Latest news with #Brzezinski
Irish Times
01-06-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
‘There's a menace, an edge to life in America that wasn't there before. And the possibility of dark stuff'
Night after night on the drive from the White House to the family home in McLean, across the Potomac in Virginia, Zbigniew Brzezinski would recall the events of the day into a recorder as he watched the city slip by from the rear window. He couldn't have known it then, but he was speaking to an unlikely future lunch companion and a collaboration he would not live to see. Edward Luce, now the Financial Times' US national editor and columnist, was a schoolboy in England when Brzezinski was at the peak of his influence as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter during the crowded, significant four years between 1977 and 1981 of international crisis and diplomacy. 'I got a radio for Christmas in 1979,' recalls Luce when we meet. 'And I remember running into my parents' bedroom on Boxing Day and telling them the Russians invaded Afghanistan. I had a pretty bad impression then of Brzezinski as an ultra-hawk, which was not a rounded impression of him. I knew of him, but not in the way people knew about Kissinger. I mean, John Cleese was referencing Kissinger in Fawlty Towers.' Brzezinski was a counterweight to Henry Kissinger in the fraught cold war decades: never as famous, not as quotable, but just as consequential. He and Kissinger passed through Ellis Island within six weeks of one another, as adolescents, in 1938. It was the beginning of what Luce describes as a 'frenemyship', with a cinematic arc covering seven decades. The Brzezinski family gave Luce the transcriptions of those recordings when their father died, in 2017, aged 89. To the end, Brzezinski, a precocious Polish emigrant who arrived in Washington via Harvard to become the pre-eminent Sovietologist of the era, remained a fiercely independent thinker – and a Washington outsider. READ MORE Edward Luce. Photograph: Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick McMullan via Getty Fortunately for Luce, he was an immaculate keeper of records. Part of him always mourned his Warsaw childhood, and he developed an intense friendship with Pope John Paul II. Brzezinski's children also gave Luce full access to their father's letters and papers and their blessing to write an unauthorised biography. Luce was hooked, and understood that as well as immersing himself in contemporary histories, he was, as he writes, in 'a race against the actuarial clock' with Madeleine Albright and president Carter among the 100-odd interviewees he sat with in the twilight of their lives. 'It is obsessional,' says Luce, hopping on to the couch in his livingroom on a dazzling Saturday afternoon. Luce is a sprightly 56, quick to find humour and slightly bleary from a Friday evening book-publishing party held in his honour. His wife, Niamh King, who is Irish and director of the Aspen Strategy Group, says the most dedicated guests drifted back here, to their home in Georgetown, to prolong the night. She makes coffee and sets down a plate of Cadbury's Fingers, a treat she correctly predicts an Irish guest will appreciate – and shares the name of the store that stocks them. In the acknowledgments, Luce includes an exchange that became an in-joke during his four years spent on the book: at the dinner table, Niamh asks him to pass the salt. 'SALT 1 or SALT 2?″ comes the absent-minded reply. The term – referencing the strategic arms limitations talks – is a useful metaphor for the vanished world of high geostrategy to which Luce returned. 'It is apocryphal,' he says of the dinner table story. 'But what does Trump call it? Truthful hyperbole. Yeah, it is obsessional. Any other reading is an opportunity lost. It is a vast subject covering about 90 years. You need to include the rivals to Brzezinski and what their Sovietology was: you can't understand him without understanding his context. But it is inexhaustible. You either write a biography properly or not at all. And I felt it was not irrelevant to what happens today.' Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski arrives to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2007. Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters The subtitle to Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski is America's Cold War Prophet. Brzezinski's steadfast view- that the Soviet Union would collapse under the weight of its distinct internal nationalities – was borne out. But his reputation was welded to that of Jimmy Carter. The men could hardly have been more different – the laconic southern Baptist and the bright, abrasive son of Polish aristocrats. They shared an intellectual hunger, a thriftiness that one reviewer described as 'comical tightfistedness' and, perhaps, too, an aloofness that did not go down well in Washington. 'That was a big mistake,' says Luce of the Carters' decision to keep their distance from Washington society events. 'Carter thought the people he was shunning were snobs – but they thought he was being snobbish by spurning them. And there was a sort of preachiness about Carter that really rubbed them up the wrong way. Carter was the first real modern outsider president. The way to fix that was to dive in and immerse yourself. There was a bit of Obama there, too – an impression of being supercilious and above-you-people. Which is not good politics.' After losing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, Carter found himself, as Luce writes, 'an orphan of history, disavowed by his party'. But Brzezinski also found himself in the wilderness through the 1980s. 'Yeah. He was really cast out. And he did a lot to get himself cast out. He was extremely rude to people. And his memoirs were ill-advised. He really did lionise himself and take down everybody else – except for Carter,' says Luce, laughing. 'And it was strange – he was actually very generous intellectually with people he thought were worth it. He usually attacked arguments, not people. But that memoir did him an enormous amount of damage. And he was a pariah amongst Democrats for years. The fall of the Soviet Union redeemed him. He was a superstar again. But he was a very restless soul. He was at his best having battles. So he didn't bask in any glory. In the 1990s he got very involved in Bosnia, and that is where Clinton used him. He was very pro-Nato. He really saw through Putin post-9/11 and was a really incisive critic of what was the establishment view. He was not part of the establishment – even in his grandest, most vindicated autumn years, he never was. And I think that is a good thing.' By then, Luce had moved from India, where he was a correspondent with the Financial Times, to Washington, where his weekly columns are frequently scathing of the current administration. He occasionally met Brzezinski for lunch in various haunts and came to like the senior man, who was generous with what Luce calls a 'deep fund of historical memory'. [ No limits? Why the United States could be on the verge of a constitutional crisis Opens in new window ] So Luce has had a busy May, double-jobbing as both guest at the recent FT Spring Festival, where he spoke with the newspaper's editor, Roula Khalaf, about his biography, before turning public interviewer to Steve Bannon. That event closed the show in front of a packed auditorium. The crowd was giddy: evening drinks loomed and Bannon excels at provocation, drawing murmurs of polite outrage when he cheerfully declared the recent papal conclave rigged and predicted that Trump would run for – and win – a third term (the constitutional limit is two terms). Luce has lived in the US for two decades and has travelled enough of the country to understand the reasons why the Maga faithful have come to see Trump as a messianic figure. 'Yes, I can. And as I said to Bannon: I agree with half of what you are saying. The diagnosis is good. But ... habeas corpus being suspended does not follow 'this is a plutocracy'. He is correct. It is a plutocracy. And the Left is too much a part of it. They are the cognitive and managerial elites who don't want to upset their part in the firmament. And until they get fire in their belly – and it has to be populist – then Trump or Trump-like figures are going to win or have a really good chance, assuming the system is free and fair next time. But Bannon understands that people hate the establishment in America and have pretty good reason to. And with Trump, it is not that people believe what he says. It is that him lying to them sounds more authentic and truthful than the Democrat blow-dried, focus group-tested, risk-averse talking points that so many of them campaign on.' Recently, Luce and Niamh found themselves chatting about the sense of unease they both detect in Washington now. His first experience of the city was as a speechwriter for Larry Summers, who was an avid FT reader, in the carefree 1990s. 'Summers and Greenspan and Rubin and these people – what were they called? 'Masters of the Universe' by Time magazine. When I came back here, the Pentagon was the department, not the treasury. It was a fortress mentality, and a very different town to the one I left. Less pleasant. But nothing like today. Trump has been the real change. Ten years ago, when your plane touched down in Dulles or DCA [Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport], you were coming home. Because we had been here for so long. And you would relax. Now I just tense up wherever I am coming in from. There is a menace, an edge to life. Not just in Washington, but in America, that just wasn't there before. And the possibility of dark stuff. I guess what schoolkids must feel when they do shooting drills. You are suddenly aware of something.' If Kamala Harris won ... in some ways it would have been darker than what we are going through now. I think the country would have broken down For the first time, he finds his 'heart skips a beat' going through emigration as a green-card holder. It is just six months into the new administration. It is impossible to predict the state of the nation in 2028. And there are no heavyweight strategic thinkers of Brzezinski's ilk to be found in government in Washington any more. Luce's biography, which has received uniformly dazzling notices, is a salute to a vanished age of intellectual and moral rigour. Luce's daughter Mimi, in a welter of school exam study, pops in to say hello. Luce describes his family background as 'privileged, quite posh ... not moneyed'. His father, Baron Richard Luce, was lord chamberlain to Queen Elizabeth. During the royal funeral, Ed and his father were guests on the popular MSNBC show Morning Joe, co-hosted by Joe Scarborough and Brzezinski's daughter, Mika: the hosts are a couple. Luce walks across to the bookcase and finds a photo-still of the television appearance. He had advised his father about video-link decorum. 'Just: please don't put the iPad up your nose.' His father paid no heed and then delighted in telling the hosts that Ed had been expelled from school in his younger days. 'It was excruciating,' says Luce cheerfully. 'But it was good television.' Then US vice-president Kamala Harris shakes hands with her presidential rival Donald Trump during a debate last September. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty London will always be home, even if Britain, post-Brexit, feels 'very Lilliputian and kind of grey'. But still, there were times last year, with the political atmosphere truly poisonous and the election forecasts see-sawing between Trump and Kamala Harris, that the family 'were seriously considering, if Kamala Harris won, we could actually move to London'. 'In practice, it would have been the Weimar Republic on steroids,' he explains. 'In some ways it would have been darker than what we are going through now. I think the country would have broken down. So, the Trump victory was the least-bad outcome in terms of social stability and the worst in governance. There would have been violence.' Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Cold War Prophet is published by Simon & Schuster in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK. Ed Luce will appear at the Dalkey Book Festival on Friday and Saturday, June 13th and 14th
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Coldest Cold Warrior
The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski,America's Great Power Prophetby Edward LuceAvid Reader, 560 pp., $29 LAST WEEK, EDWARD LUCE JOINED ME on Shield of the Republic, the podcast I cohost with Eliot Cohen, to discuss his compulsively readable biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor and longtime scholar of the Soviet Union and its relations with its East European satellites during the Cold War. Although there have been a handful of other books on Brzezinski's intellectual evolution and aspects of his public life, this is the first biography based on access to his personal papers (including his private diary) that brings together his public and private life in one volume. As we discussed on the podcast, it's a puzzle that there have been so many biographies of Brzezinski's predecessor as national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, but so few of Brzezinski. There are probably several explanations for this. Kissinger served eight years in office, including more than two years during which he was concurrently secretary of state in the Nixon-Ford administrations. By contrast, Carter's policy failures ended up limiting him to one term and casting a loser's pall on his administration's reputation. The two men's personalities may have also had something to do with it. Kissinger was more accessible, with a finely honed self-deprecating sense of humor, and he assiduously wooed the press. Brzezinski was witty, but more pointed and razor-sharp. His wit was largely aimed at others, and he could be extremely prickly with members of the fourth estate. One anecdote Luce recounts—thoroughly footnoted—illustrates how quick Brzezinski could be to inconvenience or annoy others if he perceived a rationale to doing so: At 3:00 a.m. on March 5, 1953, Merle Fainsod, Harvard University's leading Sovietologist, awoke irritably to a telephone call from his twenty-four-year-old research assistant. The excited Zbigniew Brzezinski was calling to let him know that the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, had died. Fainsod said that Stalin would 'be just as dead in the morning' and hung up. The dictator passed away later that day. Brzezinski justified his intrusion by saying that the professor would want to be prepared for journalists to ring him at dawn for comments on Stalin's death. Brzezinski's rude awakening offers an inimitable glimpse of how his mind worked: since Fainsod's sleep would in any case be interrupted, Brzezinski would save him the trouble by getting in first. Besides, what Cold War scholar would not want to know as soon as possible about the demise of one of history's greatest monsters? Keep up with all our coverage of politics, policy, books, culture, and ideas—join Bulwark+ today: After leaving government service in 1977, Kissinger continued to seek high office and courted senior officials in successive administrations, both Democratic and Republican. Brzezinski was more focused on public debate on national security policy, and his intellectual style, which consisted largely of bludgeoning his opponents in debate, won him more enemies than friends. As Luce recounts, for Brzezinski 'the visceral and the intellectual . . . were never far apart.' While Kissinger was supremely gifted in dealing out flattery, Zbig treated fools (and some who were not so foolish) with disdain. Both men, émigrés from war-torn Europe who never lost their foreign accents, were fired by relentless ambition for power and prodigious skill in networking, including scoring patronage by the Rockefeller family (Nelson in Kissinger's case and David in Brzezinski's). As a result, perhaps improbably, they both ended up operating at the highest levels of government. Since both received their graduate educations at Harvard (and Kissinger his undergraduate degree as well) and taught there in the 1950s, it was probably inevitable that myths would grow up about their rivalry. Kissinger received tenure and Brzezinski didn't, and therein, so the story goes, lay the seeds of lifelong jealousy and competition. Luce provides a valuable corrective to this tall tale. Although it is true that Brzezinski was initially denied tenure at Harvard, Kissinger actually supported him for the professorship, and Brzezinski subsequently turned down no fewer than three opportunities to return to Harvard. The two men remained in friendly contact (more or less) for the rest of their lives, and as Luce recounts, there is real pathos in Kissinger's heartfelt condolence message to Brzezinski's family when the slightly younger Brzezinski predeceased him in 2017. That said, their 'friendship' retained more than small traces of rivalry as both sought to influence national security policy, one for mostly Republican presidents and the other for Democrats (although, as hard it is to imagine in these highly polarized times, both managed to provide advice across party lines during their long post-government careers). Kissinger's years as national security advisor were marked by high drama, including the opening to China, major arms control agreements reached (SALT I and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty), vivid summits in Beijing and Moscow, and the tumultuous negotiations and tragic exit from the Vietnam war that Nixon and Kissinger inherited from their predecessors. Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Vietnam peace talks, although the catastrophic collapse of South Vietnam in the aftermath of U.S. withdrawal cast a shadow on that achievement. The Carter years were a bit more prosaic. The administration completed the establishment of formal relations with the People's Republic of China begun by Nixon and Kissinger, and the Camp David accords (for which Carter deserves enormous credit—although the catalyst for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's trip to Jerusalem was Carter's and Brzezinski's wrongheaded determination to bring the USSR back into the Middle East by convening a multilateral peace conference in Geneva). The positive achievements, however, were obscured by the larger failures. The last year of Carter's term, especially, was an almost Dickensian study in contrasts in which Brzezinski played a large part. Most people overlooked the investment in technologies like stealth and precision targeting that started a revolution in warfare (largely because they were secret). Much more visible were the breakdown of arms control negotiations in response to Soviet adventurism in the Third World culminating in the invasion of Afghanistan, as well as the collapse of the Shah's regime in Iran and the subsequent hostage crisis. Share FOR ALL THAT, HOWEVER, I suspect that readers of Luce's biography will come away thinking that Brzezinski was, perhaps, a more consequential figure in the history of American national security that the admittedly more seductive personage of Kissinger. For one thing, he was more prescient, in big ways and small. Luce recounts: In the midst of [the 1976 Entebbe hostage crisis], Brzezinski was invited to dinner at the home of Shimon Peres, Israel's defense minister. Peres kept having to leave the room to take calls. Somewhat flippantly, Brzezinski quipped to Peres that Israeli commandoes should storm the airport and free the hostages. Peres gave Brzezinski an enigmatic stare and went silent. The following day it became obvious why he had kept his counsel: Israeli forces raided the airport in one of the most daring rescue operations in modern history. On many of the big questions, as well, Brzezinski saw things more clearly, or at least more creatively, than Kissinger. Kissinger accepted that the Cold War was a long twilight struggle and that, in a world of nuclear parity with the USSR and limited support in Congress for spending on national defense, it was his job to manage American decline (as he allegedly said to Adm. Elmo Zumwalt). Brzezinski, on the other hand, was more upbeat about American prospects, more fixated on Soviet weaknesses, particularly nationalism in Eastern Europe and the nationalities problem in the USSR. The comprehensive net assessment of U.S. and Soviet strengths and weaknesses that Brzezinski (working closely with Samuel Huntington and Andrew Marshall) conducted at the outset of Carter's term found that only in the area of military power, particularly the nuclear balance, did the Soviet Union outstrip the United States. The policy shifts that Brzezinski helped initiate—the MX missile, the dual-track decision in NATO (modernizing America's arsenal of theater nuclear weapons in Europe while also negotiating more arms control agreements), counterforce nuclear targeting, emphasis on improvements in command and control of nuclear weapons and continuity of government, covert action to undermine the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and Poland, increases in the topline spending on defense in the last two years of Carter's administration, and the inclusion of strategic defense in assessments of the nuclear balance—set the stage for the Reagan Revolution that was to come as the result of the 1980 election and, in no small measure, contributed to the overall collapse of Soviet power in 1991. Join now BRZEZINSKI'S JUDGMENT, HOWEVER, was far from flawless. Luce largely acquits Brzezinski of the charge of antisemitism that dogged him throughout the last forty years of his career, and recounts the fascinating relationship that Brzezinski enjoyed with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin: Although Begin was Israel's most hawkish leader, he and Brzezinski hit it off. Indeed, their shared hawkishness may even have helped. . . . There was something about Begin's inveterate nationalism that struck a romantic chord in Brzezinski. That both men had been born in Poland—although raised in very different milieus—helped. They could switch easily from English to Polish. Their shared compendious knowledge of the Polish Home Army's wartime resistance and the Warsaw Uprising gave them plenty to talk about. Begin had been imprisoned for part of the war by Stalin's NKVD, which meant that they also shared an allergy to communism. Their discussion ranged to Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the Jewish Polish father of revisionist Zionism, who had been Begin's mentor. Brzezinski's assessments of Middle East events (about which he knew far less than Europe or even Asia, where he had spent considerable time) were sometimes catastrophically off. The most prominent examples were Iran during the crisis over the future of the Shah's regime and, at various points, Israel. Perhaps Brzezinski's his greatest lapse, and one which rekindled charges of antisemitism, was his endorsement of The Israel Lobby, the scurrilous book by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer on the supposedly determinative role of shadowy, unpatriotic, scheming forces in setting U.S. Middle East policy. Share The Bulwark LUCE'S VALUABLE VOLUME will have to serve as just a foundational effort to give Zbig his due. Although it is grounded in Brzezinski's personal papers, it only scratches the surface of the broader array of primary sources (both published and unpublished) that have become available in the last few years—not to mention a growing secondary literature on many of the topics that Luce covers in this book. The official Defense Department history of Harold Brown's tenure as Secretary of Defense and the rich documentation in the State Department's series Foreign Relations of the United States as well as the declassified documents available at the National Security Archive could all have been used to great advantage in fleshing out some of the details in episodes that Luce covers. Recent important secondary accounts of the Iran crises like Ray Takeyh's The Last Shah and Mark Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah would have enriched his account of that climactic experience of the Carter presidency. Finally, a cursory citation of William Inboden's Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink would have prevented an ill-advised overreliance on sketchy sources arguing that Reagan and his campaign minions were responsible for colluding with Iran to hold the hostages until after the election of 1980. Although Brzezinski became more pessimistic about the United States and its prospects, particularly in his last few years, close study of his broader optimism about America and his indefatigable pursuit of American advantage in strategic competition with the USSR as his life's work will yield valuable lessons for today's even more complicated era of great power competition. Send this review on to a friend who cares about foreign policy or who lived through the Carter administration: Share
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
FLASHBACK: MSNBC's Joe Scarborough mocks Hur report detailing Biden's mental decline as 'random s---'
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough criticized then-Special Counsel Robert Hur on his program in 2024 for his controversial report, parts of which were highly covered by the media and raised concerns about former President Biden's mental capabilities. "I wonder what pasture he will wonder off into," Scarborough said on his program at the time in a clip that has resurfaced on social media, beginning his attack on Hur for his report, showed the president struggling with key memories, including when his son Beau died, when he left the vice presidency, and why he was in possession of classified documents he shouldn't have had. "You know, with Joe Biden, I noticed, he didn't really tie his tie well," Scarborough said, mocking the details that Hur gave in his original report. "The tie knot suggested that maybe [Biden] has arthritis in his left thumb." Biden Struggles With Words, Key Memories In Leaked Audio From Special Counsel Hur Interview "Where are you going with this?" Brzezinski asked Scarborough, her husband and co-host. "I'm just saying this guy says such random s---!" Scarborough said, demanding that Hur apologize for his report. Read On The Fox News App "Does he hope he gets a judgeship? I think he does. I think he hopes he gets a judgeship if Donald Trump gets elected again because he's trying out, because he humiliated himself with that display." Biden Interview Audio Reveals Who Brought Up Beau's Death — And It Wasn't Hur Hur's pivotal release of his interview with Biden has again resurfaced in national news media, with audio leaked to Axios of the original interview. The audio was leaked after more than a year of congressional lawmakers demanding its release amid questions about the former president's memory lapses and mental acuity. The transcript of Biden's interview with Hur was released last year, and confirmed the president's frequent memory lapses. When asked by Hur about where he kept papers he was actively working on around 2017 and 2018, Biden said that Beau Biden was either "deployed or is dying" at that time. Beau died in 2015. At one point, Biden said to himself "When did Beau die?" and a lawyer answered that it was 2015. Fox News' Brie Stimson and Brooke Singman contributed to this article source: FLASHBACK: MSNBC's Joe Scarborough mocks Hur report detailing Biden's mental decline as 'random s---'
Politico
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Politico
Jimmy Carter's Art of the Deal
Early one morning in spring 1978, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's sharp-elbowed national security adviser, walked into the Oval Office to find the U.S. president pensively spinning a vast globe. He was trying to figure out the best historical site to hold a make-or-break Middle East peace summit with Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat. To the surprise of many of Carter's advisers (though not Brzezinski, nor his secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, who knew their president too well), Carter was willing to stake his presidency on such a gamble. He had already taken a huge political risk over the preceding year hammering out a deal with Panama to give it sovereignty over the U.S.-built and owned Panama Canal — a move that provoked outrage on the Republican right. In spite of the steep odds against Carter securing the necessary two-thirds Senate vote for ratification, he somehow managed to get it through. Weeks after his Panama victory, Carter was now threatening to cause a whole new wave of ulcers among his staff on an even bigger gamble. The goal of Middle East peace had been a core part of Carter's 1976 campaign — as had the promise of Palestinian self-determination. Brzezinski had co-authored a controversial 1975 Brookings paper that recommended the outlines of such a settlement that would include Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza. Though the two men were radically different — Carter, a peanut farmer and former one-term governor of Georgia, Brzezinski a Polish-born Sovietologist with a Machiavellian streak and an acute rivalry with Henry Kissinger — they saw eye-to-eye on the Israel-Arab dispute. But they had different reasons. To Carter, who was a regular Sunday school preacher even during the early parts of his presidency, this was his chance at curing the deep enmity besetting the Biblical Holy Lands. To Brzezinski, such a deal would be key to reducing the Soviet Union's Cold War influence over large parts of the Arab world. The first piece of any Israeli-Arab deal would have to include Egypt's recognition of Israel, which would remove the region's largest Arab military force as a threat to Israel. To convince Egypt's Sadat, Palestinian autonomy would have to be included. Ultimately, of course, Carter chose Camp David, and what followed was a master class in presidential deal-making of the most direct kind. Brzezinski and his colleagues often complained that Carter read too much. One of the president's internal nicknames was 'grammarian-in-chief.' But by the end of the improbably successful 13-day Camp David peace talks that September, they realized that Carter's obsessive reading in this case had been indispensable. His knowledge of every topographical quirk, and geographic line, in the disputed Sinai desert, was critical to the marathon process that resulted in the first ever Arab recognition of Israel's right to exist. The Camp David accords didn't fix the Middle East, but they set the template for every attempt to forge a lasting peace ever since. As President Donald Trump eyes an equivalent deal — one that has eluded all of the presidents between America's 39th and its 47th (though President Bill Clinton came close to delivering a Palestinian homeland at Camp David in 2000) — he would do well to study how Carter pulled it off. All of the pieces are there for an agreement. In today's Middle East, Trump's key leverage over Israel would be Saudi Arabia-Israel normalization. To secure Riyadh's buy-in, a deal to end Iran's nuclear weapons program would also have to be included in any broader settlement. The Saudis will also insist, like Sadat, on a deal for the Palestinians. Carter was America's first president to take Palestinian aspirations seriously, and that was key to the Camp David deal-making. Going in, the odds were poor that he would get Sadat and Begin to agree on anything. Yet his mind was set to try; the only question was about the location. He and Brzezinski discussed Spain, Morocco, Portugal and Norway. Each had pros and cons. Casablanca had a particular resonance. After several days of back-and-forth, Carter finally settled on Camp David, the president's official Maryland retreat. That would give Americans full control over the logistics. Brzezinski and Vance both saw Carter's move as the right thing to do. If it failed, however, it could be politically suicidal. On this issue, at least, the two advisers were in agreement. Going for broke in the Middle East had not been their idea. But both admired Carter for his courage. Carter had already provoked pro-Israeli U.S. groups, including the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, over his decision to link arms sales to Egypt and Saudi Arabia with Israel's own military transfers. AIPAC's executive director, Morris Amitay, Brzezinski's bête noire, had pulled out all the stops to delink Israel's plane deliveries from those to its big Arab neighbors — fighter jets that Begin said could be turned against Israel. Neither Carter's nor Vance's protestations that they would be used for defensive purposes swayed the pro-Israel lobby. They knew that the real reason Carter was traducing his own strict rules on arms sales was Cold War-related. Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia needed to be kept inside the American camp. Since an alliance of conservative Republicans and Ted Kennedy liberals would doubtless defeat the Arab military transfers in a standalone vote, the White House lumped all the sales into one package. Carter was daring Congress to vote against sending arms to Israel. The campaign against the bill targeted Brzezinski as its main culprit. Brzezinski kept up his usual bravado but suffered inner turmoil over the torrent of accusations, often seeking counsel from Stuart Eizenstat, Carter's domestic policy director and the most senior Jewish American on his staff. He even wrote Eizenstat a long memo detailing his history of encounters in the Middle East. The invective hit a nadir in May when a Republican senator, Lowell Weicker, seemed to compare Brzezinski to Hitler. 'We know from history that time and time again, when national leaders ran into difficulties, they found it convenient to blame their problems on the Jews,' Weicker told the AIPAC conference in Washington. 'If there is a meaningful distinction between those historical proclivities, and the signals which Brzezinski is sending today, I don't know what it is. I can tell you if I were president, and I had a national security adviser who singled out American Jews as an impediment to my policies, I would have his resignation before sundown, and his reputation for breakfast.' This was the most scurrilous attack on Brzezinski to date. But its outlandishness was almost helpful. Weicker was widely viewed as having miscued. His remarks triggered revulsion from Jewish organizations and condemnatory editorials in The New York Times and Washington Post. Carter also went out of his way to say that Brzezinski was being unfairly targeted by 'special interests.' In reality, he was a useful decoy. Against that backdrop, Carter's ambitions for the Camp David talks were beyond extravagant. He would either achieve a sweeping deal or preside over a collapse. In preparation for the summit, he studied theories of negotiation, ordered in-house psychological profiles of Begin and Sadat and devoured histories of the Middle East conflict. For a change, Vance and Brzezinski's teams worked seamlessly, using the Virginia retreat of Averell Harriman, one of the grandest of post-war foreign policy WASPs, for preparatory sessions. Carter's plan was to lock the two leaders and their teams into his wooded retreat in Catoctin Mountain Park until he had brokered a deal or failed. He limited each delegation to principals plus a handful of aides and a few family members. Apart from one brief photo-op, the media were kept off-site. Outside communications were impossible except via the phones in the cabins, which both the Israelis and the Egyptians wrongly assumed were bugged. In that fashion, Carter maintained silence about the state of the talks for almost two weeks. The delegations totaled 44 people with another 80 or so support staff. They were all packed into the complex, sleeping on hastily assembled cots in rooms designed for one or two. Brzezinski shared a room with Carter chief-of-staff Hamilton Jordan. Brzezinski's daughter, Mika, 11 at the time, bunked with the president's daughter, Amy Carter. The girls spent the first few days of the summit swimming, biking and watching movies. To them it was a holiday camp. By contrast, to the recalcitrant Begin, the accommodation was 'concentration camp deluxe.' After several days, everyone started complaining of cabin fever. Carter saw the Israeli and Egyptian delegations as mirror images of each other. Begin was by far the most obdurate and legally hairsplitting member of his team. Carter often turned to Moshe Dayan, the Israeli foreign minister, and Ezer Weizman, the defense minister, to find ways around their leader. They often obliged. At one fraught moment, Weizman and Dayan telephoned Ariel Sharon, Begin's tough agriculture minister, to get his support for dismantling Israeli settlements in the Sinai Desert. Sharon agreed to the move as long as it was put to the Knesset, Israel's parliament. Only then did Begin accede. Sadat's team, conversely, was filled with hawks. Sadat himself was poetic, emotional and serially impulsive, the opposite of Begin in terms of personality; frequently, however, his flexibility and willingness to be swayed by Carter's appeals to history alienated him from his own delegation in a way that worried the president. At 4:15 a.m. one morning, Carter woke Brzezinski on his cabin phone and asked him to come over. The president was paranoid about Sadat's security fearing that he could have been assassinated by one of his own aides. Carter had inadvertently disclosed to one of Sadat's most hawkish negotiators a big concession the Egyptian leader had made to him in a private meeting. At 10 o'clock the previous evening when Carter walked over to Sadat's cabin, he was told the Egyptian leader was asleep even though the lights were still on. Since Sadat was a famous night bird, he feared the worst. 'Zbig, I am very much concerned for Sadat's life,' said Carter, who had awakened with a terrible premonition. Brzezinski quickly tightened security and had all the comings and goings from Sadat's cabin monitored. During a post-dinner chat Brzezinski had one evening with Weizman and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Egypt's deputy foreign minister, the latter disclosed his view that Sadat should not sign the draft deal being hammered out. Its provisions for Palestinian autonomy were too vaguely worded and could easily be re-interpreted by Begin; Sadat would be putting himself at severe risk both in the Arab world and at home. His forebodings were prophetic; Sadat would later be assassinated amid the backlash. For the same reason, Boutros-Ghali's boss, Mohammed Ibrahim Kamel, resigned before the summit was over (though he agreed to keep it private until afterward). Kamel had been in place only a few months; his predecessor had quit in protest at Sadat's trip to Jerusalem. Most of the business with Sadat was conducted privately by Carter. After three days, Carter concluded that nothing would be achieved with the Israelis and Egyptians in one room. They were too far apart and an atmosphere of mistrust was pervasive. At their supposedly collective meals, the Egyptian and Israeli delegations sat at separate tables. The only exception was when Weizman shifted ostentatiously to the Egyptian table to prove a point. 'There was a lot of bantering, laughing, exchanges of anecdotes,' Brzezinski observed in his diary entry for that day. (Brzezinski's Tolstoyan-length White House diaries were shared with me by his family without strings attached.) 'Dayan sat at the other table sulking, obviously irritated by Weizman's little coup.' Begin ate kosher food prepared by the camp's Filipino cooks, alone in his cabin. Carter therefore switched from playing broker to taking charge of parallel bilateral talks. He himself drafted many of the outlined texts. Neither before nor since has a U.S. president involved himself in a negotiation so closely and over such a long period of time. Brzezinski's contemporaneous jottings during the Carter years were often critical of the president, although rarely scathing. Throughout the Camp David summit, however, his admiration of Carter's mastery of detail and refusal to give up is striking. 'His textual criticisms are as good as by any expert,' he thought. Carter's voracious reading appetite was in other contexts a handicap; at Camp David it was indispensable. One morning, Carter spent almost four hours alone with the Israeli and Egyptian legal experts reviewing the document he had drawn up. 'I am immensely impressed by the amount of determination and concentration on detail that the president has been displaying,' Brzezinski wrote. For the most part, Brzezinski and Vance worked well together, although the latter's tendency to agree with everything Carter said was an annoyance. Vance was too much of a yes-man for Brzezinski's taste. Carter's relationship with the other key figures varied greatly. To First Lady Rosalynn Carter, the president described Begin as a 'psycho.' The coldness between them was tangible. Toward Sadat, on the other hand, Carter had deep affection. At one U.S.-only gathering, Carter was elaborating on the vast differences between the two leaders. His praise for Sadat was emphatic. 'My chemistry with him is good,' he said. 'I feel with him the way I feel with Cy Vance.' Vance replied, 'Yes, because Cy accommodates you the way Sadat does, isn't that right?' Everyone laughed. Pointing at Brzezinski, Carter added, 'Yes and you're just like Begin.' Brzezinski took that as a compliment. 'I think this remark was in some respects quite true,' he noted. When Carter could no longer face talking to Begin, he sent Vance. But he insisted that Brzezinski accompany the secretary of State to ensure a tough line was upheld. Brzezinski was the chief Begin handler, helped by their shared Polish background and love of chess. One afternoon, he challenged Begin to a game on his cabin porch. Begin grumbled that he had not played since he was interrupted in the middle of a game in 1940 when he was arrested by the Soviet NKVD. During his first encounter with Brzezinski, Mrs. Begin inconveniently turned up and blurted out, 'Menachem just loves to play chess!' Brzezinski lost the first game after he gambled his queen too soon. In the second he took a page from Begin's playbook and consolidated his defense first. He equalized. Over the following days, they played twice more, ending at two games apiece. At one tense stage of the talks, Begin asked Brzezinski to accompany him on a walk. He said he had always defended Brzezinski from unfair attacks in the Israeli and U.S. media. He therefore felt wounded to hear that Brzezinski was referring to the Israeli West Bank settlements as 'a form of colonialism.' He also heard that Carter had been using the same vocabulary. Begin described the idea that the settlements could be dismantled as 'fantasmorphic [sic].' If Begin could not be moved on the Israeli settlements, the whole endeavor would come to naught. Sadat's readiness to risk being the first Arab leader to recognize Israel was predicated on Begin's willingness to agree to eventual Palestinian self-determination, even if the timeline stretched to several years. Though the term 'two-state solution' was never used, that was Carter and Sadat's implicit goal. Sadat made it clear that the first part of the deal, in which Israel would gradually withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for Egypt's diplomatic recognition, had to be linked to an agreed-upon mechanism that would result in a Palestinian homeland. In spite of Carter's best efforts and various runarounds via his Israeli colleagues, Begin would not budge. He and Carter spent hours arguing about UN Resolution 242, which stated the 'inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.' Carter took the mainstream view that the language applied to the West Bank, which Israel had occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War. Begin insisted that the UN wording should not apply to the territories of what he called Judea and Samaria. Carter privately began to question the Israeli leader's sanity. Unbeknownst to him, Sadat had already decided to quit the negotiations. On day 11, Vance rushed in ashen-faced with the news that Sadat had ordered a chopper to take him to Dulles International Airport. The Egyptians were packed and ready to go. It was the second time Sadat had decided to bolt; on the first, Carter had physically blocked him from leaving the room. This time, Carter had to think of something more drastic; he threatened to downgrade relations with Egypt, which would risk pushing the country back into the Soviet orbit. Their friendship, and possibly even Carter's presidency, would come to an end if Sadat quit. 'I was dead serious and he knew it,' Carter wrote in his memoirs. Sadat wanted to know how Carter would ensure that Israel would commit itself to genuine substance on Palestinian autonomy, including language on East Jerusalem's sovereign status. Carter improvised a novel pledge; he told Sadat that if any part of the deal was abrogated, the whole package would unravel — an all-or-nothing promise to stop Israel from backsliding that he vowed he would publicize were it to happen. That pledge was enough for Sadat. After a lengthy pause, he promised to stick with Carter to the end. It is hard to imagine the two Middle Eastern leaders enduring 24 hours of negotiation with each other in Carter's absence. The final documents were a master class in linguistic sleight of hand. The Egypt-Israel part of the deal was relatively straightforward since both leaders wanted it. Carter nevertheless had to sweeten the pot by offering Sadat a large consignment of wheat and corn; with Begin, he agreed that the United States would finance two new airstrips inside Israel in exchange for Israel's giving up the two it had built in the Sinai. Carter's jujitsu lay in the second part of the deal. The wording on Palestinian autonomy was so imprecise that it would be child's play for a legal hairsplitter such as Begin to reinterpret. The package nearly came undone at the last minute when Begin objected to the provision on Jerusalem that had been part of Sadat's price for not quitting. Carter rushed over to Begin's cabin with pictures of himself for each of the Israeli leader's grandchildren. On each he had written, 'With love and best wishes.' To Carter's concealed delight, his gesture triggered deep emotion in Begin. The Israeli leader's eyes filled with tears as he talked of each of his grandchildren, one by one. He waved through the next draft of the Jerusalem side letter, which was only slightly more anodyne than the one he had so adamantly rejected. Such are the idiosyncrasies that can bridge the gap between failure and success. When it became clear the deal was done, Carter sent Brzezinski back to Washington ahead of the others to brief the media. The final deal had two parts. The first was Israel-Egypt normalization. The second, which was Sadat's precondition for the first, was to start a longer process that would result in an autonomous Palestinian entity, though not a fully independent state. Most of the last-minute hitches and technicalities were handled by Vance and Carter. Though he had ably played the role of lieutenant, Brzezinski was a strategic thinker, much happier sketching out grander themes than haggling over legal terminology. The details came more naturally to Vance the lawyer and Carter the engineer. At about 5:30 p.m. on Monday, September 18, Vance told Carter, 'I think you have it.' Carter reclined in his chair with a wistful smile. 'No one spoke up, no one cheered, there was a sense of genuine admiration for what Carter had achieved,' Brzezinski wrote. At that moment a great storm hit Camp David. Flashes of lightning and thunderclaps added to the sense that history was being made. Once the winds abated, Brzezinski was the one who unveiled the deal to the world. He took a chopper to the White House and then briefed the media. Only then did he realize what a coup Carter had pulled off. Having been sealed off from the outside world for so long, he had forgotten that almost no one had a clue about what had been going on. 'There was an audible gasp when I announced the conditions of the Egyptian-Israeli agreement,' Brzezinski wrote later. 'The sense of excitement mounted steadily as the briefing went on.' What followed were essentially parallel movies. In the first movie, Washington, both houses of Congress and the world's media feted Carter as a master negotiator. Blessed are the peacemakers, Carter said, pointing at Begin and Sadat to bipartisan whoops and applause. Brzezinski's wife, Muska, had joined Rosalynn Carter and Gay Vance next to them in the congressional gallery. In the other movie, meanwhile, Begin was celebrating only the Egypt-Israel portion of the deal. He put his own stamp on a clause in which Israel promised that no new Israeli settlements would be built in the West Bank and Gaza Strip 'during the negotiations.' Carter and everyone else had taken that pledge to cover the upcoming five years of talks on Palestinian autonomy. But Begin declared that the freeze would hold only for the three months of negotiations needed to wrap up the final details of the Egypt-Israel treaty. His switch was a blow to Carter and especially to Sadat. It was an act of bad faith that Carter never forgave. A few weeks later, Sadat and Begin won a joint Nobel Peace Prize. 'Sadat deserved it,' wrote Carter. 'Begin did not.' Dayan and Weizman both expressed embarrassment to Carter and Brzezinski about Begin's actions. For the time being, however, all bitterness was set aside. At a celebratory cocktail party at Vice President Walter Mondale's official residence, Brzezinski was the toast of the American Jewish community. Though his role had been secondary, he took undisguised pleasure in his newfound popularity. Amitay, the smiling AIPAC leader, told Brzezinski that if Begin and Sadat could shake hands, they surely could, too. Brzezinski laughed, and they made peace. The following day, the New York Times' Washington bureau chief Scotty Reston called Brzezinski to confirm a story going around town that Sadat had been packed and ready to go and had been dissuaded from leaving by secret promises from Carter. Having no idea what Carter had promised to Sadat, Brzezinski told Reston he had to hang up as the president was calling. Carter then called him over to his office and related the details of his conversation with Sadat. He had told only Rosalynn and Vance about its content. Brzezinski was moved by Sadat's readiness to place his trust in Carter. 'You know the implication of this is that you have to be very steadfast on the settlements,' he told Carter. The president replied, 'I hadn't thought of that but that is true.' Three years later, Sadat was assassinated. Tragically, Carter's inability to enforce part two of Camp David fed into his brutal demise.
The Guardian
04-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Zbig: a bracing life of Carter's abrasive national security adviser
Double-digit inflation, high unemployment and the Iranian hostage crisis left Jimmy Carter a one-term president. Still, his watch was consequential. The US and China normalized relations, Egypt and Israel made peace and Russia invaded Afghanistan. Beyond that, the US returned the Panama canal and in Iran the shah fell to the Islamic revolution. After 444 days in captivity, 53 American hostages were freed moments after Ronald Reagan became president. Carter died in December, at 100. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who died in 2017 aged 89, was Carter's national security adviser. Like his boss, who came from rural Georgia, Brzezinski was a Washington outsider. But Brzezinski was also an émigré. The son of a Polish diplomat posted to Germany, he saw Hitler's rise, spent the war in Canada, then received his doctorate from Harvard. In 1968, as a Columbia professor, he witnessed campus unrest. His memories of the war years left him with little patience for make-believe revolutionaries. 'The protestors were spoiled brats from suburban homes risking nothing,' Edward Luce writes of Brzezinski's take, depicting a confrontation between Brzezinski and the 'rabble'. Discussion was heated, not violent. After 10 minutes, Brzezinski announced that he was returning to his office. 'I have to go back and plan some more genocides,' he told the protesters. Luce's Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet is a bracing tome even at 562 pages, a highly readable reminder of how US and global politics looked and felt before the cold war ended. Brzezinski is portrayed vividly, warts and all. Deeply and meticulously researched, Zbig lays out its subject's ascent, the tumult of the Carter years and what followed. Brzezinski's three children gave Luce 'unrestricted access to their father's extensive personal diaries, letters, and papers and his voluminous collection of documents housed at the Library of Congress'. The book's endnotes run more than 45 pages. British-born, Oxford-educated, Luce was a Guardian correspondent in Geneva before landing at the Financial Times, where he became a scathing critic of chumocracy and now, chief US commentator. In the late 1990s, he had a stint in government, as speechwriter to Lawrence Summers, US treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Nowadays, he is a sometime guest on MSNBC's Morning Joe, co-hosted by Brzezinski's daughter, Mika. As Luce shows, Zbigniew Brzezinski began his government career as a Democrat under Lyndon Johnson. But after Carter, Brzezinski became a political maverick. In 1988, he endorsed a Republican, George HW Bush. In 1992, alarmed by Bush's 'chicken Kiev speech' – in which the president warned against Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union shortly before it happened – he supported Clinton. In 2003, under George W Bush, Brzezinski vociferously opposed the US invasion of Iraq. In 2008, he backed Barack Obama over John McCain. Obama sought to distance himself from Brzezinski's less-than-welcoming stance on Israel. Brzezinski felt stung. On the other hand, Obama made Brzezinski's son Mark US ambassador to Sweden. Luce devotes particular attention to Brzezinski's extraordinary relationship with Pope John Paul II, who played a role in hastening the downfall of the Soviet Union. Brzezinski also enlisted the assistance of the pope in connection with the Iranian hostage crisis. John Paul turned to Brzezinski over the church's presence in China. A rapport developed, Brzezinski's command of the Polish language helping things along. In June 1980, Carter visited the Vatican. The night before the big meeting, Brzezinski and Col Les Denend, an aide, received a mass 'for the ages'. As they left, 'the pope grabbed Denend's arm and told Brzezinski, 'I should have a colonel as my assistant, not you. I am keeping him.'' The following day, 'Brzezinski and John Paul II spent seven hours in conversation,' Luce writes. 'They continued talking while [the Pope] gave Brzezinski and Denend a private tour of the Sistine Chapel.' Luce considers the depth of Brzezinski's Catholicism. A product of a Jesuit education, he appears to have developed doubts. On his death, his children scattered his ashes in a Virginia forest. He had left no instructions. Brzezinski's rivalry with Henry Kissinger marked the lives of both men. Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Germany, arrived in the US in September 1938. He served in the US military, unlike Brzezinski, then received tenure at Harvard, then became national security adviser and secretary of state, under Nixon and Ford. Nelson Rockefeller was Kissinger's first political patron. David Rockefeller, Nelson's brother, stood behind Brzezinski. Kissinger was pessimistic, viewing the US in a state of decline. He also believed the Soviets were a permanent fixture of the 'global landscape'. Brzezinski judged the Soviets to be sliding. As Luce puts it, he thought 'Washington's goal should be to hurry them along.' Luce also details and dishes on the historic Camp David peace talks between the US, Egypt and Israel. Carter's rapport with Anwar Sadat of Egypt was deep and warm. 'My chemistry with him is good,' Carter said. But Carter possessed no love for Menachem Begin of Israel, calling him a 'psycho' in comments to Rosalyn Carter, his wife. 'The coldness between [Begin and Carter] was tangible,' Luce writes. Carter reportedly told Brzezinski: 'Begin is devious to the point of lying.' And yet Carter drew parallels between Brzezinski and Begin, who was also born in Poland. 'You're just like Begin,' Carter is quoted as telling his national security adviser. 'Brzezinski took that as a compliment,' Luce writes, quoting a note from Brzezinski to self: 'I think this remark was in some respects quite true.' In old age, Brzezinski looked on as US politics, and foreign policy, took a worrying turn. 'A major country like the United States has to have a broadly conceived program for effective international action, influence and cooperation with others,' Brzezinski said in March 2017, discussing Donald Trump. 'I see nothing of the sort emerging from the administration and least of all from the president, who in my account has not given even one serious speech about the world and foreign affairs.' Brzezinski died two months later. Zbig is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
