In this video, an author discusses his comprehensive biography about Zbigniew Brzezinski, a significant figure in American foreign policy during the Cold War. The biography is based on extensive research, including interviews, access to Brzezinski's diaries, and numerous historical documents. The conversation delves into Brzezinski's strategies during critical Cold War events, his relationship with Henry Kissinger, and his vision of American geopolitical dynamics, highlighting his prediction of the Soviet Union's collapse and his strategic insights that resonate with contemporary global issues.
The video highlights Brzezinski's immigrant background and its impact on his worldview, contrasting it with Kissinger's perspective on international relations. Both figures were instrumental in shaping American foreign policy, yet they held distinctly different views on power dynamics between nations. The author outlines how Brzezinski's personal history and professional experiences influenced his approach toward the Soviet Union and world policy, reflecting broader themes in diplomacy and international relations.
Main takeaways from the video:
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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:
1. obsessional [əbˈseʃənl] - (adjective) - Relating to or characterized by an obsession; excessive preoccupation with something. - Synonyms: (compulsive, fixated, preoccupied)
my wife Niamh used to make the joke, because, you know, when you're doing a biography, you get kind of obsessional.
2. strategic [strəˈtiːdʒɪk] - (adjective) - Relating to the identification of long-term or overall aims and interests and the means of achieving them. - Synonyms: (tactical, calculated, intentional)
The nuclear situation in the Cold War and Salt 1, the strategic
3. frenemies [ˈfrɛnəmiz] - (noun) - A person with whom one is friendly despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry. - Synonyms: (rival, competitor, adversary)
that these two figures, because they were legendary frenemies, they were rivals, they would meet regularly.
4. gerontocratic [ˌdʒɛrənˈtɒkrætɪk] - (adjective) - Relating to a government run by old people; the rule of elders. - Synonyms: (elderly governance, senior rule, aged authority)
This was an ossified, gerontocratic.
5. hubristic [hjuːˈbrɪstɪk] - (adjective) - Having or showing excessive pride or self-confidence. - Synonyms: (arrogant, overconfident, egotistic)
when this town, the west in general, America in particular, but this town in a concentrated form, was hubristic.
6. triumphalism [traɪˈʌmfəˌlɪzəm] - (noun) - Excessive exultation over one's success or achievements. - Synonyms: (boastful pride, boastfulness, self-glorification)
And the triumphalism was pretty broad and it was pretty sustained throughout the 1990s.
7. providentialism [ˌprɒvɪˈdɛnʃəlɪzəm] - (noun) - The belief that the affairs of the world are controlled by a divine providence. - Synonyms: (divine foresight, divine intervention, fate)
because there is a sort of providentialism to American exceptionalism which sees itself as suspended from the laws of history.
8. multipolar [ˈmʌltɪˌpoʊlər] - (adjective) - Relating to a world in which power is distributed among multiple states rather than dominated by one or two superpowers. - Synonyms: (polycentric, multi-centered, decentralized)
that are recurring again today that are very present in today's more multipolar, more unstable world.
'The revenge of geopolitics' - FT Live
Ed writes at least one column a week, because sometimes you're asked to do two, sometimes even three, and you know what it's been like in Washington over the last three months. So in between his columns, he managed to write this, a biography of Space Brzezinski. Now, having read the book, this is really unbelievably rich in research. You talked to, I don't know, more than 100 people. You had access to his diaries, his letters.
So I suppose my first question is, when? How did you do this? Well, you very kindly gave me leaves of absence. Unpaid leaves of absence. Yeah. Let's just be clear here. But then there was, you know, weekends, evenings, my wife Niamh used to make the joke, because, you know, when you're doing a biography, you get kind of obsessional. You have to be. You have to immerse yourself in that person's life.
And apart from two or three of the things that recur throughout as the nuclear. The nuclear situation in the Cold War and Salt 1, the strategic. Older people here will remember Salt 1 and Salt 2. But when she asked me to pass the salt, allegedly, I would say salt one or SALT two. And that's. So the short answer is you have to be really quite passionate and intellectually fascinated by the subject. And the echoes with today actually feed into the job because we are in the Revenge of Geopolitics era.
But have you always been fascinated by Brzezinski? Do you ever sort of spend time going to his lectures or. What prompted this? Why did you decide this is the strategist, that I'm going to spend, what, you know, two years immersed in five. Well, four. I never went to his lectures. I wish I'd been a student. He only gave one A per class. So he was the opposite of grade inflation. He was a tough person, but people who got A's from him, whether it was at Columbia, Harvard, when he was much younger, sais here in town, he were walking on air for days.
But the short answer is his family came to me with these diaries that he kept. He would drive home every night from the White House, be driven home from the white house to McLean Spring Hill, McLean, where he lived. And he'd speak into a Dictaphone everything that had happened that day. And it was about a half an hour drive and then it would get typed up the next day. And these cumulative sort of first draft of history diaries were given to me without any strings.
The family did not read this book before you did, before the galley came out and had no sort of editorial influence in it. But I was given these diaries and when I started to read them I became really gripped because what are we dealing with? It's not just salt one, salt two and pepper one and pepper two. It's Afghanistan invasion, it's the non invasion of Poland, it's the Iran hostage crisis, which was the nemesis really of Carter and Brzezinski. It's tons of issues in that sort of geopolitical turmoil that America went through, that the world went through in the late 70s that are recurring again today that are very present in today's more multipolar, more unstable world.
And so, you know, this was instantly gripping to me. And then his childhood diaries, I mean, I got this is America. So, you know, I have 100,000 words of letters and diaries in Polish which I can't translate. So I ask a philanthropist and the philanthropist says sure. I asked Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Two days later there's, you know, $40,000 for translation or whatever. It's extraordinary how quickly if you are perceived to be, I hope correctly, in my case, a legitimate author with legitimate scholarly pursuit, how quickly you can get support for it. And then once you start going into childhood letters and diaries, you know, this is interwar, interbellum Warsaw. That he begins, that his life begins right, right through, you know, the second World War. It becomes gripping. The more you know, the more you want to know because this is a pretty cinematic life. It's a very controversial one, but it's pretty cinematic as well.
What I found fascinating, especially at this moment, to be reading sort of Cold War history, but through the eyes of him, a strategist, but also Kissinger, because there's a very famous rivalry between them. What, what did you learn? So let's just start sort of high and then we'll drill down. But what did you learn about American foreign policy in general just from writing this book to say Kissinger was very. I talked to him quite a lot for this book and my last interview.
Was he excited about it because he was his great rival. He was. And he was very solicitous. You know, I mean, I had trouble pinning down corroborating some of the things he said, which, you know, which is not unusual, which is not unusual with Kissinger, but he had this great thing that Brzezinski lacked, which is a self deprecating sense of humor. And the first interview I did with him, he said it's tragic how young Spig was. And I said he was 89. But then how old was he was then about 96 that's my point.
And then he said, so why are you writing this? And I said, well, to be fair, Dr. Kissinger, you had about 4,000 pages of autobiography, three massive volumes, and he had a short volume. And he never cooperated with biographers. So you had tons of biographies, but Brzezinski never cooperated. And he said, yes, but those 4,000 pages of autobiography, if you subtract the four first person, they're about 3,000 pages. That's a real skill to be able to laugh at yourself.
But what did I learn about foreign policy? I mean, I learned a lot of it through the debates, that these two figures, because they were legendary frenemies, they were rivals, they would meet regularly. They would meet at Sans Souci, the French restaurant since closed, very close to the White House, every few weeks. Even when they were sort of trying to slit each other's career throats, they were still continuing a conversation.
But they did stand on very, very different sides of the debate. During the Cold War, though, Kissinger, you know, famously Congress of Vienna, 1815, he saw the role of diplomacy as establishing order between great powers and the four great powers of the Congress of Vienna in the Cold War, the two great powers of the United States, the Soviet Union gave birth to detente, saw it through that sort of 30,000 foot level and therefore saw the Soviet Union as a permanent feature of the landscape.
Brzezinski, coming from Poland with that sort of permanent burning sense of wounded, amputated history that a lot of Poles, for understandable reasons have, did not see the world through the lens of order or big powers. He saw the world through the lens of smaller powers trampled by bigger ones within their spheres of interest. And Poland was of course, behind the Iron Curtain for most two thirds of his life, and saw the Achilles heel of the Soviet Union as being its nationalities, not just in the Warsaw Pact countries, but within the ussr, the Ukrainians, the Georgians, the Tajiks, et cetera, and that it wouldn't therefore be a permanent feature of the landscape at all.
This was an ossified, gerontocratic. He actually used the word reverse natural selection. You got promoted in the Soviet Union by having no innovative or creative mobility. The most staid people got promoted. Therefore it was going to collapse under its own weight. And these were two very, very different strategies, both respectable ones. Well, I mean, he turned out to be right, but there's always, there is a question as to whether he was driven, whether this was strategic thinking in a way, or whether there was a lot more emotion and Passion that colored his thinking about the Soviet Union? I think it did.
And I mean, one of the fascinating. There are so many fascinating byways and all of them are relevant to a biograph.
One of the fascinating ones was how the wasps, the sort of the elite of American foreign policy, the Averell Harrimans, the Dean achesons, the John McCloys, the Robert Lovetts, the Chip Boland, all that crowd, how suspicious they were of Brzezinski as having dual loyalty. Basically Polish American, you're going to get us into a war with the Soviet Union because you're a Pole. And what comes particularly strongly to me, since all of these people are essentially Anglo elites, you know, for the most, Chip Boland was of German background, but the rest were mostly Anglo background. Avril Harriman had married Churchill's former daughter in law. Dean Acheson's dad was an Anglican bishop who moved to Connecticut and Groton.
Half of them went to Yale. Skull and Bones. This is all very Anglo and Anglophilic. They weren't called English Americans because that's not. But they did certainly have their own particular biases, ones that, you know, I'm very happy they did have. But the idea that Brzezinski was automatically disqualified because he's a Pole, it recurs again and again. And he has big. It comes out very clearly in the book.
Yeah, it's. It was a strong theme. And, you know, these were generally very wealthy people for whom foreign policy was a second career. It was sort of an obligation to do a little bit of stint in public service or a lot. But, you know, you'd made your money and your reputation and your weight was elsewhere. This was a sort of. It was a bit like volunteer work at weekends. I mean, I'm exaggerating. Dean Adjison was a very, very serious Secretary of State, whereas Brzezinski and Kissinger were professionals full time.
They needed sponsors. One of them Nelson Rockefeller Kissinger, the other David Rockefeller Brzezinski, each of them had a Rockefeller. So they're kind of like, well, each of them had a Medici and therefore were able to. To get ahead and move in, to dominate really American Cold War strategy between them for 20 years. So one of the questions I think about both of them is why them? Was it the immigrant background that really drove them? You also write about that. Is that in your research? Did this come out as a kind of defining feature or was it what drove their ambition?
I think America in the 1950s, late 40s, 50s, facing this new threat and this nuclear shadow, the Terror of which it's hard for us to reimagine because it was new and it was total. Had this sort of mirror image of where we are today. A real appetite for foreigners, for immigrants, for skills, for experts, expertise. The whole, you know, department of many departments in the Cold War, universities of Soviet Studies, Soviet Area studies grew from nothing to. Went from zero to sort of juggernaut within a few years.
And the demand for people who spoke Russian, which Brzezinski did, Kissinger German, I guess, and I'm not sure what other languages I think he spoke good French, but Brzezinski and he were in great demand. So that's sort of one aspect of it. Another is that, you know, they weren't just immigrants. The circumstances of their emigration, Both leaving in 1938, crossing the Atlantic in 1938. Kissinger, Heinz Kissinger, 15 year old, a few weeks before the Munich conference, the notorious Munich conference.
A Brzezinski, 10 year old, a few days after the Munich Conference. They're sort of. The fact that they both saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time within a few weeks of each other is again, it's this sort of wonderful, you know, biography is. Can produce these amazing sort of little cinematic moments. And it is, it's the closest that nonfiction gets to fiction as a narrative form. And it's at moments like that that it really, you know, comes together. But the circumstances of their emigration from the bloodlands of interwar Europe at the very eve of the Second World War is absolutely key.
And in one of the interviews that Kissinger gave me for the book, he talks about understanding the essential sort of tragedy of human history and the fragility of civilization and of society. And I think both he and Brzezinski in different ways were in that respect quite un American because there is a sort of providentialism to American exceptionalism which sees itself as suspended from the laws of history. And they brought in a really quite practical, very different, very controversial, particularly in Kissinger's case, particularly realpolitik and slightly more gritty understanding of what humans are capable of doing and how fragile the things we take for granted are. And this is why I feel this biography is relevant for now.
Speaking of now, where expertise, it is the revenge of politics really, because you can't find a Kissinger or a Brzezinski, immigrant or no, or not immigrant. Right. Do you see a reaction in the political class of today? Particularly today. I mean, by today, I mean really today, not sort of in a general sense this decade or this or Even the century. But do you see almost a reaction that what you want, that some people, what they want today is not someone who actually is deeply immersed in the politics or the immersed in understanding, but rather someone who can just get together, like Steve Witkoff and, and maybe make a deal on the basis of, I don't know, real estate or.
Yeah, I mean, it's a different definition of expertise. But even if Trump had hired Brzezinski or Kissinger, you have to behave like Marco Rubio to stay in the job, which means you're a Greek chorus. You're basically a yes man. And I think I've written this before, yes man cannot be a strategist. You, you need to work for a president who doesn't mind being disagreed with. And I think Mike Waltz probably disagreed a bit too much or had views that weren't Trumpian. But the Cold War, I don't want to exaggerate the bipartisan unity, politics stops at the water's edge element of it, but the Cold War, there was broadly a sort of consensus on where the threat came, came from and what the threat was, which was, at least in its early decades, an empire that, a Soviet empire that had worldwide revolution as its aim.
And America was the headquarters of capitalism. Today, I don't think there's a consensus at all. I mean, later I'm going to be in conversation with Steve Bannon. I don't think that Republicans and Democrats, or at least Maga Republicans, Trumpian Republicans and Democrats agree on what the threat is. And we're in a more complex world, but it is more, it is more direct. The threat emanates more from China than from Russia. They are agreed. They are agreed on that.
But Russia is the sort of closest lieutenant. It's a reverse of the Cold War little brother now, not the big Brother that we had in the early Cold War, but this no limits partnership. And we saw she, you know, just on yesterday for the Victory in Europe parade next to Putin with 24 other leaders in what Brzezinski, by the way, called the alliance of the aggrieved. He, I mean, the subtitle of this is America's Great Power Prophet. And I should probably sort of emphasize why.
One of the reasons is not just his prediction of the Soviet Union's inevitable demise, but what he said after the Cold War ended, when this town, the west in general, America in particular, but this town in a concentrated form, was hubristic, off the scale. And we went and the triumphalism was pretty broad and it was pretty sustained throughout the 1990s. And America went in that period from the intense study of the rest of the world, particularly its adversaries, to, at least in the political realm, the stance that now you have to study us, we don't need to study you anymore. We're at the top of the ladder and we're where you want to be.
And I'm not going to malign Francis Fukuyama here because his book the End of History is actually a great book and it is mischaracterized. It's a much more nuanced book. Book, but that sort of spirit that, no, we're the end state and we can help you up rungs of this ladder towards us, but you should be studying us. We have a Washington consensus. We have a toolkit for everything. And Brzezinski wrote this book which was really jarring, out of control, saying we are alienating the losers of history and they will form an alliance of the aggrieved. And the alliance will be chiefly Russia, China. But Iran will belong to it, North Korea will belong to it. Well, if you look at who was standing there with Putin yesterday, that's the alliance of the aggrieved.
And so the sense that America went from being deeply strategic and strategic people disagree with each other, Kissinger and Brzezinski, to being pretty much a strategic for quite a long time is, I think, very strong again here today. They, of course, changed positions on China in particular, where Brzezinski was advocating normalization. And in fact, there was a normalization. And some people say that it is that normalization that gave a lot of confidence to China and it drove sort of the, the rise of China. Do you see it that way? And did he say much later, in later years, both he and Kissinger were sort of united on this.
They were very celebrated in China, Kissinger in particular. But Brzezinski is a big, big name in China. So I've had a lot of excitement from Chinese people. I know about this book because I'm Brzezinski because one arranged the Shanghai communique and the second, you know, completed normalization. Well, initiated and completed normalization. And so no is the answer. Brzezinski was a big critic of Obama's pivot to Asia. He said it would create the China you fear. And I think he believed that China's not going to go away. It's not like the Soviet Union. It's not inherently fragile. The han Chinese are 90% of it. Its political system might change, but as a sort of geopolitical unit. It's always going to be there.
And therefore he didn't have that sort of expectation of its inevitable demise. So he talked about what would be the best modus for Vendi with a regime and a country whose system we don't agree with, but that we are not in a position to regime change. And I think that was probably Kissinger's view too, and that involves some sang froid. I mean, Brzezinski wasn't particularly bothered by Tiananmen Square, June 4, 1989. Yeah, he thought you could overcome it. What was the low point? Iran, presumably.
Iran. Yeah. Iran was an idea. And in a way this illustrates my point because his ignorance and everybody's. But Brzezinski's ignorance of Iran, just to explain, he was the one who was arguing continue to support the Shah. He was arguing for continuing to support the Shah and trying to urge the Shah to crack down, but he didn't. None of them knew. There's a really interesting paper that Stansfield Turner, the then director of the CIA, provides to Carter at their request, explaining the difference between Sunni and Shia. And they weren't really sort of aware of any differences.
Iran was purely about this guy. The Shah, who had massive oil revenues, was a friendly. He was our sort of strongman in the region and he bought more arms from America than any other country. I mean, at one point, 73 to 77, I think 48% of U.S. arms export exports went to Iran. Extraordinary sort of myopia of America and this civil nuclear program which is now the basis, was given to Iran. Then no idea of what might happen if the Shah goes. So Carter.
I did interview Carter before he died too, and he said, look, the worst piece of advice Zbig gave me was Iran. And he urged Carter to eventually persuaded Carter to admit the Shah into America for treatment for lymphoma on the pretext that only he could only be treated in New York. This was David Rockefeller with Kissinger. Again, this is. Which wasn't true. Which was not true at all. He could have been treated in many countries and even if he couldn't have been, they should have had a basic precaution, which is you renounce the. The Peacock throne as a precondition for being admitted into America because the Iranians were paranoid, given recent history with some reason, that there would be another American British coup to impose the Shah on the throne, as you'd had in 1953 with the overthrow of Mossadegh. So Brzezinski then urged the rescue mission.
So, I mean, he did not serve Carter well on Iran. The rescue mission. 48 hours. Desert one, desert two. Overnighting in the mountains after getting these 52 people out of the embassy in a metropolis of 12 million people, and then going to a disused sports stadium and then picking up choppers and then meeting C130s. And it's like, you really think this is going to work? And apparently they did. And the Pentagon brass were all very confident this was going to work, so maybe they bear the sort of first tranche of blame. But Brzezinski was gung ho, so he served Carter badly on Iran, I think would be fair to say.
It's very interesting also to just go over Carter's presidency. I can't imagine a presidency that is more different than the Trump administration. But he was also very indecisive. And you had the rivalry between Vance and Brzezinski, which was really fierce. What did you. I mean, when you were researching this, was this on your mind, sort of just this comparison between the Carter presidency and the Trump presidency?
Well, a lot of the work I was doing was during the Biden one. Actually, Biden was the first senator to endorse Carter, this young senator from Delaware. And Carter, it was in 1975 that he endorsed him. So very early, when the Washington Post was doing polls of who. It was a very, very big field for 76. And they were doing polls of. They kept referring to Carter, the former governor of Georgia, as Jimmy Collins and Johnny Apple, the famous New York Times, whose wife is here, I think, famously wrote a big piece. Jimmy who? And so, yeah, the Carter administrative. Sorry, complete.
I had another anecdote and then I forgot. What was it you actually asked me? Carter versus Trump. I'm in a couch here. And so it's not good for being alert. You need to be alert for Bannon. Yeah. This is for J.D. vance. Or. No, that's a bad joke. Sorry, that's awful. I withdraw that remark. Carter was only possible. I mean, the willpower of that man. I mean, he would. He went round shaking hands with people, just saying, hi, I'm Jimmy and I'm running for president across Iowa. He just covered Iowa again. He invented it, the Iowa strategy, the 99 counties.
And he kept, by the way, saying, such an improbable, Such an improbable partnership between him and Brzezinski, this sort of Polish Machiavellian, and this peanut farmer from Georgia, Sunday school preacher from Georgia. But Carter kept saying to people, I am an eager student of Zbig. And Zbig kept telling him People don't want to elect a student, they want to elect a leader. So I'm happy to continue. But the difference, I mean, Carter was a fundamentally decent man, and it's worth mentioning who read a lot.
He read a lot, and sometimes that was really bad for him. He was the opposite of Trump. I mean, he read one weekend in Camp David, four books. In the evenings, he and Rosalind would do Spanish, read the Bible in Spanish to learn Spanish. They did speed reading courses. They did. I mean, it was extraordinary. 500 pages a day he would read as president, of material that Brzezinski and Stu Eisenstadt on the domestic side supplied to him. I don't think Trump's read a book. I mean, I'm not aware there's proof he's ever read a full book in his life or written any of the books that he's written. So they are the opposite of each other.
But Carter's only possible in the aftermath of Watergate, somebody that moral, a Sunday school preacher, the Augean stable stench of post Watergate Washington. There was this demand for the outsider, for the moral outsider, not tainted by Washington. And he understood that and exploited it. But yeah, he read too much. Except during Camp David, where that mastery of detail was absolutely intense. That was the high point, in a way, of his presidency. And only probably, I can't imagine any other president able to have done Camp David.
And this was one area where both Brzezinski and Vance and Carter strongly agreed, which is you want Egypt, Israel, normalization, but you also want part two of the Camp David Accords, which is Palestinian homeland. I mean, not, not a state. It wasn't called the two state solution in those days. And they all rode in the same direction on that. And so there was none of the famous Vance Brzezinski split that bedeviled the first half of the Carter administration.
It's very hard to imagine today because they had radio silence for 13 days. And when Brzezinski flew back after, somehow Carter had got Begin and Sadat to agree, flew back to the White House from Camp David to brief the media on this breathtaking agreement. And they were all stunned. The media had no idea. Now, you can imagine that today with our iPhones, I mean, it's very hard. Or a president devoting 13 days. He was also very fond. Carter was very fond of Sadat. He really trusted Sadat.
He loved Sadat and he hated Begin. Brzezinski and Begin, perhaps improbably, got along very well. They both spoke Polish to each other. Carter could Barely stand to be in the same room as Begin. So Brzezinski was the Begin whisperer. And there's the fact that famous story where he's playing chess with Begin, famous picture at Camp David. And Begin says, the last time I played chess was in 1940, when the NKVD, the Soviet secret, burst in. And then they arrested me and jailed me before I escaped for a year.
That's the last time I played chess. And during the middle of the game, Mrs. Bagan comes in, comes out and says, ah, Menachem, he's always playing chess. You're playing another game. I love stories like that. So did he tell us a little bit about Afghanistan? Did he lure the Soviets to Afghanistan? Was this a very well thought out Machiavellian strategy so that they get their own Vietnam? I mean, I don't. I think they would have invaded anyway.
But he understood their paranoia about their soft underbelly of all these Muslim republics in the southern Soviet Union. And that after a couple of coups of pro Soviet figures, the last coup was this guy called Amin, who very brutally murdered Taraki, the previous pro Soviet ish leader of the Afghan government. And Amin had studied at Columbia at the same time Brzezinski was teaching there. Brzezinski got the acting, the dcm, the ambassador had been killed, Ambassador Dubs had been killed.
So he got the DCM to keep meeting Amin and he kept sort of playing on Soviet paranoia. And the Politburo minutes show that they thought that Amin was planning to station US nuclear weapons in Afghanistan, which was complete non nonsense. But he understood that the Soviets were paranoid about Afghanistan and he played on that paranoia. So certainly he. And there were all these Pashto language, American broadcasts going. And in six months before the Soviet invasion, he persuades Carter to do the first covert finding it all post Watergate church committee.
There were no covert actions. And Carter was not the kind who believed in covert actions. Brzezinski broke that and got some funding, not very much, $695,000 to help support the Mueller rebellion against this Soviet government. So he certainly helped stoke Soviet paranoia. But I think the consensus amongst scholars on this is the Soviets would have invaded anyway. Brzezinski gave them a nice push. It's ironic that after they got stuck in Afghanistan, then the US got stuck in Afghanistan for quite a while.
And when he was told that they had invaded, it was On Christmas Day 1979, he said, they took the bait and they will have their Vietnam. I mean, again, this is very Machiavellian, but if you're cold and looking at the chessboard and you want to bring the Soviets down. That's the logic he pursued. So if you're cold in sitting and looking at the chessboard, and if Brzezinski was still with us, what would he be thinking today? What do you do about Russia and China? What would he be advising?
See, I don't think he would be in favor of striking up an alliance with Russia. I mean, since the bigger threat is perceived to be China, the large geopolitical rivalry there is definitely US China. I don't think he'd see it as at all realistic for a US Russia alliance, as a reverse Nixon Kissinger and reverse Carter Brzezinski. But I think. Which is what some people say Trump is doing. Some people say Trump is doing that. But doing that whilst alienating your allies is a funny way of. Is just.
Just doesn't really add up. It's, I think, sane washing. It's giving a sort of grand strategic gloss to what Trump is up to. But I think he would probably be looking at Russian latent paranoia about China that, you know, Chinese have the maps of the mid-19th century of the czarist annexation of Chinese territory when it was weak. Those maps, you know, there's a large chunk of territory the Russians took, the czarist Russians took. And the fact that Russia is pretty much obviously going to be and is already to some extent the largest beneficiary of global warming.
The Siberian tundra is turning into arable land and China has a population problem and a very sort of strong commercial presence in the former Soviet republics, but also in the Soviet. In Russia, you can stoke that paranoia, not to bring Russia into our camp, but just to have to have a bit more equidistance between the powers. You do not want to. You would try to create this distance. You try and create this distance. You do not want to drive your enemies together.
I mean, Trump, of course, is driving our friends into the arms of our enemies. So, I mean, that's a whole different level of a strategic. The polite word for stupid. So next time my daughter does something silly, they call her astrategic, the opposite of strategy. This is your next book. Oh, she'll call me astrategic. Sorry, it should be the other way around. Okay, I am going to open this up for questions, so if you have any questions, please raise your hand and a mic will be provided. Go ahead.
Yeah. You gave a biographical interpretation of Kissinger and Brzezinski's different attitudes to Russia, but did kissinger have a substantive answer to the vision of Russia, of the Soviet Union as a sclerotic, doomed rival? No, not that I'm aware of. He was actually quite, I mean, favorite Kissinger terms Spenglerian after Oswald Spengler, the very gloomy early 20th century German thinker who was talking about the decline of the West. Kissinger was actually very pessimistic about America's ability to remain top dog.
He was also not alone in expecting, and I think this was completely wrong, expecting what was known as the convergence theory that through industrialization and development and bureaucratization, the west and the Eastern Bloc would become more and more alike and the ideological differences would become more and more manageable. That was a very fashionable view in the 60s and the 70s, at least until the mid-70s, when it became very hard to deny that the Soviet Union was stagnant and falling further and further behind.
Brzezinski called it a museum to the industrial age. But no, Kissinger didn't. He didn't really respond to that. He tried to. Both Brzezinski and Kissinger had nothing when Carter left office. That was the last either of them were ever in power. So he had eight years of Kissinger as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State and then just Secretary of State when Brent Scowcroft was brought in.
And you had four years of Brzezinski and then you had Reaganism. And by that point Kissinger Associates was up and running. And this is sort of, I think a really key difference between Kissinger, Brzezinski is that Kissinger Associates required Kissinger to have access to the White House, to the Kremlin, to Zhongnanhai in Beijing and elsewhere in order to serve his clients. He wanted to understand those systems, but also introductions. Brzezinski didn't have a big sort of geopolitical consultancy and therefore was able to destroy his access to all of them.
Most of the time he was very outspoken and he made a lot of enemies by being outspoken. There was a huge difference between the two. So it was hard over time to actually understand what Kissinger really did think. He became what I think of as a sort of geopolitical version of Alan Greenspan, very sort of oracle, like Delphic in how he spoke, beautiful in his prose. Much better writer than Brzezinski. But if Brzezinski's prose had one virtue, it was you knew what he was arguing.
But not enough people read his books. A few Kissinger was a global best seller. The Grand Chessboard was a bestseller. That was in 97 out of control sold well. But his academic books were the ones that last. They were too academic. Yes, the original academic books on the Soviet work. Yes, please go ahead. Thank you very much. What was Brzezinski's views on Ukraine and Ukraine's relationships with Europe and NATO? Please. Thank you.
So he wrote an op ed for US for the FT in 2014 arguing for the Finlandization of Ukraine, surprising many people, basically meaning it should be a buffer state that did not belong to the West. And towards the end of his life, Henry Kissinger argued that Ukraine should join NATO. So it was kind of a weird reversal of. He changed his mind a bit. Kissinger on Ukraine, beginning of the war and then a few weeks or a few months later. He did, he did. I mean, he was 98 by that point.
I think. I think that the Smolensk air crash in Poland. Brzezinski was very, very involved with Poland and with the Solidarity movement under Lech Walesa. Of course, he had a very, very close relationship with people. Pope John Paul ii, who he knew a bit before he became Pope. Serendipity. First non Italian Pope in 450 year. We haven't had an Italian Pope since, by the way. And apparently an American is now so extraordinary.
Serendipity. The Smolensk air crash which wiped out half of Poland's elite in 2011, 2010 is a sort of the belief that that was a Russian conspiracy, is an article of faith on the polish right. Like January 6th was a legitimate attempt to overthrow a rigged election. Is an article of faith amongst Maga. It's a litmus test. Are you with us? What do you believe? He thought that the conspiracy theory was complete nonsense and kept saying it was complete nonsense. And Putin and Medvedev then.
Medvedev was the president. Their response to Smolensk was not just to come to fly straight there and empathize with the Polish people, but then the Duma, the Russian parliament, finally, after decades and decades, admitted that the Soviet Union, not the Nazis, were responsible for the Katyn massacre. And so he had reason then Putin was taking a different stance towards Poland then than he is now. He had reason then to be somewhat hopeful that Putin might be sort of manageable and think that some kind of arrangement could be fixed.
But I think also as he got older, he softened his edges on a lot of issues and saw Ukraine as potential potentially so explosive that having it as a buffer state would be one way of forestalling that. But he was still alive when Trump was first elected in the first Trump administration. What was he saying then? He had a Twitter account, which I think his family tried to sort of discourage after he'd had a stroke in 2014. He had some kind of little bit cryptic tweets about Trump, you know, not being well informed and you need to understand the world in order to master it.
Without naming him, it's really weird going through his tweets. You know, I went through papers from the 1920s and the 30s and the 40s, but his Twitter archive seems more weird and sort of ancient. It's a very. It doesn't sound like him. He's being cryptic. He wasn't cryptic. You're sure it was him who was. The Post thing. Yes, he was writing them. He was writing them. But David Ignatius, the Washington Post economist who knew Brzezinski very, very well, went to some Pentagon award that he was being given by Ashton Carter, who was Obama's last defense secretary.
And it was a few weeks after Trump had first been elected, and he just described this very, very sad thing where he was. He gave a speech and it was, well, we'd all better just buckle up. This is not what I was expecting. It was just. This is really in the last sort of. It was in the late evening of his life. And it was not a sort of cheerful response, let's put it that way. Okay. This is not a depressing book. It's a great. It's a great Pacey read.
So if you want to buy it, you can do so downstairs. I think there are one or two left, maybe. If not, you can order it or go to a bookstore. It is published on Tuesday. Ed, thank you for this and, yeah, good luck. Thank you very much. Thank you.
LEADERSHIP, POLITICS, GLOBAL, BIOGRAPHY, COLD WAR, DIPLOMACY, FINANCIAL TIMES
