ZBIG

Comprehensive biography of the influential Sovietologist and international affairs doyen.

Financial Times columnist Luce opens his sprawling—and a touch too long—narrative in Montreal, where Brzezinski (his name “pronounced ‘ZbigNieff BreshinSki,’” Jimmy Carter told his staff) was living while his father served as Poland’s consul general. Brzezinski proved early on an implacable enemy of the Soviet Union after Stalin’s bargain with Hitler to carve up his native land. Attaining American citizenship in 1958, he became an accomplished Sovietologist, one of the few who could speak Russian and Polish and, with his Czech-speaking wife, feel at home in much of Eastern Europe. He fell into the same scholarly orbit as Henry Kissinger at Harvard, an association that was rarely happy: Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later confided in his journal that Kissinger detested Brzezinski, as did Averill Harriman, who called him a “fool” and a “menace,” in part because of Brzezinski’s early Cold War sword rattling. Indeed, Brzezinski was not much liked anywhere: Among other things, many viewed him as antisemitic simply because he was from Poland, “which had had a nasty pattern of turning on its ancient Jewish communities when scapegoats were needed.” There was no basis to that charge, Luce counters, and Brzezinski, while never quite softening his anti-Soviet views, was instrumental in arms-reduction talks as national security adviser to Carter. Still, his counsel remained hawkish overall; advocating that the U.S. sponsor a military coup to overthrow the Shah of Iran to stymie the Islamicist revolution and, at least in some sense, luring the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan, he insisted that “world politics is not a kindergarten.” Even so, toward the end of his life, Brzezinski was a foe of the U.S. war in Iraq and a prescient champion of newly independent Ukraine and endorsed Barack Obama early on.

A solid work of political and diplomatic history, with much insight into modern geopolitics.