Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - America’s Power Problem: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Today

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Starting point is 00:01:26 Conditions apply. I think doing what Biden did, which is to say Trump was an aberration that America is back would be a mistake. I think he would caution very incremental, gentle, non-dramatic, constant gardening of rebuilding relationships slowly and not pretending life is a social media contest, that the confidence around the world in the United States is so shaken. You cannot undo that at the stroke of a magic wand. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us now is the U.S.

Starting point is 00:01:57 National Editor and columnist at the Financial Times. It's also a big, best-selling author, Ed Luce. The title of the book is Zzebigh. Hopefully I'm saying that right. It's the life of Zibbenu. Zibbenu. Zizibniew. Bersenski. Okay, well, it's big new. Or if you want to be really pedantic, it's big nears. All right. So there you go. See, they don't pay me to pronounce things though, Ed Luce. They know where I'm from, okay? But anyway, this book is awesome. It is about Mr. Brzezinski's life. He was former national security advisor, but so much more. And in this title, it's the America's Great Power Profit.

Starting point is 00:02:39 So much to say about him. But before we get into the book, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into writing? I think you have a very interesting life story, Ed. So let's start there. Well, I got into writing, I guess my grandmother, my dad's mother, She was a playwright in a stage where there weren't too many female playwrights. And she would write me these long letters when I was at these pretty ghastly English boarding schools as a child.

Starting point is 00:03:05 And those letters were so lyrical and morale boosting that got me into writing and reading, more importantly. So I'd blame my grandmother. I find that your writing style is very compelling because it's, you know, you use the word pedantic, but you are the least pedantic writer of anybody that I've read in a biography because you lay out the facts. The writing is crisp. You want to turn the page into the next chapter. But when I closed the book, the first thing that came to my mind, I want you to react to it is this was a realist, this man. This man had grown up in Eastern Europe.

Starting point is 00:03:46 He's a product of Poland and the Cold War environment and the communist. aggression in Poland, also the Nazi aggression in Poland. And so he had this very realistic approach, but he was going up against people that probably didn't have his life experience, right? Jimmy Carter didn't have his life experience. Others in the American political, you know, we're from a nation of isolationists and we're from a nation that, you know, prior to the 9-11, we didn't really have a lot of bloodshed or violence in the nation. So tell us about, that because to me that's the thing that I was left with the most is this was a guy knocking on the heads of people trying to explain to them the existential dangers that were out there

Starting point is 00:04:33 during the Cold War. Yeah, I think that's very astute, Anthony. I mean, he had a sense of the tragic. And actually, he shared that with his great rival and frenemy, Henry Kissinger, who of course also came from the bloodlands of interwar Europe. And they both, through their seeing what happened to their families and to their home nations came across the Atlantic with this strong sense of the thinness of civilization, that it has to be defended, that it's never done, that, you know, history's never over. And, you know, I guess Brasinski was big as he became known. He refused to anglicize his name, which you would approve of, I think, as do I.

Starting point is 00:05:19 Yeah, of course. He wouldn't anglicize his name. He came up against the wasps, really. You know, my people, the Anglo-Americans, who were from very privileged backgrounds and thought that foreign policy was a sort of gentleman's second fiddle. That's what he did, you know, as a public obligation. And Brasinski was a man on a mission,

Starting point is 00:05:45 very much a professional foreign policy person. And so his clashes, really initially, with all the Waspolites, the Georgetown set. Well, I mean, that's the very same group of people that believe Dahlger Hish, right? And they, because they had this patrician culture and had this club-like atmosphere. But again, what I found a bit, well, it's so interesting about this, his life experience directly influences judgment. Of course, when they sent George Kennan, one of their own, to Moscow, a couple of years in Moscow, he too figured out the danger, right?

Starting point is 00:06:17 He very famously put that telegram together, assigned to Dax, but it was a 10,000-word telegram expressing the danger, creating this policy of containment that Brzezinski believed in and wanted to help prosecute in a bipartisan way. But let's go to the bloodlance of Central Europe. Tell us about the desecration there that you so beautifully write about. I want, if you don't mind, to capture his origin story because I really do think that's central to all of his future decision-making and his policy initiatives. Absolutely. These are his formative years when he's forged.

Starting point is 00:06:56 And his dad, who was a Polish diplomat, in that brief interwar period where Poland existed as a Second Republic, it had been born in the Treaty of Versailles. They've ended the First World War. Poland, the creation of Poland was Woodrow Wilson's 13th point out of the 14 points, famous 14 points he had. And his dad, Brzynski's dad, Junior diplomat, manages in 1938 to get posted across the Atlantic, not a promotion, Consul General in Montreal, but he knew exactly what was coming. And he got Brzynski out of the way and the family out of the way. a few days after the Munich, the notorious Munich agreement,

Starting point is 00:07:41 where Chamberlain had basically submitted to Hitler. So the timing was perfect. But from the other side of the Atlantic, this 11-year-old at the beginning of the war is big. He hears through his dad on the radio about the opening of the First World War. And the opening of the First World War is the partition of his native Poland, not just the partition between the Nazis and the Soviet. this Nazi Soviet pact, this devil's pact, but the raising of the streets of Warsaw in which he'd

Starting point is 00:08:15 grown up that he knew so well. And he listened to this every night on Radio Warsaw and then one night the radio went quiet except for the first 11 notes of a Polonaise by Chopin, the Polish composer. And then a couple of weeks later, that went and was replaced by Deutscheland-Uber-Alez. So you can imagine this young mind from the sort of Elysian comfort of the sort of higher altitude bits of Montreal. You can imagine what anguish, what sort of defining anguish this instilled in that young mind. And I did get hold of what of his diary is and he started keeping them then. And they are fascinating die. They're a chronicle of this blitzkriek, this horror of total war. Listen, I mean, you know, when you live through that, you're influenced by that.

Starting point is 00:09:06 I think one of the problems we're having now, Ed, is that none of us have lived through this. You know, we've had 80 years of peace and prosperity, which, you know, as Barbara Tuckman once said in the guns of August, it increases the bellicassee of rhetoric. It allows for the foment of nationalism. When you've seen this type of bloodshed, you're more interested in unification and to protect each other, less less interested in devolvement, which has happened. today. But let's go to his architecture. You know, there's something in the book I did not know. I'll share this with people. I always saw him from my glance as a good national security advisor, a good promoter of American, just sort of the policy of containment and foreign policy. But he was really one of the great architects of the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. He put a lot of

Starting point is 00:09:57 things in place during the Carter administration that I didn't know about. Share with us some of things that he did, which other leaders like Ronald Reagan, frankly, benefited from years later. That's absolutely right. I mean, he was, you know, a leading Sovietologist, first and foremost, you know, at Harvard, then Colombia. And he became Carter's tutor, in fact, after he set up something called the Trilateral Commission. And Carter, as governor of Georgia, joined it.

Starting point is 00:10:26 But the sort of key aspect of his Sovietology was that he said, this system, the Soviet system, has an Achilles heel. And this Achilles heel is the nations. You've got all these countries like Poland, you know, captive nations, as they called them. But you've also got the republics within the USSR, the Ukrainians, the Georgians, the Tajik's, etc., who believe themselves not to be part of a new socialist paradise, but to be part of a Russian empire in Marxist clothing. And he said, but they don't feel Soviet. And he famously kept asking, have you heard Soviet spoken as a language?

Starting point is 00:11:11 And his strategy was to dismantle the Soviet Union by promoting these nationalisms, these national resentments. And he sort of formed that into a strategy that Carter picked up in 1977 when he came into office. In fact, his first trip as president, state visit was to Poland. But he promoted all these human rights groups, including the Polish Solidarity Movement, which eventually led to the unraveling of the Soviet Union. He promoted underground literature, Samizdat.

Starting point is 00:11:50 He endorsed Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet Union's biggest dissident. He stoked ferment. peacefully, not through supplying arms, but through ideological support to the very resentful peoples of the Soviet Empire. And this was something that even George Kennan, with his great insights, not to mention Henry Kissinger, simply ignored. They took the Soviet Union to be a permanent feature of the landscape. And Brzezinski believed it was declining, fragile, and that America's job

Starting point is 00:12:27 must be to accelerate its end. And that's pretty much what happened. Of course, there are other players involved. And Reagan picks up on what he inherits from Carter. He doesn't undo any of it. He picks it up and the nuclear modernization, the support for solidarity, etc. But Bruginski was very much its architect from the American side. I mean, again, this is sort of a question is a contemporary question. I want to want you to channel, Mr. for a second because, you know, you stayed in the book, more or less, that he believed that geopolitics was destiny. And so, but today we've got social media, domestic polarization. We've got, obviously, economic nationalism. What do you still see foreign policy is the primary driver of

Starting point is 00:13:18 history today? Or what would he be thinking about today looking at the fracturing that you and I are witnessing? That's a really good question. I mean, your point of about social media, it's a hell of a lot more difficult to conduct foreign policy in any serious long-term form. And it's only worth it if it's, you know, for keeps. If you've got a strategy, that means long term. The idea of doing this whilst you're constantly having to respond and signal and be relevant on social media, it's so much more difficult. You know, he died, Brzeinski died in 2017. So it was a few months after Trump took office in his first term.

Starting point is 00:14:02 So he had seen the impact of social media. In fact, he had a relatively active Twitter account in his last years. He'd also seen the resurgence of Russian nationalism and the emergence of China as a peer competitor. So he would still, and was then preoccupied with the geopolitics of this, but he was in despair about what he saw as the cultural and moral decline of the West, of Western democracies, internally, inside our sort of what you were mentioning earlier, Anthony, the 80 years of having no real lessons about what happens when it goes wrong, like war, revolution, civil war, all these things, you know, a bit like a bull trader, who's only known a bull market.

Starting point is 00:14:53 They have no idea what a crash looks like. similar sort of wild risk-taking that we have in our spirit nowadays. We don't really know the scale of the risks we're taking. And I think he would be focused, even though this wasn't his predominant area, he did, towards the end of his life, write a lot about education, or the declining education, declining reading, declining knowledge of other countries and languages as being a genuine a genuine national security problem, regardless of your ideology, whether you're conservative or liberal, a genuine national security problem for the United States.

Starting point is 00:15:35 Yeah, I know. I think it's well said. And I want to ask you about the frenemy relationship with Henry Kissinger. Obviously, they saw some things eye to eye, but they had different views of foreign policy. You know, I would say Kissinger's view, you know, and I've read. Neil Ferguson's bio. I felt like Kissinger had more realism. Rizinski had more foundational

Starting point is 00:16:02 understanding of good versus evil. If you don't mind me putting it that way. And if you disagree, please chime in. But whose worldview has aged better, Ed Luce? It's a very good question. I mean, Kissinger was asked, and Kissinger, by the way, was very helpful to this biography. I interviewed him a lot.

Starting point is 00:16:20 And I did ask him, because they were such rivals and frenemies, though addicted to debating with each other, I did ask him, where would you rank Bridgettki in terms of Cold War strategists? And he said, well, he was definitely in the top two. So I think we can guess who number one was. He brought an equal sense of the tragic. Most of his family, extended family, died in the Holocaust. And he was asked more than once, this is Kissinger,

Starting point is 00:16:49 if you had a choice between order or just, justice, which would you choose? And he said, I would always go for order, because I think he saw that tragedy as being a product of disorder. Bersinski, I think, would have given, he wasn't posed the same question, but he would have said justice. He had this deep and burning sense of wounded Polishness, which he wanted to restore, even as he became more and more American. And their difference in philosophy, well, Kissinger was a realist and a realist classical. realist says we don't care about the internal politics of countries we're dealing with. All we assume they have is interests, just like we have interests, and it's a cold world.

Starting point is 00:17:36 Brzezinski was a lot more zealous in terms of believing that the character of other regimes did shape how they behaved, even if their interests, and they changed their perception of what their interests were. And the Soviet Union was a classic example. It promoted worldwide revolution. a different sort of idea of your own interest than a more typical state. I guess if you apply their views, and I'm not sure what label I would give to Brasinski, Kisenger, I would agree as a realist. I mean, you could say an idealist realist or a realist idealist, which is a bit of a mouthful.

Starting point is 00:18:13 I had this professor, and I think I mentioned this to you after I finished your book. I had this professor at Tufts at the Fletcher School when I was there. And his name is Professor Delphine or he's no longer with us, unfortunately. He was an Austrian professor. So he grew up in Austria, and he was old enough to witness by 12 years old when the Nazis took over. And so he had this very hardline view. I feel Berzynski was in his category. Yes.

Starting point is 00:18:42 So, you know, idealism, I guess. But to me, it was like, look, this is right or wrong. And this is what America needs to do to stay on the good side of this battle for West liberalism and for Western freedom, I feel like Kissinger was more willing to parlay, if you will. Am I wrong in thinking that, Ed? If I am, you know, tell me. No, you're not. I mean, I think Kissinger would, he celebrated the word amoral, not immoral, but amoral, is that we don't allow values to cloud our judgment. And Brzynski, I think, did think that values had to shape your judgment. And he did, and he did see Russian

Starting point is 00:19:24 post-Soviet Russia under Putin. He didn't warn about what would happen. He said they'll need Ukraine. Without Ukraine, they cannot be a Eurasian empire. With Ukraine, they will just become an appendage of China. With Ukraine, they can restore Russia's former greatness. And so he saw that as a, it would be immoral not to counter that because other people's freedoms, if not just the Ukrainians, would be in jeopardy. But he wasn't what we used to call a neo-conservative. He didn't believe that our Democrat, liberal democratic stamp could simply be imposed on very different cultures.

Starting point is 00:20:07 And so he was quite a critic of the Iraq War. And so his life's arc is interesting because, you know, he was Dar Fader to the liberals during the Carter years. The Ted Kennedy liberals really did revile Brighin. He was right about it. Yeah, no, I saw the strain and intention there. So I'm going to, if you don't mind, because it's so fascinating for me, I want you to channel Brzynski. I'm going to ask you some lightning round questions, okay?

Starting point is 00:20:33 All right. So you give me a few sentences, okay? Was he right about everything or just early? What would you say there? I mean, he seemed to have gotten a lot right. He got a lot right. I mean, you know, the Soviet Union's demise, the fact that the Achilles Hill, but also the economic, you know, redundancy of the system. them. He got that right. He wrote a book, a very impressive book on Japan in the early 70s saying

Starting point is 00:21:01 Japan has peaked. Now, this is years before people start getting what we used to call Japanic, that it's the next superpower. He saw through that. And he understood their demography. He understood their demography, precisely. And then in the 90s, he did predict that, you know, history is not ending and great power politics will return with a vengeance. And it was wasn't a very popular view. Fukuiyama's book, End of History, sold a lot more than what Brasinski warned, but what Brasinski warned was

Starting point is 00:21:32 there would be an axis of the aggrieved of countries that felt like they were on the losing side of the end of the Cold War, and we see that axis now with Putin, Xi, Iran, North Korea, etc. He did get some things wrong though, I mean, and most famously and

Starting point is 00:21:48 consequently, Iran. He badly advised Carter and it led to Carter's undoing. Yeah, there's a great book about that. The King of All Kings just came out, which I read precisely says that. All right, let's go to NATO for a second. Is NATO a strong point for the West or is it an inertia point? What would Brzezinski say about NATO today? I think he would be arguing today for the rest of the West to recreate the West. Because right now, in a clearly America is de facto, even if it's still a member of NATO, it's de facto not an ally

Starting point is 00:22:26 of most Western European nations and indeed of Canada. And so he would see NATO as having to transfer into European Union defense arm. You know, it's no longer really viable. Let's go to not President Trump, but let's go to the next president, whoever he or she may be. It's January of 2009. Channel your Brzezinski. What would be the advice, what would be one mistake that he would want the future president to avoid? Well, you don't step into the same rather twice. So I think doing what Biden did, which is to say Trump was an aberration and we're back to America's back, would be a mistake. I think he would caution very incremental, gentle, non-dramatic, constant gardening of rebuilding relationships slowly

Starting point is 00:23:17 and not pretending life is a social media contest that the confidence around the world in the United States is so shaken. You cannot undo that at the stroke of a wand, a magic wand. Right. Okay. I'm down to the five words. Okay. So in our podcast, we take five words from your book. It's the end of the show.

Starting point is 00:23:38 I'm going to say the two words Soviet Union. You're going to say what? I'm going to say bankrupt Marxist Imperial Project. Right. But helped pushed into bankruptcy by guys like Brzynski, yeah. Pushed into bankruptcy by facilitated into bankruptcy. Yeah. American power. Generally good. But in fact, the only power capable on a global scale of doing good, but that doesn't mean to say it can't turn bad. Right. Good, good intentions, sometimes bad outcomes, right? Yes, correct.

Starting point is 00:24:13 Generally good intention. I'm not talking about the Trump era as much as I'm talking about the last 80 years since the end of the Second World War. The Cold War. The Cold War, bipolar. Washington, Moscow, very different to a multipolar world. It's much less easy for physics to stabilize and have an equilibrium when there's more than two poles. A lot more history has come into play, right? It's not the end of history. There's multiple histories happening at once. Revenge of history. Revenge of history. Okay, Henry Kissinger. extraordinary impresario, a brilliant man, a fox, but ultimately wrong on the biggest question of his time. Which was?

Starting point is 00:24:56 The nature of the Cold War. He believed the Soviets were here forever and we should essentially live with them. Yeah, well, that was the whole policy of the taunt versus what Berzinsky was saying. You know, I had the opportunity, this is a little bit of a sidebar, I had the opportunity to be in the room during the transition team in December or December, 2016 when Dr. Gissinger came to speak to us. And, you know, he had said some things to Trump that, you know, obviously Trump ignored. But one of the things he said was that they needed to figure out a way to get Putin pushed back off of the Ukraine. He was very worried about what happened in Crimea and suggested that the Obama administration did not handle that well. Of course, we learned that

Starting point is 00:25:44 Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin have a different relationship than all of us thought day one. All right. So I'm going to give you the last word, sir. Zibinyu, I'm pronouncing a Riperzinski. What would you say? An amazing product of America, a meritocratic America, with a thirst for knowledge that promotes talent, regardless of whether they've got an American accent or a pronounceable name, that he was, therefore quintessentially American.

Starting point is 00:26:13 There were a lot of fun parts of your book, Ed, but one of the fun parts for me was Mika Brzynski, driving around the golf car to Camp David, right? Before you go, just tell us a quick story about that before I leave. She very nearly ran over Monarchin Bacon, the Israeli leader. She also, by the way, spilled caviar into Deng Xiaop, the Chinese leader's lap. They were serving him on his first visit to America at their home. She was 11. Spilt caviar into his lap and got so flustered, she tried.

Starting point is 00:26:43 to fiend it up with a napkin, which was a source of great amusement to the pint size. I mean, because I know her. I love those stories about her, you know, and it was a great affect in the book. And listen, I congratulate you on the book, Best, New York Times bestseller, deservedly so. Number two on the Foreign Affairs list this year, which there are no number two's in life that. I consider you a number one. The title of the book is a big, the life of Zygne, Bidu Brizinski, America's great power profit. Legendary Edward Luce, what's next for you, sir, before you go? I'm trying to keep up with what's going on.

Starting point is 00:27:22 So my day job with the Financial Times here in Washington has not yet permitted me to think of my next book. It's just been, you know, 18-hour days, seven days a week. We're looking forward to your next book and obviously I always look forward to your columns. It's an interesting world. We're an interesting world, sir. you know, it's going to get, it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Starting point is 00:27:44 That's my prediction because it just seems that that's the way it's going to go for right now. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much, Anthony. That was a real delight.

Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - America’s Power Problem: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Today

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