, but Brzezinski was undaunted. Indeed, he believed that Marshal Tito’s willingness to challenge Soviet hegemony in Yugoslavia was already pointing the way to a successful conclusion of the Cold War. Brzezinski’s own destiny was already clear, at least to him. Leaving McGill for Harvard in 1950, as Luce notes, was ‘merely a step in a far greater mission, which, like his Sovietology, seems to have chosen him’. The motto he chose for his final McGill yearbook entry was: ‘When one is right, victory is only a matter of time.’ Fine words for an ideologue, but less appropriate for a diplomat and foreign policymaker.

Before Brzezinski arrived at Harvard he volunteered to join the South Korean army against the communist North; he also tried to join the CIA. Both applications were declined. And both revealed his intensifying ideological commitment rather than, as Luce claims, ‘his fast-widening worldview’. Brzezinski always wanted to be on the barricades. Towards the end of his life, he told an interviewer that he was glad Harvard had given him the opportunity to become a scholar but ‘there was always something within me that drew me to action … As I began to feel my oats, I began to crystallise my ambition, which was nothing less than formulating a coherent strategy for the United States so that we could eventually dismantle the Soviet bloc.’ Long years of practice had left him at ease with grandiosity in the name of the foreign policy establishment’s favourite pronoun: ‘we’.

In search of a mentor at Harvard, Brzezinski chose the German émigré Carl Friedrich, an embattled anti-fascist. Brzezinski’s PhD thesis, completed in 1953 and published three years later as The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism, claimed that the purge was a ‘normal tool of totalitarianism’, and assumed that the Soviet system was incapable of reform from within. This assumption depended on a concept of totalitarianism shaped by the Stalin era. Brzezinski and Friedrich collaborated on elaborating this idea in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy. Since it didn’t appear in print until eight months after Khrushchev had delivered his Secret Speech recounting Stalin’s crimes in February 1956, its thesis was already overtaken by events.

In the summer of 1956, a trip to the Eastern European satellite states and the USSR revealed to Brzezinski that the Soviet reality was a lot messier than the concept of totalitarianism allowed. After visiting the USSR, he came to believe that authoritarian sterility, not Stalinist terror, was the chief threat Russia faced. Yet Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, remained captive to the fantasy of rolling back communism in Eastern Europe rather than containing it (as Kennan had been advocating). When US propaganda outlets encouraged Hungarian dissidents to rebel against their government, then failed to back the rebels, the hollowness of this strategy became impossible to ignore.

In 1961, Brzezinski proposed his alternative strategy in an article for Foreign Affairs called ‘Peaceful Engagement in Eastern Europe’. The approach was unimpeachably sensible. Rather than remaining obsessed with Moscow, the US should seek to multiply connections with Eastern Europe by, as Luce writes, ‘lifting travel restrictions, providing soft loans and export credits, and encouraging people-to-people exchanges, including sporting events and student scholarships’. The aim of peaceful engagement was to create a détente that would allow the US subtly and gradually to undermine the Soviet empire. The alternatives were either the militant confrontation that risked nuclear war or the ‘passivity’ and ‘appeasement’ that Luce unaccountably links to containment.

Brzezinski’s strategy gained influence over time with smart and ambitious politicians, notably John F. Kennedy. Brzezinski announced it at a crucial moment in his own career, when he had just left Harvard for Columbia – closer to New York (where the money was) and Washington (where the power was). He had begun advising PhD students, including Madeleine Albright, another émigré from Eastern Europe, whose definition of the US as ‘the indispensable nation’ remains a touchstone for exceptionalist rhetoric. He had also discovered his first American hero in Kennedy, who had in turn discovered the electric impact of the slogan ‘peaceful engagement’ on voters of Eastern European extraction. But Kennedy – at least until after the Cuban Missile Crisis – was as preoccupied with threatening war as he was with promoting peace. He had narrowly defeated Nixon by inventing a missile gap and running to the right of the original cold warrior. These tactics resonated with Brzezinski’s own reflexive anti-communism, which led him to support the developing US war in Vietnam. Brzezinski continued to support that war after it passed into Lyndon Johnson’s hands and body bags began to pile up on the runways of American airbases. This stance did his career no harm. He retained the connections he had begun to cultivate with influential men in and out of government: McGeorge Bundy, who left the National Security Council to head the Ford Foundation; David Rockefeller, who founded the Trilateral Commission, President Carter’s think tank of choice; and William Burden, Eisenhower’s ambassador to Belgium and a financier whose friendship ensured Brzezinski’s instant admission to the Harbour Club on Mount Desert Island in Maine – as well as access for himself and his family to Burden’s Maine cottage for a month every summer. What Luce calls Brzezinski’s ‘ferocious self-promotion’ was paying off.

In June 1966, Brzezinski took a job at the Policy Planning Council in the State Department, where he aimed to promote his peaceful engagement strategy. This was not a retreat from the pursuit of victory in the Cold War. Brzezinski was convinced that ‘Communism Is Dead’, as he wrote in the CIA-backed New Leader in 1967. It had lost its appeal as a revolutionary force, but the US was ideologically ill-equipped to take advantage. In Brzezinski’s view, the right wanted a Fortress America; the left, burned by Vietnam, wanted to withdraw from the world.

Here as elsewhere, Brzezinski caricatured the anti-war position as what Luce calls ‘neo-isolationism’ rather than a sober recognition that American hubris had led to destructive military commitments abroad, a world-threatening nuclear arms race and a lumbering defence budget that drained scarce resources from urgent domestic needs. Critics of imperial overreach called for a foreign policy based on realistic restraint and a conviction that war should be the last resort. No serious opponent of the Vietnam War advocated an ostrich-like avoidance of global engagement.

In contrast to what he thought were dead ends on the right and left, Brzezinski asserted that the only authentic world revolution was technological, and the US would have that world-transforming process under control if it deployed the soft power of CIA sponsorship as well as the hard power of planes and missiles. This melding of technocratic and messianic strains would characterise the hymns to ‘globalisation’ in the 1990s. With respect to intellectual fashion at least, Brzezinski was indeed prescient.

By the time Nixon took over the presidency in 1969, America’s supposedly superior technology was being thwarted by insurgent peasants. By 1974, Brzezinski was insisting that the president’s policies were promoting US decline in the world. The evidence, he claimed in Foreign Policy, could be seen in the growing asymmetry between the US and the Soviet Union in the arms race: the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks agreement (SALT) allowed the Soviets numerical superiority in land-based ICBMs on what Brzezinski called the ‘spurious’ basis that the US had the technological edge overall. This obsession with numbers and size, which afflicted most nuclear hawks, led to a distorted perception of the arms race: an inability to see the importance of American superiority in speed and accuracy; to admit its variety of launching systems, including the virtual invulnerability of its submarine-launched missiles; and, most of all, to see the absurdity of piling up more weapons when you already had enough to blow up the world. The same writer who a decade earlier had advocated peaceful engagement was now taking a position against arms limitation ‘that used to be the privileged property of the extreme right’, as a puzzled Kissinger observed.

Brzezinski’s​ Russophobia was the solution to Kissinger’s confusion. In 1977 he joined a Carter administration that was looking to improve relations with the Soviet Union, make deep cuts in the defence budget and move towards a nuclear-free world. He left it four years later with an increased defence budget, a restarted nuclear arms race and a revived Cold War, with the US restyling itself as the defender of human rights wherever they were threatened.

Carter was a moralist, but he was also a technocrat who was unsure of himself in foreign policy. Eager to surround himself with experts, he was drawn to Brzezinski despite their policy differences and had made him part of his campaign team. A month before the election, Carter and President Ford held a televised debate in San Francisco; Brzezinski urged Carter to focus more sharply on the central issues, chief among them ‘Ford’s weakness in dealing with the Soviet Union’, as Luce writes. In the debate itself, Ford seemed less weak than confused, stumbling over the questions journalists posed and at one point blurting out: ‘I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.’ It was the ultimate Cold War gaffe.

Carter won the election, barely, and made Brzezinski his national security adviser. In the genteel WASP foreign policy establishment, it was a daring move to pick a Polish Catholic. (Kissinger had already cleared the way for Jewish diplomats.) Some WASP ‘wise men’ were nervous about Brzezinski’s dual loyalties. The Democratic grandee Averell Harriman warned Carter that Brzezinski’s anti-Soviet obsession would imperil détente and told the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr that Brzezinski was a ‘fool’ and a ‘menace’ with ‘absolutely no understanding of the Russians’. The establishment had their own representative in Cyrus Vance, a Second World War veteran, Wall Street lawyer and professional diplomat, whom Carter appointed secretary of state. Vance and his staff were justifiably sobered by the futility and mendacity of the Vietnam War. They wanted to dial back the grandiosity of America’s global ambition by cultivating restraint over military intervention abroad, thawing the Cold War and passing the SALT II treaty. ‘For the sake of mankind,’ Luce writes, they believed that ‘no cause, however just, could compete with the necessity of lessening the spectre of nuclear war.’ Focusing on human rights in the Soviet Union or its Eastern European satellite states would distract from the larger goal of saving humanity from nuclear holocaust.

On 21 January 1977, the day after his inauguration, Carter received a letter from the Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov, who had received the Nobel Peace Prize for advocating freer speech in the Soviet Union but had been blocked by his government from accepting it. Sakharov asked the president to embrace the Soviet dissidents’ cause. Carter agreed, warmly. This was a turning point in the post-Vietnam history of American foreign policy. The US was no longer on the ideological defensive; it could once again pose as an unembarrassed advocate of freedom and democracy.

But this feeling of liberation came at a price. In February 1977, Leonid Brezhnev complained about Carter’s correspondence with Sakharov, warning the president not to interfere in the USSR’s internal affairs. Vance was disturbed: Carter’s human rights agenda had begun to sour Soviet-American relations. Brzezinski was delighted: here, he thought, was an opportunity to push Carter towards a harder anti-Soviet line, back away from cuts in the nuclear arsenal and push the normalisation of relations with China, despite Soviet fears of a new rival in the Far East. The post-Vietnam atmosphere in Washington was increasingly poisoned by pressure groups like the Committee on the Present Danger, a group of politicians and policy intellectuals who wanted to abandon détente and restore the moral clarity of the early Cold War. Vance was right to worry. His trip to Moscow to try to restart SALT II negotiations ended in failure.

Zbig was off and running. He pushed for FBI wiretapping of foreign diplomats’ phones. He doubled the budget of Radio Free Europe, which Kissinger had seen as an unnecessary provocation to the USSR. He convinced Carter to renew the US commitment to Nato after years of Nixonian neglect and to restore US military spending to pre-Nixon levels, despite campaign pledges to cut the defence budget. Carter was tilting towards Brzezinski and away from Vance. Meanwhile, Amnesty International won the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize. ‘Human rights’ – no matter how vague or how easily appropriated for imperial purposes – had become the phrase du jour.

Still, Brzezinski and the secretary of defence, Harold Brown, his closest ally in the administration, had a problem. Not only was the European public becoming more outspokenly opposed to nuclear weapons, but, as Luce writes, ‘Carter’s heart seemed to be with the protesters.’ Under pressure from transatlantic public opinion, the president cancelled development of the neutron bomb – a thermonuclear device that killed people but spared property. It was, Brzezinski said, Carter’s ‘worst decision’ in the fourteen months of his presidency. The suspension of neutron bomb production, the cancellation of the B-1 bomber and the concessions in the SALT II negotiations all combined to intensify suspicions of Carter among Capitol Hill hawks, whose numbers were on the rise.

Sensing his growing support in Congress, Brzezinski stayed on the offensive. He and his staff had drawn up a ten-point foreign policy plan. The first item on the list was to bind Western Europe and Japan more closely, politically and economically. The aim was ‘to signal strategic encirclement of the USSR’, as Luce writes. Promoting human rights worldwide, but especially in Russia’s backyard, meant ignoring traditional geopolitical restraints on the exercise of power. Moral imperatives would trump national boundaries. This was the mentality that would allow the US to ignore inconvenient nations’ sovereignty and eventually t0 justify, even sanctify, the doctrines of ‘regime change’ and ‘democracy promotion’ that have infected American foreign policy in the 21st century. But as early as the late 1970s, thanks to Brzezinski, they were already infecting Carter. The president’s first official state visit was to Poland, where he planned to showcase his commitment to human rights – despite Vance’s concern that the trip would needlessly provoke the Soviets and pose another risk to SALT II.

Brzezinski’s overall advice to Carter, at the end of his first year in office, was to stiffen his resistance to Vance, beginning by opposing Soviet support for Ethiopia in its war with Somalia. Urging Carter to send an aircraft carrier to the Horn of Africa, Brzezinski warned that ‘Moscow took Washington’s inaction as a green light for adventurism elsewhere,’ as Luce writes. This was a Cold War trope that survives to this day: if we don’t stop Putin in Ukraine, we are told, he will keep invading other innocent countries to feed his insatiable appetite for territory. Vance’s staff, led by Tony Lake, dismissed Brzezinski’s outlook as ‘globaloney’: viewing all events through a Cold War lens, rather than as the people on the ground saw them. Even now, long after the Cold War has ended, the lens is still in use.

For once, Brzezinski lost the argument; Vance and his team prevented US intervention in the Horn of Africa. Several months into 1978 Brzezinski launched a counterattack, deriding the timidity of US foreign policy, implying that it needed ‘more Machiavelli and less Sunday school’, as Luce puts it. It was time for a ‘demonstration of force’ to ‘infuse fear’ into America’s adversaries; ‘black propaganda’ and ‘deception’ should not be ruled out. The adversary in question was, of course, the USSR. Now was the time to start courting the Chinese, Brzezinski insisted, Soviet sensitivities be damned. His push for normalisation of relations with China, despite its dismal record on human rights, revealed his selective moralism.

There were other matters that occasionally demanded attention, notably the question of Palestine. From the early days of his campaign Carter had distinguished himself from every other presidential candidate in either party by acknowledging that Palestinians were human beings with legitimate aspirations for a homeland and urging Israel to accommodate them by accepting a land for peace settlement. In 1975, Brzezinski had collaborated on a study by the Brookings Institution that advocated a broad Arab-Israeli settlement, including Soviet participation and self-determination for the Palestinians; Carter made it part of his campaign.

None of this was lost on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the advance guard of the Israel lobby.* Both Carter and Brzezinski were under constant suspicion from AIPAC, which (then as now) was ready to hurl the charge of antisemitism for any deviation from their version of Zionist orthodoxy. On Brzezinski’s first day in office, he was visited by Senator Richard Stone of Florida, an AIPAC envoy carrying a list of a hundred or so officials across the federal government, but mostly in the Pentagon. Stone claimed they were all anti-Israel and demanded they be fired. After the senator left, Brzezinski crumpled up the list and threw it away. It may have been his finest hour.

False accusations of antisemitism continued to swirl around Carter and his foreign policy team, falling mostly on Brzezinski. When the US and USSR issued a joint statement on Israel/Palestine at the UN, calling for a regional peace settlement that would address the ‘legitimate rights of the Palestinians’, Israeli leaders and their American supporters (led by Edward Koch, later the mayor of New York) howled in dismay. Carter caved, agreeing to a US-Israeli statement that retreated from the US-Soviet one. Brzezinski thought the president had been ‘effectively blackmailed’ by the Israelis and their lobbyists. Even James Reston of the New York Times complained that Carter was ‘too easily intimidated by a highly organised constituency’. Plus ça change.

In other arenas, Brzezinski ended up definitively winning out over Vance. Characterising Carter’s views on the nuclear arms race, Luce resorts to a familiar – and misleading – antithesis: the president’s ‘heart’ hated nuclear weapons, while his ‘head’ feared vulnerability to a Soviet first strike. One could just as easily say that the effort to move towards nuclear disarmament came from the head, as the only sane alternative to the fantasy of a winnable nuclear war, and that the fear of a Soviet first strike came from the heart – from the terror that the Soviets were so maddened by ideology as to provoke their own annihilation by America’s weapons. But few people inside the Beltway were thinking such thoughts. When Carter went to Vienna in June 1979 to talk about SALT II with Brezhnev, Senator Scoop Jackson cried ‘appeasement!’ and compared Carter with Neville Chamberlain. Such analogies were already threadbare in the 1970s, though they remain irresistible to embattled militarists.

Brzezinski played his cards carefully in the SALT II game. He pronounced a bad deal better than none but insisted the treaty would do nothing to change Soviet behaviour. After Carter and Brezhnev reached an agreement in June 1979, Carter hoped for Senate ratification despite rising Russophobia in Washington. Among the leading Russophobes was Frank Church, who had chaired the Senate committee investigating CIA misconduct in 1975 and now faced an electoral challenge from his right flank. ‘America’s winds were blowing in a conservative direction,’ Luce writes.

This is a bland mystification of the sharp militaristic turn in the Washington foreign policy consensus in the late 1970s, encouraged by outlets such as the New York Times, which began to discover the virtues of government secrecy, along with Democrats like Church, who promoted the threat posed by a mythical Soviet combat brigade in Cuba. Even Vance called the imaginary brigade a ‘serious concern’, although everyone in the administration knew better. Brzezinski ‘knew the Cuban brigade was a fiction’, Luce writes, but ‘thought Carter had once again missed an opportunity to draw a red line for the Soviets’. The big winner in this manufactured crisis was Ronald Reagan, who would cash in his chips in the 1980 election.

Afew months​ before SALT II was stymied in the Senate, conventional assumptions about Middle East politics were upended by the Iranian Revolution, which took the Carter administration by surprise. No one had quite appreciated the power of the ayatollahs, or the long-simmering hostility to the shah and his secret police. Vance advised a diplomatic approach, incorporating Ayatollah Khomeini into a broad governing coalition; Brzezinski wanted to stage a military coup. This approach offended Carter’s deepest convictions as well as his belief that the Democrats were not the sort of party that overthrew foreign governments. Brzezinski, citing a strained parallel between the Bolshevik and Iranian Revolutions, bemoaned Carter’s reluctance to use force.

Meanwhile, Brzezinski exacerbated the crisis by helping to bring the shah to the US despite Carter’s objections. When the Iranians stormed the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979, Brzezinski immediately demanded a display of American power. We should blow up oil fields, mine harbours and impose economic sanctions, he insisted. Vance said any military action would endanger the hostages. When Vance and Carter agreed that the Iranians’ capture of American hostages meant it was time for the shah to leave the US, Brzezinski raged against this ‘abject capitulation’ and ‘acquiescence to blackmail’. His ‘bottom line’, Luce writes, ‘was that the US had turned into a helpless giant’. Thanks to media hysteria, Brzezinski’s anger and impatience began to resonate with popular sentiment.

Brzezinski created a subcommittee of the National Security Council to pursue covert actions against Iran, but Carter and Vance successfully resisted his determination to launch a regime change operation. In Afghanistan he got what he wanted. On 24 December 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and murdered President Hafizullah Amin. Luce writes that two days later, back in the office after his Christmas break, Brzezinski ‘reportedly clenched his fist’ as he told his aide Bill Odom: ‘They have taken the bait!’ The Soviets quickly installed a new president, Babrak Karmal, who requested Soviet support against Mujahedin insurgents. By the end of January 1980, 80,000 Soviet troops had entered Afghanistan. Détente was over.

According to Luce, ‘it remains an open question whether Brzezinski lured the Soviets into Afghanistan,’ but he provides abundant evidence that without Brzezinski’s support of US covert action to fuel the growing insurgency, the Soviets would not have launched what turned out to be a disastrous invasion. Encouraging a Muslim revival through Voice of America broadcasts to Central Asian USSR was only the most obvious example of a broader and largely secret operation. Years later, in an interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, Brzezinski admitted: ‘We did not push the Russians into intervening, but we did knowingly increase the chances that they would do so.’ Brzezinski believed, and Luce apparently agrees, that the Soviet invasion was a return to a larger effort to promote ‘global revolution’. This overlooks the obvious reason: the Soviets did not want a US-sponsored regime, backed by the CIA, on their southern border.

In helping Carter prepare his State of the Union address in 1980, Brzezinski urged the president to announce what became known as the Carter Doctrine: ‘an attempt by any outside force to control the Persian Gulf will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States,’ in Brzezinski’s words. The chief ‘vital interest’ was the free flow of oil, which might be threatened by Soviet access to warm-water ports on the Straits of Hormuz and the Indian Ocean. The Carter Doctrine was part of a pattern: as the election approached, Carter needed to protect his right flank, and Brzezinski was the man for the job.

His influence was apparent in the poorly conceived, poorly planned rescue mission that he and Carter hoped would spirit the hostages out of Iran. Vance was sceptical from the outset. As the only military veteran in the White House, Luce admits, ‘his voice should have carried greater weight. But his doubts were trumped by the Pentagon’s confidence and everyone else’s impatience.’ When the mission had to be aborted, Brzezinski was crushed. But within two hours he was back in combat mode. ‘We must go back in,’ he announced. Learning from mistakes was not part of his skill set.

In early 1980, Vance was exhausted by his repeated failures to influence policy and ready to resign. Soon after he did, he gave a commencement address at Harvard, warning against the ‘dangerous fallacy’ that force could serve US foreign policy as well as or better than diplomacy. He was replaced by Senator Edmund Muskie, whom Brzezinski feared was even more dovish.

He needn’t have worried. In nuclear policy, Carter was more and more attentive to Brzezinski and Brown; the State Department was nearly shut out. Brzezinski brought his former Harvard colleague Samuel Huntington into government as a national security consultant, and asked him to produce a white paper on nuclear modernisation. In it, Huntington claimed the USSR had drawn level with the US in the 1970s and now had the capacity to win a nuclear war. Later research showed that Soviet leaders did not think they could prevail in a nuclear exchange, but Brzezinski was horrified to read Huntington’s speculation that the USSR could protect as much as 10 to 20 per cent of its population in shelters. Assuming (falsely) that the Soviets were planning a first strike, Brzezinski urged the beefing up of civil defence and the creation of a Federal Emergency Management Agency. He also backed Carter’s most important nuclear directive, PD-59, which announced a shift from strategic to tactical nuclear weapons, designed to pinpoint mobile Soviet targets on the battlefield rather than major population centres. Critics, including Muskie, said it made nuclear war even more likely. Not even he, let alone the State Department in general, knew that the policy change had already taken place.

Carter’s​ rightward turn couldn’t help him against Reagan, who packaged the same militarist policies in reassuring, upbeat banalities. After the Republican victory, Brzezinski returned to Columbia, where peace activists called him ‘Carter’s Darth Vader’. He also took up a post at Georgetown’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies, resuming his dual identity as professor and policy intellectual. Luce claims Brzezinski was chastened: ‘His basic lesson from the Carter years was that foreign policy rarely lent itself to the binary simplicities that journalists craved.’ This is an astonishing assertion about a man whose own ‘binary simplicities’ rarely wavered.

Brzezinski remained a major figure in American public life, frequently cited, quoted and consulted on foreign policy issues. He felt comfortable with the hardline Russophobia of the early Reagan years, but by the mid-1980s noticed disturbing signs on the horizon, above all the nuclear freeze movement and the adoption of this position by the Democrats. ‘We never had a major party before advocating a hoax as foreign policy,’ he said. ‘I think the nuclear freeze is a hoax.’ Trapped in his own illusions about quantifiable superiority and winnable nuclear wars, Brzezinski failed to realise that what he saw as a hoax was a major transatlantic movement against the nuclear arms race. Luce has nothing to say about the sidelining of Brzezinski from the most dramatic foreign policy developments in the later 1980s – Reagan’s conversion to nuclear pacifism and his rapprochement with Gorbachev.

The collapse of communism, by contrast, gets full coverage. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, every Washington insider from Francis Fukuyama to Richard Nixon rushed to congratulate Brzezinski. As Luce writes, ‘everything that Brzezinski had been forecasting for decades – often in a minority of one – had come to pass with remarkably little violence.’ Though Brzezinski didn’t know much about economics, he knew enough to realise that Russia was poorly equipped to adapt to unregulated market capitalism, opening the country to plunder by foreign and domestic oligarchs. He feared ‘an intensifying crisis of the Russian spirit’, which might lead to revanchist nationalism. But he failed to consider the ways that US policies – particularly its commitment to shock-and-awe economics – might aggravate the Russian crisis, or to realise that his own dream of a regenerated Eastern Europe might intensify it.

Brzezinski’s dream became institutional reality a few years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, when his efforts to promote Nato expansion finally paid off. The purpose of this policy, he wrote in The Grand Chessboard (1997), was ‘to reinvigorate Europe’s own waning sense of a larger vocation, while consolidating, to the benefit of both the United States and Europe, the democratic gains won through the successful termination of the Cold War’. We should try to allay Russian fears but also to demand security guarantees, he added, and never let them think they’ve become a de facto member of Nato, because that might make the other new members feel like second-class citizens. He also observed in frustration that Russia was just too big (ten time zones!) and should be divided into three smaller ‘loosely confederated’ nations. For Brzezinski as for other globalists, the collapse of communism fostered wide-ranging fantasies.

But the transition from Yeltsin to Putin provoked fresh anxieties. Rather than becoming a sober version of Yeltsin who remained compliant with American demands, Putin focused on his own nation’s interests – particularly its need for a new European security architecture, which included Russia in an arrangement based on the principle of ‘indivisible security’, where no nation would gain security at the expense of another. He was still proposing this plan to the US as recently as December 2021. Meanwhile, the US was still pushing the eastward expansion of Nato, which was still styling itself as a defensive alliance against a common (implicitly Russian) foe.

There could only be one explanation for Putin’s independence, in Brzezinski’s view: he remained ‘a product of the Soviet Era’, which to Zbig meant that he wanted to revive Soviet institutions. This was a non sequitur. Like any leader of a sovereign nation going through radical social transformation, Putin had the responsibility of ensuring his population’s stability and security in everyday life. But Brzezinski’s belief in a deep continuity between Russia and the Soviet Union made him dismiss any Russian attempt to chart its own course as a return to the delusions of empire.

Brzezinski’s political loyalties continued to reflect his divided mind on Europe and the Middle East. After 9/11, he disdained what he called President Bush’s ‘quasi-theological formulations’ about terrorists ‘hating freedom’, and even picked up support on the anti-war left by denouncing the invasion of Iraq. He also recognised that US policy on Israel was ‘one-sided and morally hypocritical, with clear displays of sympathy for Israeli victims of terrorist violence and relative indifference to the (much more numerous) Palestinian civilian casualties’. When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s article ‘The Israel Lobby’ appeared in these pages in 2006 (23 March), Brzezinski endorsed it, provoking predictable and unjustified accusations of antisemitism.

His obsession with Eastern Europe remained. He lobbied the Clinton administration to strengthen Ukraine’s ties with the West, although many of Clinton’s advisors sympathised with Russia’s concern to maintain friendly relations with its ‘near abroad’. Brzezinski dismissed that concern as a euphemism for Russia’s determination to maintain a sphere of influence. He kept suspicions of Russia alive when there were people in high office who wanted to overcome them. Luce concludes that ‘the larger goal of bringing Russia into a broader European home evidently failed’ – without acknowledging that the US blocked that goal by refusing to consider Putin’s proposals for a new security architecture.

As his life neared its end, Brzezinski began to show signs of ambivalence. Despite his persistent dread of Russia, he opposed Nato membership for Ukraine as overly provocative. His last public lecture, at Columbia on 2 April 2017, a month before he died, was ‘the final testament of a man who was starting to sound remarkably like a dove’, Luce writes. The argument was straightforward: the stakes were too high for geopolitics to continue as normal; we needed to recognise that we lived in a multipolar world; Russia, China and the US must act in concert to address issues like climate change and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. One can only imagine the private struggle and courage involved for Brzezinski to say such things. An old man, near death, repudiates a geopolitics he has been promoting for his entire life and announces a new, humane and necessary worldview. It is our misfortune that he didn’t articulate this argument a few decades earlier.