Morning Joe - BONUS EPISODE: What today’s leaders can learn from Zbigniew Brzezinski

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Ed Luce joins Joe Scarborough to chat about his critically acclaimed biography “Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet”. Ed explains the strategic brilliance and character complexities of this foreign policy giant, as well as what America’s leaders can learn from Brzezinski’s legacy. 

Hey, welcome to Morning Joe. In the afternoon, we have with us Ed Lucey, he's a US national editor and columnist for the Financial Times, and also the author of Zbig, The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Profit. Ed, thank you so much for being with us. It's a delight, Joe. Ed, the reviews for Zbig have just been extraordinary, over the top. I must say though, I was only concerned about one review and that was my wife. From the first read through, she has been so moved by it and also so moved by the work that you did, the depth of the character showing not only

the extraordinary sides of her father, but also the challenging sides as well. Talk about your journey in writing this book and where it's brought you. Well, I have to say, I mean, Mika's response and that of her brothers, Mark and Ian, has been a particular delight because there were uncomfortable things in there. They did take a sort of gambling in handing these papers and diaries and things to me without any conditions, knowing that they would read it at the same time as everybody else.

And so, their response to this has been particularly gratifying because, you know, not everything in there about their dad was necessarily comfortable reading. And that kind of gets to your question. The endeavor of trying to get to the bottom of a character, the wellsprings of that person's life, to really explain their journey and who they became, that is a relentlessly intrusive

and inquiring and nosy business that a biographer undertakes, but it's also an absolutely gripping one. It's sort of like researching a historic detective novel, reconstructing Spig Brzezinski's life and the extraordinary sort of narrative of that life from interwar Europe, from Warsaw, where he was born in the 1920s to the first few months of Trump's first administration where when he died in May 2017, the nature of the story of his life history is quite gripping.

And Mika turned everything over to you. But there was one letter that her father wrote. It was a very harsh, tough letter to Mrs. Brzezinski, basically telling her, you know, fix your head. Get it off. And Mika, I remember Mika telling me that she showed you the letter and then she burned the letter in front of you saying, you can have everything but this. And you just smiled politely.

And I read the book and I said to me, you go, you do know Ed put the letter in the book. So you may have thought you burned the one letter out of the millions of documents. I said, but he had a copy of it and he put it in the book and she laughed. She goes, yeah, I know that she said that's just how true he was to his quest to get to the bottom of my father's character. And you did that and he was a brilliant, brilliant strategist who served in one administration. And I thought the Economist review, talking about how he was brilliant, but he was also too blunt at times, often worked against his political interests as opposed to Henry Kissinger, who

knew how to play all sides. Your late father-in-law, Joe, was not, he wasn't a charmer, although the more you got to know him, I think the more you realized there were much softer characteristics inside. But his exterior was, there was always something of the Polish cavalry charge in Brzezinski's character. I mean, he would go for people he thought were less intelligent than him, and that covered most of humanity, and not spared people's feelings.

I think Kissinger was very different in that regard. That was quite funny. One of the interviews that Kissinger gave me for this biography, and he was probably 98, 99 by this point, he said something I knew full well not to be true, which he said mr. Luce I read I read your columns before anybody else every single morning and I knew for a fact that wasn't true But a little piece of you is going out, but you know, he's really got a point He's obviously a talent spotter and so seduction and flattery work Even when the object of that flattery is fully aware it's blowing smoke. Brzezinski wasn't like that. He had the misfortune, I guess, in terms of

the inevitable comparisons between Kissinger and Brzezinski of having served a president who's been sort of written off, Jimmy Carter, and only one term, whereas Kissinger served two terms, so eight years, double the time. And he served Nixon, who, regardless of what you think of his domestic sort of criminality and Watergate, etc., was a brilliant foreign policy president. And so that's a misfortune in the comparison between the two because Brzezinski's impact on American foreign policy was greater. Yeah. And that's one thing that The Economist Review brought out and others have brought out is

that on so many subjects, Brzezinski was right, Kissinger was wrong. Talk about Kissinger's detente versus Brzezinski's confrontation and Dr. Brzezinski's understanding that the Soviet Union was not what Kissinger, Nixon and everybody else thought it was and he believed that the wall could be brought down. Absolutely did. And this was a sort of core difference in their strategies. Kissinger believed in detente because he thought the Soviet Union would be around forever. And indeed, more than that, he thought the Soviet Union was going to overtake the United

States technologically. And this had been a sort of feeling that was doing the rounds since 1957, since the Soviets launched the first satellite, Sputnik. And Kissinger really held on to that through the 1970s. And Brzezinski, as a Sovietologist at Harvard in the 50s, 60s, he developed this view, which was borne out by events and by the end of the Cold War. He developed this view that the Soviets were, it was a system with a very, very limited shelf life because it could not contain its nationalities within. They did not see themselves as Soviet citizens. They didn't speak a language called

Soviet. They saw themselves as Ukrainians, as Georgians, as Kazakhs, as Tajiks. And that Achilles heel led him to be deeply skeptical of the whole basis of detente. And so detente really unraveled under Carter because of Brzezinski. And Brzezinski was very much sort of fighting the State Department. Cyrus Vance took really the Kissinger view. Brzezinski eventually defeated him pretty comprehensively and Carter sided with Brzezinski. But that laid the basis, the predicates for Reaganism.

And Ronald Reagan, you know, twice tried to recruit Brzezinski, very unorthodox, I think it would have been the first and last time in US history as his national security, as Reagan's national security advisor, a man from a different party. You know, it's interesting, you say turn him down, it's interesting that in the 21st century, and Mika and I see this when we go around to people's sign books, Dr. Brzezinski was a hero of Democrats, a hero of the left. Why? Because he got the Iraq War right. He and Brent Scowcroft were two of the only people that were speaking out loudly in the Washington foreign policy establishment, the really powerful voices. But one of the really surprising things in reading your book was just how hated, how loathed Dr. Brzezinski was by the Democratic left, by the Kennedy wing of the party, by

the strobe Talbot wing of the mainstream media, so much so that you write about how he was booed at the 1980 Democratic Convention. Talk about how he got both the Cold War right and he got a rock right, but in doing so, he made powerful enemies first on the left and then on the right. It is, I mean, that's a sort of brilliant contrast to bring up, Joe, because it does get to the essence of who Brzezinski was as a man, as a figure, as a public figure. And that was somebody who did not belong to groups or factions. I mean, he operated according to where his intellect took him and where his strategic sort of sense took him. And in the late 70s, that acquired him notoriety

on the liberal left, the Ted Kennedy wing, as he pointed out, he was known as Darth Vader. Remember, this is the time of Star Wars. Right. So he was Darth Vader before Dick Cheney was Darth Vader. He was. He got there first. And unlike Dick Cheney, although a little bit like Liz Cheney, it should be mentioned,

he then became a darling of the left. Liz Cheney because of never Trumpism and Brzezinski because his critique of the global war on terror about how Bush was pursuing it, Bush Jr. was pursuing it, and then more sort of dramatically of the Iraq war, really sort of gave him almost hero status on the left in the early 21st century. The mirror image of how they viewed him in the late 1970s. You mentioned Strobe Talbot, a very fine, a very sort of distinguished journalist who was Time magazine in the 70s and a definite skeptic and critic of Brzezinski. In 1989, when the wall finally fell, more importantly a few months earlier when Poland elected solidarity, that was what really broke the communist system.

He wrote a time cover story with the headline, Vindication of a Hardliner, and of course that was Brzezinski. What was amazing is though that from the time he first got to Harvard in the early 1950s through 1988 into the beginning of 1989, he was attacked from the left. He was attacked as a Cold War hawk. But then you're right, 1989, everything changed. He was vindicated. He also, reading through your book, he was vindicated on Afghanistan. He kept warning Jimmy Carter, kept warning the State Department.

They wanted to figure out if they could make Afghanistan work. They kept warning about the Soviets moving into Afghanistan. Same thing, fighting the State Department on Iran, where the State Department wanted to deal with Ayatollah Khomeini. And you even said, I guess it was Ambassador Sullivan who said that Khomeini would be a Gandhi-like figure. I'm curious and I'm going to ask you what he got terribly wrong in a minute so people don't think this is just sort of like hometown fan worship on my part. And again, talking about a man who did call me stunningly superficial. He didn't mean it.

No, he did not. He was a wonderful man. But you know, the funny thing is, when he did that, I was thinking, oh my God, this guy will do anything to win a fight at the moment. And I was reading about his roommate in Harvard, who was from, I think, Lithuania, who said the same thing. When I was reading through the book, I'd go, oh my God, he was dealing with him in a dorm. I was dealing with him on national television.

But in the short term, he had very sharp elbows. He had to win every fight he was in. Talk about that for a minute. And then I want you to talk about how did he manage to get the Cold War right? How did he manage to get Iraq right? How did he manage to get Afghanistan and Iran right? How did he go through the process and get so many things right that so many others around him got wrong? Yeah, I mean, you are in very fine company and they're fine in your company too in being

one of the targets of a Brzezinski sort of live public argument in which as you say, he took no prisoners. I mean, most people would. But by the way, I can say it now. He was also wrong. He was wrong in that argument. And I told him at the time, I said, you stand alone here. What makes you so right and everybody else so wrong? But in fact, actually, just to sort of fill in the details there, what you were arguing about was whether Clinton had got close to an Israeli-Palestine deal in Camp David in the year 2000 and who was to blame for sinking that deal.

And you were arguing that Yasser Arafat was the one who torpedoed it, I think, correctly. And Zbig was arguing the opposite. But as you found out, he doesn't sort of argue and then declare a truce. His aim is to beat his opponent to death. Into the ground, exactly. And weirdly, then the next day or the ground exactly and weirdly, you know then the next day or the next and I heard this so many times from students and fellow academics and

People in public life that the next day he would then incorporate some of your argument or maybe all of it, right? So he tested ideas to destruction, but I think you're right. You were correct on that one. Well, I mean, it was just jousting and it's something that, you know, I love retelling the story because a southern politician understands, you know, self deprecation is a very, very powerful tool, whether it's coming from your mother, your child, or in this case your future father-in-law. He gave me a little wink and a smile afterwards. It was, again, he loved the verbal jousting. Let's go back to his analysis of different issues, whether it was a Cold War, whether it was the Second Iraq War, whether it was Afghanistan and Iran in 79.

How did he, what process did he use to get to conclusions and to get it right more often than not? So he called the Cold War correctly, and I think Kissinger incorrectly. This was the one big idea of their time. Remember a British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin wrote that Winston Churchill was wrong on everything.

The gold standard, you know, not giving India independence, the Irish question, except the one big thing that mattered where he was right and pretty much alone and that of course was on the nature of the Nazi He picked the right one right it meacham and I Often share our favorite quote about Churchill which was when he when Winston was right He was right when he was wrong. Oh my god Yes, and that and that then gave rise to Isaiah Berlin's characterization of the fox and the hedgehog. Hedgehog knows one big thing, it gets one big thing right, which is self-protection.

The fox is cunning and does a lot of sort of clever tactical maneuvers. And I would say that when it comes to the grand strategy in the Cold War, Brzezinski was the hedgehog and Kissinger was the fox. And Brzezinski's predictive confidence on the Soviet Union, which was the product of learning Russian, visiting Russia, testing all his theories to destruction and refining them was that he had an insight into what was going on behind the Iron Curtain. That Kissinger simply lacked. Kissinger had a different approach to strategy, and it was the big power approach. Brzezinski had the, I suppose, the loser's perspective, the smaller nation's

sense of injury that came from being Polish or for that matter Hungarian or Ukrainian, and he weaponized that. And that sort of big insight produced, it was not just, you know, gave him a stellar record predictively as a Sovietologist, but also in terms of strategy when he was in government. So I would say that that's the main thing. But he got other things right, like Iraq. I mean, Iraq, I think, and some friends of his sort of really emphasized this point. Brzezinski was really embarrassed about how late he realized Vietnam was a blunder, that

Vietnam was a real quagmire, because he had dutifully supported the war up till 1966-67, and others, some had turned against it sooner. And so he was very quick out of the starting blocks with Iraq. But you were saying he so he opposed though Vietnam pre-tet in sixty what 67? Yes, he came to realize that more troops just meant more deaths, no strategic advantage. So he wrote a paper for Lyndon Johnson, in fact, saying that. Nobody read it. But he then put it into practice as the foreign policy advisor to Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 campaign.

And unfortunately, perhaps fatally, Humphrey felt unable to break as vice president from LBJ, his president, who was by this stage monomaniacal. Yeah. So I told you I would hold you for 15 minutes and you've been very kind with your time here. What else do you think people that are listening right now should know about Dr. Brzezinski? What will they learn from your book that will help them in trying to figure out where we should go as a country, where we should go in the world in the coming years. In a way, what this biography is, is it's about what is it that goes to make up a grand strategist.

And of course, there's all the very particular human story, the really very gripping story of Brzezinski's life. But what is it you can extract from that for today? And I think a strategic mindset is one that is able to understand your adversaries and your friends as well as they can. The more you can view the world through their lens, the better you can shape how they act or manipulate how they act to your advantage, presumably therefore to avoid war, to get them to do what you want without war. And that is a time old, sort of an age-worn insight of any kind of statesmanship throughout human history.

But Brzezinski really embodied it. And what is that? It's about knowledge. It's about the quest for knowledge and I think, you know, to put it mildly, the Trump administration and Donald Trump himself do not value or even notice knowledge. In a way, knowledge is for losers.

It's like the sort of, you know, green eye shade of academia. Accountants, you know, green eye shade of academia. Accountants, you know, these are people who don't really know the value of anything in the Trump worldview. And I think he's very, very diametrically wrong. And you know, it's sort of a posh word for stupid would be a strategic. But a lot of what Trump is doing is a strategic. And we need strategy now more than ever.

It's even more dangerous than the bipolar world Kissinger-Brzynski had to grapple with. We're living in a multipolar world and that's far less predictable. And so knowing what you're doing, knowing about the other players and the other polls is even more important and I think his life tells us I think it screams That to us particularly today The book is a big the life of Zbigniew Brzezinski America's great power profit at loose Thank you so much. You're so kind greatly appreciated Now I should thank you. Thank you Joe. I really enjoyed that. All right. Thanks so much. You're so kind. I greatly appreciate it. No, I should thank you. Thank you, Joe.

I really enjoyed that. All right. Thanks so much. And thank you for listening. We'll see you tomorrow morning on Morning Joe. you