School of War - Ep 245: Edward Luce on Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Twentieth Century

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Edward Luce, U.S. national editor and columnist at the Financial Times and author of Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet,joins the show to discuss one of the most interesting characters of the Cold War, Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. ▪️ Times 00:00 The Life and Legacy of Zbigniew Brzezinski 02:55 Carter's Foreign Policy and Brzezinski's Influence 05:56 Contrasting Worldviews: Brzezinski vs. Kissinger 08:52 The Formative Years: War and Identity 11:35 The Cold War Landscape and Brzezinski's Rise 14:34 Order vs. Justice: Diverging Philosophies 17:55 Brzezinski's Strategic Vision for the Cold War 20:57 The Vietnam War and Its Impact on Brzezinski 23:47 Brzezinski's Approach to Foreign Policy 28:35 The Rise of Jimmy Carter and the Trilateral Commission 32:12 Carter's Foreign Policy Challenges: The Middle East and Iran 37:15 Human Rights and the Shift from Nixon to Carter 45:27 Reagan's Continuity and Change: A New Era in Foreign Policy 51:19 The Iranian Revolution and Brzezinski's Legacy Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Today on School of War, the remarkable life and career of Zabignyaf Brzynski, Sovietologist, Russia Hawk, and National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, the career-long foil to another great immigrant strategist of the Cold War, Henry Kissinger. The Financial Times, Edward Luce, takes us through what was an extraordinary journey. Let's get into it. It is the victory for war. December 7, 1941, a date with which a bloody explosion. of Vietnam is to end in a state.

We continue to face the grave situation in Iran. We'll fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We'll fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today.

Edward Luce, who's U.S. national editor and a columnist at the Financial Times. He is the author of a new book, Zibig, the life of Zibniev-Bersinsky, America's great power of profit. Edward, thank you so much for coming on School of War. Delight to join you, Aaron. I see you're in a slightly sunny and more picturesque part of Washington than my backdrop, but we're in the same town. Well, maybe we can get into the ways in which your historical research in this biography

plays into matters of discussion or matters in the news today. How did you get interested in this subject? What's the source of the book? It's a good question. I mean, Brzynski was a major figure when I moved to Washington. It's still a major figure in 2006. I'd been here almost 20 years, and so I used to go and see him quite a lot. He had an ability to cut through complicated geopolitical problems to what is essentially at stake,

which is a very rare skill. He had quite a penetrating brain, whether he was right or wrong, that his ability to sort of get to the bare essentials was rare. And so I got to know him as a journalist for the Financial Times here, but I wasn't aware while he was still alive. I was going to write his biography. Then early COVID, his family came to me and said, look, would you like his diaries that he kept as national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter? And I read through them and they were compelling in terms of sort of first rough draft of history.

He would speak into a dictaphone every night in the car from the White House back to his home in McLean, Virginia. And so this was really interesting issues that they dealt with, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. the Cam David agreement with Egypt, Israel normalization, giving the Panama Canal back to Panama, the Cold War, obviously, the sort of the tensions with the Soviet Union, and so much else that this was compelling. And once I'd secured the family's agreement that I have full editorial control, they don't read this book before anybody else. So in other words, it's a non-authorized, but you do not want a biography to be authorized. That's a gun for hire biography. And once I sort of got an agreement that I'd have access to everything,

every possible biographical paper, diary, childhood, whatever, everything is relevant to a biography and that they would have no control. Then I just got, it was too tempting. It's such a compelling American story, Brzynski's career that hasn't really been told fully before that it's too tempting with primary sources like that, not to do it. Let me pose to you a contrast or maybe a contradiction and get your take on it,

and maybe you'll want to push back on the premise. It seems to me that the Carter foreign policy writ large is not held in the highest esteem in 2025. It's not something that I think most Democrat, most national Democrats, if they were, when Gavin Newsom, you know, seemingly inevitably runs for president, he probably will, when he's prone, when he's, when he wants to make a historical reference. He will probably not point to the Carter foreign policy as a model. And yet, we have the subject of your work here. I believe yours is not the first biography, if I'm not mistaken, a widely respected figure who's thinking on international affairs long, long followed his time in office, as you just pointed out. How is this possible that the man

who is the national security advisor and administration that's a bit of a bit of a byword for foreign policy failure, remains in such good repute and people like yourself and others who, you know, think carefully about these matters, remain interested in his thinking. Now, that's a great question, and I fully agree with you, that Carter is not something Democrats point to. They run from him. He's kind of an orphan of history, because, you know, Reagan is the man who defeats him and succeeds him, and Reaganism is credited with winning the Cold War. and Carter, you know, Carter was so influenced by Brzezinski and moved in such a hawkish direction

in the second half of his presidency and laid so many predicates for Reaganism that he's disowned by liberals. So Carter is an orphaness of history, for sure. And Briggsinski is a significant figure because he was one of the sort of great, grand strategists, really, of the American Cold War and his influence and his impact.

go way before the Carter administration. And they post-date the Carter administration. And it is worth emphasizing that Reagan twice approached Briggsinski to be his own national security of virus. It never really got to the formal office stage because Brzezinski realized it just wouldn't work. But to Reagan, Briggsinsky was like he looked the part. He sounded the part.

And Reagan, you know, recognized that the nuclear modernization that was happening in the early 80s, that the restoring of defense spending that had been cut during the Kissinger Nixon years by 40% in those eight years for Kissinger terms, that Carter had restored that spending pretty much completely in four years

and had the boycott of the Moscow Olympics, the support for the Mujahideen now looks very controversial in retrospect, but the support for the Afghan uprising against the Soviet invasion. All of these are things that Reagan inherited. And so, you know, you look at Brzynski's career as a strategist and particularly his weaponizing with Carter of human rights behind the Iron Curtain,

stimulating national resentments against Moscow, not just in Poland, but in republics of the USSR, the Georgia's, the, Tajikistan's, Ukraine's. This was a sort of strategic legacy in American foreign policy that bears taking very seriously. And so, you know, you're right. There's been one biography of him,

a very good one by Justine Veil, a French diplomat. But it was an intellectual biography, not a full life biography. And I believe that Brzynski deserved a full life biography. And it's kind of, it's a pretty cinematic life. You know, you go from being born in 1928, in Warsaw to dying, you know, May 2017, a few months into Trump, that's quite a span. That's quite a narrative arc, as they say.

And it's just an extraordinary story. It does sort of seem that Kissinger and Kissingerism is the great foil to Prisinski's career, as you indeed point out. And that it's not quite a sort of Democrat Republican or Reagan Carter even distinction that really matters as a driving tension in his career, but rather this sort of ongoing entangle with the Kissinger worldview. And both men, of course, are, you just alluded to it, but let's get into the details. Both men are sort of shaped by their and their families' experiences of the Second World War.

Kissinger, of course, you know, is in New York City, is a young man at the start of the war, but, you know, a Jewish family that has fled Europe. Przinski also is in North America, but from a Polish family. Talk about his family and talk about how the war shapes his worldview. It's a very important part like in anybody's life. The early years are formative. And for Brzynski, they were watching his homeland from the safety of Montreal, whereas dad, who was a Polish diplomat, had got posted as Consul General a year before the outbreak of the Second World War.

A few, really a few days after the Munich, the notorious Munich agreement, was Simon between Chamberlain and Hitler. the Briggsinski family crossed the Atlantic. And Spig, the young Spigneff is 10 years old, arrived in Montreal, and 10 months after they arrived, the Second World War began. And the Second World War, of course, the real theatre of it for the whole first year was Poland and that part of Central Eastern Europe. And Briggsinski listens with his dad to Radio Warsaw every night to destruction of the streets he knew that he grew up with and people they knew.

The Nazi-Soviet pact sort of divided Poland. It was a vivisection between Moscow and Germany. And this was a searing, this idea of what I call wounded Polishness, was a searing experience for the young Spig. And his diaries at the time were fascinating. He's a preteen and then an adolescent, but he's got this very detailed grasp of what's going on the other side of the Atlantic and writing about it every day.

So, you know, that's a, that's a very important. a motivating boost for what gets him into geopolitics and into Sovietology. Once he's of age after the Second World War, and it's quickly replaced by the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. And his mission stated very young, very arrogantly in life, is to liberate the Soviet satellite states from Moscow's grip, including Poland, but not confined to Poland. And that becomes really his basis as a subject,

sovietologist, he really shines in that field. And post-war America is an extraordinary scene, really unique, I think, in history in that it's got this challenge, which has got this other global power that wants to overthrow American capitalism and Western democracy and ensure that the newly decolonized third world is in its camp and not in America's camp. And this is a huge global challenge and America's just not limbered up for it. That wasn't America's idea of itself until really Pearl Harbor and afterwards. And so it recognizes its ignorance, its need for knowledge and expertise on the Soviet world. And federal government, first under Truman, then Eisenhower, you know, gets into a major partnership with the universities to build Soviet area studies,

departments and to sort of train Russian speakers and to sort of try and grapple within adversary to better understand it, to better grapple with it. And so the Cold War University, as it's called, is also thirsty for sort of expertise from everywhere. So that's where the foreign-born Kissinger's and Brzynski's, but not just them, so many other names at Harvard, at Columbia, at Princeton elsewhere, and in, you know, public universities get recruited. It's a real boom time for sort of geopolitical expertise and scientific expertise and in all kinds

of expertise and technological expertise of engineering, and amid the whole sort of across the board, there's this boom time for researchers and scholars. And luminaries in their fields rose quickly, and Brzynski rose at Harvard very quickly, as did Kissinger. And, you know, I guess always, like Kissinger did, saw scholarship as a springboard to power. I mean, he wasn't just being an academic for the sake of it.

To borrow a phrase from Marx, which I don't normally do, I promise, is the point is not to philosophize about the world, the point is to change it. And that was very much Brzynski's mission. Just to stick with this, Kessinger-Brizensky contrast for a bit longer, because I find it totally fascinating, the way you frame Britschke's essential, that the legacy that the war gives him, which is this drive of liberation, which is to say a drive to change the status quo. of the post-war world. It's such a fascinating contrast with Kissinger's takeaways, which are a little bit more, they're a little harder to unpack.

And like you knew Brzynski a bit, I knew Kissinger a bit in his later years, so that's why this contrast is so interesting to me. It seemed to me, and these are not his words, that Kissinger's fundamental response to the Holocaust and to all the tragedies of the war

was that, sort of just to put it in simple terms, look, this is what happens when order collapsed. What order collapses, you get horrible things, one, one variety of which was this awful thing, the Holocaust, but all kinds of terrible things happened. And so the imperative is order. And so his career becomes about understanding order and maintaining order, which is, it's harder to imagine, I mean, it's a sort of defensible, intellectually coherent position, but it's harder to imagine a greater contrast than the one posed by that in Brzezinski's

vision, which is one of liberation. Does that seem fair to you? That does seem entirely fair. I mean, I think history was more than once asked and posed to question himself if he would be given a choice between order and justice, he would always go for order. I mean, his extended family, the part of it that didn't cross the Atlantic,

died in the Holocaust, most of them. And he saw that as a product of apps, the collapse of all standards, all stability, quite rightly, I think, that indeed was only possible with the claps of the previous order. And so his quest was always, and he did it through his,

he was a diplomatic historian. So his great work, really, what made his name was the book in the mid-1950s called The World Restored, which was about the 1815 Congress of Vienna, Metternick and Castle Ray and all these big figures that brought the Napoleonic Wars to an end and established a stability,

rules of the game between the children, great powers, the four great powers, really, which is Britain, the Tsarist Russia, the Habsburgs and the Prussian, and then the French were added in once they'd sort of reconstituted post-Nopolian. But that kept the peace till 1914, by and large, by 20th century standards, it kept the peace. So that was really his model, and that was his approach to the Cold War. he saw the Soviet Union, particularly in a nuclear age, as a country with which you had to have some understanding, some modus for Vendi, some equilibrium,

because the Soviet Union was going to be around indefinitely, it was here to stay. And Britschinsky took a very different view. He was never actually posed the question between order and justice, but I think he would have gone for justice. He took a Polish perspective, which is of injured pride and of the need to restore independence from Moscow. And so he studied what he called the Soviet Union's Achilles' heel, which he saw as its nationalities,

not just the captive nations, so-called as they were then called of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and so on, but also the republics within the USSR, which were national republics, the Ukrainians, the Georgians, and the Tajiks, et cetera, and that America should weaponize, and he wrote this in 1950 initially, by the way,

when he was at McGill in Canada, America should recognize the unharnessed power of these nations' resentment of rule from Moscow. He famously asked, does anybody speak Soviet? Nobody speaks Soviet. There isn't a national identity that computes with Soviet. And so his idea was to stimulate the small powers. And that's the sort of perspective

with which he begins, which, of course, is very different from Kissinger's more Olympian, great power compact. And that produced very different Cold War strategies. You know, I do think they have something in common, and I did talk to, Kistinger was generous with his time for this biography. Britschinsky died in 2017, and Kistinger, as you know, died in November 20203. And my last interviewer was actually after he turned 100 in 2023, built coherent. And he said, look, we did have things in common, and one of which was a stance of the essential tragedy

or the potential tragedy of human events, that that never goes away and the thinness of civilization. And so, you know, they weren't ideological opponents. They were tactical, strategic sort of rivals and frenemies, whose relationship, whose dialogue, really, I mean, it's kind of like Jefferson and Adams. This spans decades. It's an extraordinary dialogue.

It is striking, too, that it's the one who's the Sovietologist, that is to say, the one who spends his days and his serious work, understanding the insides of the Soviet regime, who is the relatively more hawkish one? Now, I guess, sort of a chicken and egg question. Is it the Sovietology that makes them more hawkish? It seems like some of the hawkishness precedes that. But on the other hand, you have the diplomatic historian

and the sort of the more, the person who thinks in probably terms of, whose research is about broader categories of state action over longer periods of time who traffics them sort of the realism and the more abstract questions of order. It seems non-accidental. Yeah. I mean, Kessinger's history of diplomacy, really, from the birth of the nation state in 17th century, Europe to today in his day, the 90s when he wrote this, the book, Diplomacy. It's a classic.

and it's really good up to the point when Kissinger sort of intrudes on the scene and Nixon intrudes on the scene. There was a great headline. One of the reviews was from Metternich to me. So he loses his objectivity. Towards the end. I don't think Brighinski was capable of writing such a book.

He was more of a specialist. And I don't think Brzynski was capable of the kind of diplomatic vanderkind sort of acrobatics and skill and, you know, deception that Kissinger brought to his diplomacy into these negotiations, whether it's in the Middle East or with Moscow. But what I would say about a comparative,

and, you know, of course this is a little bit reductive, they were both complicated figures. But if you're going to compare them, then I'd retreat to that old, not retreat, I would reach for that old Isaiah Berlin comparison between the hedgehog and the fox. The hedgehog knows,

one big thing, how to protect itself. The Fox knows lots of things. It's very cunning and versatile. And that Isaiah Berlin category of hedgehog and fox was often applied to Winston Churchill, Winston Churchill being the hedgehog. He got lots of little things wrong. Well, not so little things wrong. But he got India wrong. He got Ireland wrong. You got the first world war military tactics. My mother's astray. And so the Gallipoli recollections are still alive and well down there. Yeah, well, and that's on Churchill, right? Your mother will, every good Australian will know that. And he got the gold standard wrong when he was Britain's charge of the Chekker.

But he got the one big, really transcendent issue, correct, and that's the Nazi, the existential nature of the Nazi fascist threat, correct when the foxes were mostly on the side of Chamberlain. They'd got all the other stuff right, most of the foxes. And I think if you sort of transpose that on the Kissinger-Brasinski and the Cold War and the Cold War, and the Cold War alone, which was the big issue of the time, then Brzynski is the hedgehog and Kissinger is the fox.

And I do think history sort of bears that one out when you look at what it was that led to the unraveling of the Soviet Union and why treating the Soviet Union as a temporary power that was inevitably going to unravel and therefore taking steps to accelerate that unraveling was the better Cold War strategy than one that assumed it was a permanent feature of the landscape and should actually be, I would hate to use the word appeased because it's so loaded, but should not be provoked within its own sphere of influence,

which was really the Kissinger approach. Right. And if that, again, to speak in highly reductive terms that can be overdone or overapplied, you know, if the Kissinger vision is sort of an attempt, well, to reorient American Cold War strategy, of course, in the late 40s, you know, the Kennan view, the Truman view, is tracks somewhat with what will become the Brzezinski view in time. Kissinger, of course, represents this sort of effort to attack in another direction and sort of impose this Metternichian. What would it look like if we could create the concert of Europe here in the 1960s and 70s

because that seems like the best solution to order? Talk a bit in contrast to the emerging Brzeinsky worldview in the 50s and 60s. And also, how does it, how does he think about, Vietnam and these sort of controversies of Cold War policy before he's close to Hyattano. So that's a really interesting question and a very sort of also formative, well, key period of his life, his early career, really. I mean, he's made his name as a Sovietologist. He's introduced, after having been denied tenure at Harvard, he moves to Colombia and he introduces the study of comparative communism, which is really what I was sort of.

of trying to outline earlier, it's about looking at the tensions behind the iron curtain and teasing them out and looking at ways to, you know, weaponise that as a Cold War tool. And pretty quickly, as the 1960s wears on, the focus of the Cold War shifts from the transatlantic world to Southeast Asia because of the Vietnam War. And Brzezinski gets a junior position in the Policy and Planning Department at the State Department. George Kennan's old perch, but something that's become much more obscure since then and less important. So he's in a pretty obscure position in Foggy Bottom, but he recognizes that LBJ, this is 1966, and in particular, people advising LBJ are getting more and more desperate,

that LBJ is obsessed with Vietnam, it's not going well, and he needs to make a larger foreign policy speech. and Brasinski's written this speech about bridge building and peaceful engagement to Eastern Europe. And he gets LBJ through sort of trickery, basically, which I think I nailed down pretty much banged her rights. He tells LBJ's staff that Bobby Kennedy, who LBJ dreads and fears as his main rival, is going to give a foreign policy speech the next week. And therefore, LBJ attacking LBJ's Cold War, relations with the Soviet Union.

But if LBJ gives this speech, then Bobby Kennedy won't give his speech. And so that's the way. And it's, of course, unfalsifiable this, because Bobby Kennedy didn't give his speech, and LBJ did. And that speech, you know, was basically Brzynski's peaceful bridge building,

and it had consequences on the ground in Western Europe. The West German government fell. Ludwig Ahad's government partly fell because of this LBJ speech, in which he said we have to recognize post-war boundaries, borders. And that went against West German policy because a large part of Germany had been locked off by Stalin and added to Poland to make up for the larger bit of Poland

that the Soviet Union had stolen from Poland. But Bersinski said, look, we've got to be sophisticated here, and we've got to recognize these borders because whilst that German sword hangs over Poland and its borders, and Czechoslovakia, by the way, because there were lots of Sudaten Germans voting, living in West Germany. Whilst that West German sword hangs over these satellite states, they're never going to relax, they're never going to engage us. They're terrified of Germany.

The Second World War wasn't that long ago. So this was a really big speech, a measure of sort of Brasinski's fierce Machiavellian sort of and entrepreneurial spirit, let's put it like that. And it helped change a subject a bit. Vosynski was embarrassed later in life. by having been such a solid supporter of the Vietnam War. And he was a really big supporter of it in pretty conventional sort of terms. It was the consensus amongst what we now call the blob,

you know, right until it started going wrong. So until late 65, 66, most of the people who later came out as doves were conventional hawks. Averill Harriman, you know, Neil Sheen, the people who wrote the famous books from the field as well were in favor of the Vietnam more, and Prisinski was no exception, and he was embarrassed by this later in life.

It changed a bit in the 68 campaign. I mean, he was advising Hubert Humphrey, and he tried to get Humphrey to break with LBJ, but with now that much success. So how does he become intimate with Carter? Tell the story of the trilateral commission in his life when Nixon is in office. Another of these just, you know, very particular,

accidental stories which history is made. And, you know, researching biography reminds you sort of how accidental some of things are. And part of this obscureish, one-term governor of Georgia's selection by Brighinski to be one of the two governors that he wants on the board, well, as a member of the Trilateral Commission, which Briggsky had set up as a rival to Bilderberg, be a sort of international

not so secretive but reputational secretive conferences. And he'd done it with the backing of David Rockefeller. Nelson Rockefeller was, of course, the backer of Henry Kissinger. Each of them had their own Medici, if you like, sponsoring them. But they needed a governor and he selected Jimmy Carter because Jimmy Carter was a New South, the Procival Rights Governor, but also he was big into trade. And the state of Georgia had trade offices in Brussels.

and in Tokyo. And Trinateral was precisely that. Those were the other two poles of it. So Carter was already in 1972 planning to run in 76, and he needed to really do his homework on foreign policy. And so Brzynski sort of became his tutor. Remember, this is a very sort of geopolitical and grand strategic decade. Kisinger is like the celebrity of Washington, D.C.

He is Nixon's sort of rainmaker. And Briggsinski is seen as the Democrats Kissinger. This is our Kissinger. So you have other candidates who are courting Bruginski. You have Ted Kennedy, you have Scoop from all wings, Scoop Jackson, Modell, Birchby, people like that. They were sort of soliciting Briggsky to be there on their campaign. But Carter sort of just announced one day in 1975,

my advisor is Bershinsky. And Bershensky thought, well, why not? You know, he'd wasted his time in the 1972 election. That was like a hopeless cause. He didn't even associate himself with George McGovern. He saw it as a train wreck. Hubert Humphrey had been a real disappointment. He admired the man in 1968,

but just didn't think he was presidential material. Nixon was much tougher. And Carter struck him, you know, particularly in this context, Watergate. You know, there's an Orgyan stench coming out of Washington. And Carter's like the kind of, he's the Mr. Smith goes to Washington candidate of the hour. He is not tainted by it. And so he thinks, why not back this outsider?

And he was a real outsider. You know, I mean, Washington Post kept calling him Jimmy Collins. To keep issuing corrections. And the Times had a famous headline, Jimmy Who? So it was kind of, you know, it was a flutter on the derby in a way that Brzynski makes, but it pays off. And then he becomes the real new Kissinger when Carter is elected. So the major foreign policy issues of the Carter administration that you focus on in your book, at least two of which are direct, their continuations of stories and issues that are very fraught

and very busy under the next administration. That's, of course, the Arab-Israeli issue. and then just this question we've been discussing all along, which is Soviet policy relations with the Soviet Union. And then there's at least one third one. There are no doubt others, but there's a third one that sort of explodes anew in Carter, which is Iran. I want to take each of them in turn.

So for the Israel-Arab question, you know, this is something that following the 73 war, I'll give Kisinger a great deal of credit here, Kissinger's maneuvering through that war to, on the one hand, support Israel, prevent its annihilation. On the other hand, finding a way to end the war that also preserves, well, preserves a large chunk of the Egyptian army, for one,

but then sets up a degree of alienation between the Egyptians and the Soviet Union. It creates this environment where clearly there's some sort of rapprochement that might be achieved one day, some new order, but it's not settled, not finished. That's left for, in some way. I guess it's a casualty of Watergate.

How does Carter and Britschinsky take the issue from where they inherit it to, of course, famously the Camp David Accords? That's a really good way of presenting what they inherited, because this is one area where Carter and Briggsinsky do represent a continuation from Kissinger with Nixon then Ford on the Middle East. And Kissinger has left a situation ripe for four. further development. You get two very different characters picking this up, Carter leading that. This is not something that Brizinski needed to push Carter on. And he had this very Sunday

school preacher sort of idea that I want to bring peace to the biblical lands. Bersinski had a slightly different motive, more Kisangerian, actually, which is, look, we've got to prevent the Arab world drifting into the Soviet camp. And in order to sort of show them we're with them. We need to bring a settlement about here to the Arab-Israeli dispute. We need to drain some of the poison here and first on the list has to be picking up from where Kissinger had sort of teed them up. And that's Egypt recognition of Israel, the first Arab normalization of relations with Israel. But we need to address the Palestinian issue, not so much to state. But they did talk about creating a Palestinian homeland. And the camp David talks that then ensued,

these 13 days of extraordinary intense negotiations between Carter, Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Manakim Begin of Israel, you know, does produce this agreement, two-part agreement that does kind of shock on all the world. It's not, you know, they had radio silence at Cam David for 13 days. It's obviously no Wi-Fi or cell phones. So nothing was leaking out. And if it had, it wouldn't have happened this deal. I mean, it's a real measure of how much more difficult that is to do diplomacy in today's world, I think, to show that Cam David would not be possible.

And so we get this amazing deal. The second part of which unravels, that is namely the steps towards a five-year plan to create a Palestinian homeland. And the unraveling of part two is, I think, what leads to Sadat's assassination a few years later. He's held up by radicals as being responsible for selling the Palestinian people. Indians down the river, et cetera. But it was ever that's a landmark deal. And Brasinski was sort of second fiddle. He didn't drive this.

This was Carter's project. Carter's micro-managed it. And Brasinski was an able lieutenant. And the most able part of his lieutenantcy, as it were, is he was the Begin whisperer. Began was also raised in Poland, but was Polish-Jewish. And so Carter and Began really didn't like each other. Bruginski got along with Began. and had a long, long conversations with them

and helped sort of diffuse moments where it could have broken down. And that's a really fascinating chapter in the Carter administration that shouldn't be forgotten because we're on a continuum here. I mean, this is a long saga and a very tragic one on all sides,

but history isn't irrelevant here, even today in 2025. The Soviet question, not one of pure continuity, substantially more complicated. You know, what they inherit, I mean, Ford complicates things a little, but only a little. They inherit this Kissinger-driven, but very much Nixon-led. I mean, there are ways in which Nixon, I think this has been correct in recent years,

but there are ways in which Nixon doesn't get enough credit for the Nixon presidency. He's so diminished by the end of it that, you know, we don't have a constitutional position in the United States for a prime minister. But Kissinger really was a kind of prime minister by the end of, as far as foreign policy was concerned, by the end of the Nixon administration. That said, Richard Nixon, as I don't need to tell you, had a very strong strategic vision of his own that it happened to accord with Pistinger's. So we're in this process of detain, of rapprochement, of accepting that the Soviet Union's here to stay. And there are all sorts of policy implications of that, arms control, et cetera. How does the counter-revolution, as it were, proceed?

What are the major complications? And in particular, you know, this issue of human rights, which was sort of anathema to the Nixon-Kissinger team, this great distraction that, you know, early neo-conservatives like Scoop Jackson keep raising to spoil all the good work that Nixon and Ford and Kissinger are trying to do. How does that fit into everything?

It's, again, really interesting context here, because detente is waning, you know. It's no longer, you know, held up as, this sort of major diplomatic change of the weather that had been seen, you know, as recently as 73, 74. By 75, it's not just that Watergate's poisoning domestic politics. It's the shini's going off this rapproch more with Moscow that Kissinger had orchestrated, but Nixon had very much should have driven, as you rightly say. And you've got the rise of the Reagan right. And the Reagan Wright sees and depicts Kissinger Ford as basically an appeasing administration.

The Munich analogy starts coming up quite a lot, and so does the Yalta analogy. And the Yalta is applied to the Helsinki Final Act, which was concluded under Ford, in which the West does recognize all post-war international boundaries, including ones behind the Iron Curtain. but also adds in this human rights dimension. The Kissinger downplayed, was actually against his will. It was pushed by some of the Western European members of the Helsinki negotiating team

and persuades Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, look, sign this. It's just small print. I shouldn't worry too much about all this freedom of movement and religion and expression. And all by itself, it's not Carter. Carter picks this up. All by itself, you get these Helsinki watch groups. suddenly mushrooming across Eastern Europe.

And in Moscow, you have the Jewish refusenics. You have Andres Sackerov. And you have some dissidents who get out, like Soljanitsyn, the great writer, with whom Kissinger and Ford refused to meet. He's given his dinner honoring him by the AFL-CIO in the ballroom of Grand Hotel in Washington. And Kissinger and Ford refused to meet Soljitzen because they don't want to provoke the Soviets. So the term appeasement succumbs in.

So you've got this criticism coming Kissinger from the right. And then you've got, you know, from the left, Carter's saying, but there's this human rights. And the right is saying you shouldn't have recognized post-war boundaries, by the way. So the criticism is across the board. And you've got Carter saying, well done for negotiating the human rights bit of Helsinki. Well, for negotiating all of it, but you're ignoring the human rights bit. And you need to take that serious.

I will champion Soljhenitsyn. I will champion Sakharov. I will champion all of these people who are becoming dissident celebrities. And then you get, you know, in 1977 spirit of the times, Amnesty International, winning the Nobel Prize for Peace, Nobel Peace Prize.

So they come in and this is a rupture. It's very much, as you say, not continuity from the Kissinger years. And remember that, Carter has partly won the election by getting Ford, who's punched drunk, Reagan and attacking Emperor right, Carter from the left, getting forward to declare wrongly that Poland is not dominated by the Soviet Union and Romania is not dominated by the Soviet Union. Carter's just handed a softball and he wax it. And that helps lose Ford the election with amongst

what, you know, we used to call ethics, meaning like Polish-Americans, Latvian Americans, etc. in swing states like Michigan and Ohio in what was a very close election. Carter weaponizes human rights. It's an idea whose time has come in his words and in Brasinski's words. And Carter's first state visit outside of America is to Poland,

uncoincidentally. And the immediate deterioration of relations and the sort of fear that detain will be replaced by a new Cold War, you know, becomes the issue in Washington, D.C. And it's a very, there are some strongly different camps in town. One of the camps is under Cyrus Vance at the State Department, who he is Carter's Secretary of State.

Kissinger from the outside is with Vance. He wants to preserve detente. Another camp is, of course, Brasinski's camp, which is we must take the ideological offensive back to the Soviets. This is the first American, administration in many administrations, not to have the albatross of Vietnam around its neck, not to be on the defensive. No more apologies. We're going on the ideological offensive again. And then you've got the sort of committee on present danger. You've got Scoop Jackson. You've got,

you know, the new Reagan wing, the rising Reagan wing of the GOP. You've got Jesse Helms. You've got people like that wanting far stronger, more hawkish policies. So Carter's kind of in the middle of this, and Brzynski wins this legendary battle with Vance and therefore, once removed with Kissingerism, this is a big rupture. And I think in winning this legendary, at the time, really dominant, if you look at the headlines,

to have battle with the State Department, defeating Vance's state, Brasinski's closest ally was Leonid Bresnev, the Soviet leader, who kept behaving according to type, who kept breaking the spirit of the talk, who was fermenting, promoting revolution and insurgencies around the world, in the Horn of Africa, in Central America.

Then, of course, in Vietnam, very nearly invaded Poland, by the way. So Brezhnev really sort of helped deliver Carter finally into the sort of Brzynski worldview. And this sort of Sunday school Carter versus the nuclear submariner Carter that was on each shoulder, one on each shoulder, the hard-headed Carter in the second half of his administration really starts winning out, which is to go back to what we were talking about earlier. That's where there's what I call the predicates of Reaganism are laid.

It's in the second half of Carter's single term. Well, let's keep going with that then. To what extent is Reagan a representative of just continuity from Carter? It's certainly not the commonly held view. To what extent is it break? I mean, on this issue, of human rights, you know, you see obviously some, there are complicated currents here that ultimately are brilliantly expressed in that Jean Kirkpatrick essay, Dictatorships, and Double

Standards, where the Reagan right, of course, is all for hammering the Soviet Union for its human rights violations. But there's a degree of frustration with the left and the left insofar as it's represented in Carter with constantly hammering American allies and partners for their own human rights shortcomings. And Kirkpatrick gives what I take to be the great sort of conservative articulation of the distinction. But, you know, in the end, the embrace of human rights writ large and sort of this liberal vision wins out over Carterism, or excuse me, over Nixonism and Kissingerism. How much does Reagan actually just take from Carter and how much is changed? Reagan and the people around him were really good at politics. No accident. He's from California.

you know, there's an Hollywood sort of element to Reagan. And so I think his marketing of himself and his ability to win elections and his sort of presentation, the way in which he communicated with the American people, was just so vastly superior to Carter, was constantly conflict-written inside his own head. He read as much as Reagan read as little. I mean, well, you know what I mean? I mean, he was as well-read as Reagan was uninterested in reading.

I mean, but he was way too well read for his own good. He read everything. You know, he was known as the Grammarian in chief amongst Britschinsky's crowd, Carter, that is. There was a massive change in rhetoric between Carter and Reagan. And there was talk of the evil empire. And there was this sort of terminology Carter will never use. So there was, and I don't want to underplay, what a big shift that was. But in terms of most of the substance, what Reagan did is he picked up.

up and continued with what he inherited from Carter. And, you know, there were a couple of areas where he was actually more dovish than Carter, one of which pretty obviously was he had promised the farmers of Iowa that they could resume grain exports to the Soviet Union. We find echoes with the day, you know, he had to win his primary, and you couldn't win a primary by promising to uphold Carter's grain embargo on the Soviet Union. So he lifted that. There were one or two things he did more sort of hawkishly in terms of the same.

substance with B1 and B2 bombers and stuff. But he, and he did increase defense spending, but it was from an already increasing curve. So I think history is a little bit unfair, and history tends to sort of, it tends to sort of fit trends that exist independently of administrations into administrations. But, you know, the world also has agency and stuff goes on regardless of who's president. And so some of the trends Reagan inherited were there. And the biggest, I think, the biggest one is that the Soviet Union was in decline. America was back on the ideological defensive.

There was a sort of awakening of nations behind the Iron Curtain. Eventually the Cold War ends in Poland with the victory of the Solidarity Movement in elections there. And Moscow, Gorbachev by then in Moscow and Yaroselsky, the Polish leader in Poland, realizing the game was up. I mean, Solidarity won 99 out of 100 seats. You could not, they might have miscalculated and agreeing to hold these elections, but once they held them, you couldn't really say, okay, we'll offer you the Ministry of Sports. So they just gave the game up at that point.

This is June 1989. They just said, okay, former government. At that point, Cold War ends. And I would sort of, I would trace those seats very much to Carter. But Reagan played a year. I mean, you know, Reagan funded the Mujahideen as well. that really bled the Soviets. He instituted the arms race

that the Soviet Union could no longer afford. He had a bit of luck, but he exploited his luck. Contrary to his advisors in having Gorbachev as his, from 1985 onwards, as his counterpart.

And he and Thatcher, in Britain, they saw in Gorbachev somebody very different. And they really sort of, they did business with him. And that was, you know, that's down to Reagan. That was his judgment. People around him were not advising him to do this.

So I don't want to downplay at all, Reagan's sort of contribution. But I want to sort of, I guess, restore some of the undeserved. You said earlier that, I mean, Nixon, you know, it doesn't get enough credit for the Nixon administration. You know, I think Carter gets too much blame for the Carter administration. We only have a couple of minutes left, but I want to ask you at least two questions. So I'm going to spooch him together and then leave it to you to see how you can navigate it. I want to get your thoughts on Iran and the revolution and Prasinski's important role in that.

But I also want to ask you about his long-term legacy, the thinking he does after the administration, this famous, very interesting book, The Grand Chess Board, in the way in which it sort of points to the present day. Maybe that's the connection between the two elements of my double-barrel question. The Iranian Revolution is still something that we are dealing with today, maybe a bit diminished since October the 7th, but still very much a force in the Middle East. and Brzezinski's just foresight and ability in some ways to sort of spookily intuit what the 21st century was going to evolve into in terms of foreign policy challenges. So take that somewhat in elegant, double-barreled question, as you will, and we'll close out with that.

So Iran was really Carter's greatest blunder. It was his albatross. And Briggs, you know, a pretty big role and bears a lot of responsibility for having misread Iran. I won't go into too much detail about how the CIA and others were also blind. I mean, they had a deal with the Shah of Iran that basically America had these critical listening posts on the Iranian-Soviet border, which monitors Soviet nuclear missile testing. They were key. And in exchange, they didn't spy on Iran domestically.

So they were blind as to this ferment in Iranian streets, and still more so to the source of the ferment. ferment, which was the mosque. They just weren't used to, you know, a revolution. They weren't expecting a revolution to come from the Middle Ages. You know, the revolutions came with Soviet tanks, or at least with Soviet advisors. And so this was just, but they were blindsided and Brzynski as much as any. And when he, after the Shah went into exile, when he persuaded a very reluctant Carter to admit that gives the Shah asylum for medical treatment, who had terminal lymphoma, What he didn't do was something he ought to have done, which is to get the Shah to renounce all claims to the peacock throne,

because that very same Shah had been put back on the throne in 1953 in an Anglo-American coup that was deeply, deeply seminal to all-Iranian politics. And I think Carter knew, rather, as he agreed to admit the Shah, without renouncing the peacock throne, that this would immediately mushroom, or was at least threatened to mushroom into consideration. conspiracy theory, and the embassy would be stormed, which is precisely what happened, and the rest is history. And, you know, I won't go into the failed rescue operation, but that was partially

also Brzynski's responsibility, amongst others. The Pentagon, of course, takes huge share. But, you know, Iran helped sink Carter, and Brzynski bears some responsibility for that. His legacy, I think, is the flexibility of all really, really good strategic thinkers. It's a key sort of element that you've got to have purpose. There's no one having a strategy unless you've got an end goal. And whilst the Cold War lasted, that end goal for Brasinski was ending the Soviet Union. Then it ended. And he went from being this real optimist of the Cold War that America was winning it

and leaving the Soviets in the dust, technological. economically, to being quite a pessimist, that there was too much triumphalism in 1990s, Washington, and the perceived losers of this new world, what he called the axis of the aggrieved, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, they would start to coalesce and pose a problem. At the time, there wasn't much demand for this worldview, for this Jeremiah, this warning. But today it reads like a description just of the present. So I think that was quite a prophetic warning that went unheeded. But I think the sort of larger lesson, and this applies to Kissinger too, is, you know, these were immigrants.

These were incredibly talented, they're disputatious, flawed figures in America's second half of its 20th century and early 21st. And we need thinkers. We need strategists. and it's I sort of subscribe to the Winston Churchill dictum that the further back you look, the further forward you can see that history is always relevant to now and now we're in a more complex world. You can at least imagine with two poles, Moscow and the Soviet Union, some kind of physics,

some kind of equilibrium. When we're in multiple poles, it's harder to stabilize the dangers, if anything greater. the need for strategic thinking is therefore, if anything, greater. And so history is relevant to now. It's not dead. Edward Luce, the book is called Zabig, the life of Zabignev-Bersynski, America's Great Power Profit.

Listeners should read it. They should also follow your work, Edward, in the Financial Times. And this has been a really, really interesting conversation. Thank you so much for making the time. Absolute delight, Aaron. Thank you for inviting. This is a nebulous media. Production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.