The foreign policy titan who saw this moment coming

BBC News

28-05-2025

Ever since World War Two, the United States has boasted a storied bench of foreign policy titans – primarily men – who more or less managed to stay above partisan politics to focus on shaping the world order.
Think of people like Henry Kissinger. George Kennan. Robert McNamara. Jim Baker. Among them is Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish immigrant who worked his way up from escaping World War Two, to becoming the US National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter.
Brzezinski's life has as much history in it as just about anyone I can think of. His earliest memories were of living as a child in Germany and watching the Nazis rise to power. He spearheaded normalisation of US ties with China. He advised Jimmy Carter on how to handle the Iran Hostage Crisis. He was a key broker during the Camp David Accords. And he always believed the Soviet Union, the US's great foe, could be defeated, not just contained.
Near the end of his life, Brzezinski had a warning for his adopted country.
The Soviet Union was gone. The economy was strong. The US seemed invincible. But Brzezinski feared that a decline in US leadership was coming – and that it would be disastrous for both the US and the rest of the world.
Ed Luce is a journalist at the Financial Times and author of the new book, Zbig. We spoke about why Brzezinski was such a prophetic figure in US foreign policy – and what he would have made of the current state of the world.
It was a really eye-opening conversation; you can watch (or read) more of it below.
Below is an excerpt from our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Katty Kay: Why choose Zbigniew Brzezinski? Why, in this moment, write about that person?
Edward Luce: I was given tonnes of primary material, including the diaries he kept as national security adviser, where he would sort of speak paragraphs into his dictaphone every night, going home from the White House.
I think his life was mostly dominated by the Cold War. So, when the Cold War ended, at a time when everyone else, or most other people, were triumphalist about the victory of the West and particularly of America, Brzezinski began warning that the rot now, from within, was America's major challenge.
He accused Americans of hubris and of not understanding how quickly they could alienate Russia, Iran, China and fellow travellers. And that was quite prescient. And that's why the subtitle of my book is "America's great power prophet". He had a very good predictive record.
KK: Was there something you learned writing this book, Ed, that made you think that this man seems relevant in 2025?
EL: With a biography, you really need to get into the crucible where that character was made – and for Brzezinski, clearly it was interwar Poland, ending in this horrible conflagration where the Nazis and the Soviets divide the country and then raze it, essentially. In odd ways, it's not dissimilar to Henry Kissinger, whose Jewish extended family mostly died in the Holocaust and he coincidentally left Europe in the same year as Brzezinski: 1938.
I think in both cases, but in very different ways, this shaped how they viewed the world, but one very similar way – which is that civilisation is inherently fragile; it's inherently unstable. I think that is something that both men, although they disagreed on so much, agreed on about America. It's that America somehow sees itself as standing apart from history and is not subject to its tragic laws.
In 2025, with us living through what some people call the "revenge of geopolitics" that's going on around the world, it's very good for Americans to be reminded of the importance of understanding the value of what we have – and what we could be losing.
A little bit like good health: you only rate it when you lose it.
KK: As I went through the book, you keep coming across these issues around the world that America is still dealing with. There's Russia, there's the problems with Europe, there's the Middle East, of course the Iran hostage case, China – and it's the same issues, most of which have not been resolved.
I wonder if there's anything in Brzezinski that would look at where we are today and say: "Maybe we didn't get it right".
EL: I did a lot of interviews with Henry Kissinger for this book, and he said, "Look, I think what we don't understand so well in America is that history never stops. It goes on and on and on".
If you look at how they both dealt with China, bringing China more into the American camp and breaking it away from the Soviets in the '70s. This was a brilliant strategic chessboard move, but of course it also seeded the rise of China, which is now a problem that America is indefinitely going to have to grapple with. Another is the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: a perfectly sensible, although controversial, decision by Brzezinski to fund the Mujahideen rebellion against the Soviets. It helped contribute to the demise of the Soviet Union, but that then creates problems down the line of Islamism and worldwide terrorism.
History does go on and on. And it does require solutions for the short and medium term, but there is never a permanent solution to anything. I think that sort of grit and pessimism at the heart of these strategic thinkers is something that's quite valuable. It schools us to realise you have to deal with what's in front of you and if you aim to an unrealistic height, you're going to fall flat on your face.
KK: Are there any of those big strategic thinkers today?
EL: Look, I think America is full of the most extraordinary scholarship of all regions of the world. But you don't see any scholar who's able to become a scholar practitioner in the way that Brezenski or Kissinger or George Kennan were. It's not because they're not there, but I think the demand for them has decreased. Foreign policy has become much, much more political. It's become domestic politics. Politics doesn't stop at the water's edge, as people used to say.
KK: In his later years, Brzezinski felt that America lacked a kind of grand, overarching strategy. But you look at the Trump administration now and whatever you might say about the tactics and the implementation, Trump does have an overall grand vision for America, doesn't he?
EL: I think it's a grand series of impulses. I don't think it has a real strategy behind it. The core of the Trump vision is essentially that we live in a jungle and big predators are more powerful than small predators. Trump sees the Western Hemisphere as America's backyard – and therefore we can do what we like, even to Canada, even to friends. Ukraine is Russia's backyard. And Taiwan, I think by implication, is China's.
I don't think Brzezinski would have agreed – well, I know he disagreed with that. He would probably be looking to stoke Russian paranoia about China just to keep them a little bit suspicious of each other so that they don't unite.
Things like Russian fears that China wants the territory back that the czars seized from it in the 19th Century. The fact that Russia is probably going to be the biggest beneficiary of climate change and you'll see the Siberian tundra unfreezing and becoming agricultural. China has acute population pressures.
There's a lot of material to play with there, if you want to be Machiavellian and to pry Russia and China apart. I think he – and probably Kissinger, too – would be looking at that kind of strategy.
I think Trump's policies are pushing Russia and China closer together which, again, just in terms of chessboard logic, it's not smart to unite your enemies. Try and keep them divided. Try and stoke mutual suspicion.
--