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- [00:00]
Martin DeCaro
History as it happens. February 3, 2026. Why Brzezinski matters.
- [00:07]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Columbia University foreign policy expert. Carter's Kissinger during the campaign, the new White House advisor for national security affairs. It will be a time which will demand the very best from us, not only intellectually but morally. Principles are in place at Camp David, Maryland.
- [00:26]
Martin DeCaro
It is assumed the first work of.
- [00:28]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
The Middle east summit will come sometime this morning.
- [00:30]
Martin DeCaro
President Carter Sadat of Egypt, Prime Minister Begin of Israel.
- [00:34]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
President Brezhnev. You and I both have children and grandchildren and we want them to live and to live in peace. Some 60Americans, including our fellow citizen, whom you just saw bound and blindfolded, are now beginning their sixth day of captivity.
- [00:52]
Edward Luce
Inside the US Embassy in Tehran.
- [00:54]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
There are conflicting reports out of Afghanistan, some saying that Soviet forces now are.
- [01:00]
Edward Luce
In complete control of all major towns and highways.
- [01:03]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
That land over there is yours. You'll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail. I do feel strongly that we live in an age in which freedom is in fact the destiny of the future.
- [01:19]
Martin DeCaro
Jimmy Carter's national security advisor was an ardent anti communist, a cold warrior whose goal was to accelerate the breakup of the Soviet empire, who supported Palestinian autonomy and after the Cold War, NATO expansion in Eastern Europe. Zbigniew Brzezinski, intellectual policymaker, grand strategist who tried to influence events whose consequences are felt to this day. His biographer, Edward Luce is next as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [01:50]
Edward Luce
You know, this was the man who was known as Darth vader in the 1970s. He did evolve. It's not quite so simple as he went from being a hawk to a dove, but he did evolve into a more post American way of thinking. He saw the post American world and felt America was not doing enough.
- [02:20]
Martin DeCaro
In early 1980, a US contingent visited a refugee camp on the Pakistan side of the border with Afghanistan. Among the officials was Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, Zhbignief Brzezinski. And he was there to rally the fighters of the anti Soviet jihad.
- [02:36]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
We know of their deep belief in God. We are confident that their struggle will succeed. That land over there is yours. You'll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail and you'll have your homes and your mosques back again. Because your cause is right and God is on your side.
- [03:04]
Martin DeCaro
Unknown at the time was the Carter administration that started the Mujahideen insurgency in the middle of 1979, months before the Soviet invasion This was Brzezinski's policy, as he decades later admitted to an interviewer at a French weekly. He wanted to induce an invasion with the hope of making Afghanistan the Soviet Union's Vietnam. In that interview in 1998, Brzezinski said he did not regret having brought together radical Islamists to kill Communists in 1979. Devoutly religious jihadists were American friends.
- [03:39]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Our cooperation, the cooperation between Pakistan and the United States has to take these changes into account. And we particularly note the vitality of the Muslim world. The United States shares with the Muslim world a deep religious faith, and this provides us with yet another basis for our friendship. It is in this spirit that we come here to consult with our Pakistani friends.
- [04:18]
Martin DeCaro
This is but one drama covered by the Financial Times. Edward Luce in his valuable biography, Izbig the Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet. As Lou says, Brzezinski's ideas and impact have plenty to teach us by offering a window on how the world works and what happens in history and man. Did a lot happen during Brzezinski's four years as President Carter's national security guru? A turning point in the Cold War? As detente was buried in the sands of Ogeden, as Brzezinski formulated the Carter Doctrine to militarize the U.S. presence in the Middle east with its precious oil announced in the 1980 State of the Union address.
- [04:59]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interest of the United States of America. And such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.
- [05:26]
Martin DeCaro
There was also Camp David, the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Panama Canal treaties. But Brzezinski's priority was confronting the Soviet Union through peaceful engagement with the captive nations of the Eastern bloc. They were, in his view, the USSR's Achilles heel, because Poles and Czechs and Hungarians never wanted to be Soviet citizens.
- [05:48]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
And we're experiencing today, before our very eyes, the death of a very powerful ideology, a doctrine that shaped much of the history of this century.
- [06:01]
Martin DeCaro
After the Cold War, Brzezinski backed NATO expansion, but not all the way to Ukraine and Georgia. He also became a critic of how the US was prosecuting the global war on terror, two other issues about which he had plenty to say that continue to make headlines today. My conversation with Edward Luce of the Financial Times next. Remember, you can enjoy ad free listening and get bonus content by tapping. Subscribe now in the show Notes or go to historyasithappens.com Edward Loose. Welcome to the podcast.
- [06:36]
Edward Luce
Pleasure to be with you, Martin.
- [06:37]
Martin DeCaro
You know, when I write a review, I feel like I owe it to the author to do the book justice while being honest as a reviewer. You have any problems with my review?
- [06:47]
Edward Luce
No, I have no dispute. I thought it was a fair review.
- [06:50]
Martin DeCaro
You know, I had problems with my review. Like anyone who writes anything, I want to write more than the editor will allow. Why a biography about this man? Why'd you write it?
- [07:00]
Edward Luce
A number of reasons. One is I've never done a biography before. I always see the best ones that I've read as being not just great accounts and chronicles of the life of a significant person, but also as vehicles to tell larger histories. For me, researching Brzezinski's life was also a way of really delving into the Cold War. Not just the intellectual arguments or the policies, but the sort of broader context of how the Cold War evolved, and the post Cold War for that matter. At a time which I like to call, I didn't coin the phrase, today's time, when we're living through the revenge of Geopolitics history. It's a very instructive tutorial. The family did offer me the diaries he kept, which he was famously parsimonious about sharing. He'd sort of send out little excerpts to researchers here and there, but the diaries were never made available to any researcher, and they made them all available to me with no strings attached reading them. And this was during COVID so there were fewer external activities to distract me. And I started reading them and I realized this is the biography I should should do. And not least because he hadn't had a full English language one. There's a very good one by Justin Weise, a French scholar and diplomat, which has been translated into English, but it didn't benefit from the availability of this first draft of History and other family papers.
- [08:29]
Martin DeCaro
I mean, there's been a million books written about Kissinger, not many about Brzezinski. I mean, the answer to the question is almost self evident. This is a significant person who tried to influence major events. We're still living with the consequences of the events that he lived through that he tried to influence. So, yeah, you wrote a history almost of the 20th century. You know, I'm fascinated by how powerful people exercise power with ideas. You alluded to the Revenge of Geopolitics. Right now there's really serious debates about restraint versus primacy, about the US role in the world, the roles of ideology, understanding motivations of our opponents, all of that is critical. I think that is the life of Brzezinski as well. And you brought that to life not just by doing some really narrow biography of the man. You did write a history, a contextual biography.
- [09:21]
Edward Luce
Thank you. No, I'm glad you picked that one up. It's very hard to know when you're researching a biography, because the actions of that figure have to be set in a context, and it's very hard to know where the boundaries of that context end. So you can really Robert Cairo Ize if you wish, and go on forever. But I felt that part of the value for myself intellectually in doing this biography, but also the benefit to the reader was to set reasonably wide parameters. But you can go. It's a bottomless pit. It's just entirely arbitrary where you decide to draw the line. Say, for example, you're looking at Brzezinski's works as a Sovietologist, which made his name in the 1950s in Harv and Colombia. You read his books, of course, you understand his books. You see what kind of critical reception they got. But you need to read other Sovietologists, but you read all other Sovietologists. I mean, you could literally go. Go on forever reading the entire corpus of that field. That's just sort of one example of, you know, what your judgment is as to how broad should a context be to explain this figure.
- [10:35]
Martin DeCaro
Well, it's really interesting is how you treat the Soviets and how they read Brzezinski, interpreted him, attributed an enormous amount of power to this one person as if he was a puppet master. Let's return to that in a little bit. You know, I actually didn't know a lot about Brzezinski's background or his ideas, so I was interested to learn about that. You also wrote basically a short history of the Carter presidency, how Carter prosecuted the Cold War. So, you know, when I judge the records, not that anyone listens to me, when I judge the records of major figures, I try to avoid great man, evil man, although those labels certainly apply to some people. Rather, I focus on influence. What matters is what endures. In what ways was Brzezinski influential in his time and what endures to this day.
- [11:27]
Edward Luce
So he was influential first and foremost in this context, on Jimmy Carter. It's kind of hard to imagine in today's Washington, D.C. or in any sort of period since the Cold War ended, just how big a figure, not just Kissinger and Brzezinski were, but just how big figures, grand strategists were. George Kennan was an absolute Sort of oracle. Decades after he had any official position and many other sort of brains in the foreign policy world. And in the 70s, the Democrats wanted their own Democratic Kissinger. And Brzezinski was the obvious person for that role. And the relationship he had with Carter, who was pretty obscure, Washington Post would right up to 1976 have to issue corrections for calling him Jimmy Collins, not Jimmy Carter. And there's a famous sort of Jimmy who Johnny Apple headline in the New York Times about the obscurity of this one term governor of Georgia. And essentially he was a student of Brzezinski. He had joined the Trilateral Commission, which Brzezinski set up with David Rockefeller's backing and partnership. He needed a Democratic governor, a Republican governor, and they picked Carter, not the other way around. And Carter used the Trilateral Commission as a crash course in foreign affairs. He was an innocent abroad, if you like. And he recognized that he needed to do a lot of intensive study. Maybe in the same way that somebody like Gavin Newsom is coming to that realization today. But the relationship between Brzezinski and Carter is the key to Brzezinski's real impact on the Cold War. He had an intellectual impact. He had impact in the policy debates in Washington, D.C. and so he was a significant figure. But Carter's election to the presidency made him a decisive figure. That relationship is very important to explaining it. And I think I go into some detail. Highly unlikely partnership between these two very different kinds of men.
- [13:36]
Martin DeCaro
Well, Brzezinski had an influence or an impact as an intellectual in the world of ideas and writing his short books, but as a policymaker, I think it was December 1979 where he really takes over. He gains the upper hand against the State Department. So really the last year or so of Carter's presidency, I think that's where Brzezinski really leaves his mark. Would you agree?
- [13:58]
Edward Luce
Yeah. You're referring to the Soviet invasion. To the invasion of Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I would actually take it back to December 1978. The way I see it is he really wins the second half of Kant's presidency. And December 1978 is when China normalization is concluded. And when SALT 2, which Brzezinski's sort of great rival, I guess, within the administration, Cy Vance, the Secretary of State, fails in his battle to prevent China normalization, which he feared would sink SALT ii, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, talks with the Soviet Union because the Soviets would correctly interpret China normalization as a dagger aimed at the ussr. And it didn't sink SALT ii But SALT II then took a backseat to China normalization. And this was a measure, I guess, of the fact that Brzezinski had sharper elbows than Vance, but also that he had convinced Carter that worthy and lofty though a new nuclear arms limitation agreement would be, it wasn't actually the be all and end all to global peace and stability. It was a nice to have if it was on our terms and the Soviets were being pretty stubborn and foot dragging at this point. Gromyko, the famously stony Soviet foreign minister, was not providing the kinds of concessions that could clinch a deal. And at that point Carter says, okay, go ahead. We're going to normalize with China. So I think it's really the last two years of Carter that Vance begins to periodically offer his resignation. Carter turned them down, but he periodically just kept trying to resign.
- [15:39]
Martin DeCaro
Now let's return to Afghanistan in a bit because that, that will involve the other part of my question there about enduring influence or just unintended consequences of policies. So Brzezinski, even in this great land of opportunity, the United States, a land of immigrants, he's an unlikely figure to become a national security advisor. Born in Poland, although he spent very few years of his life there, I think you said it was only three full years of his life as a child. Family then immigrates to Canada. He has a brilliant mind already as a young man, that is a parent. He somehow winds up as an Ivy League intellectual and a teacher in the United States, where his ideas start to gain attention and gain traction as a Sovietologist. Anyone who's not up on their history, maybe under the age of 35, listening to this, might say, what the hell did we need something called a Sovietologist for? Take us there. Edward Luce. And what were Brzezinski's most important observations about the Soviet Union? He seemed to get certain things right about the big monolith, although it wasn't a monolith. Go ahead.
- [16:47]
Edward Luce
Yeah, he did. I mean, and this is where he excelled as a scholar and I guess as a practitioner. I mean, in diagnosing the weaknesses of the Soviet Union. I mentioned earlier, there's no limits to what you research in terms of trying to get context of the stage and evolution of a significant person's biography. It's very rare in any, any significant person's life that at such a young age that I found with Brzezinski, they declare essentially their life. They lay it all out. And in Brzezinski's case, this was his master's thesis that completed at McGill in Montreal in 1950 when he was 21. And it's called Russo Soviet Nationalism. It looks at what he calls the Soviet Union's Achilles heel, which is the nations nationalities amongst the USSR republics and also the so called, what they called in those days the captive nations, including Poland, that were behind the Iron Curtain, the Warsaw Pact countries. And he said, look, other Sovietologists, meaning people with actual names and 10 years people weightier than this 21 year old master's student. Actual Sovietologists are missing the big picture here. And the big picture here is that this is essentially a Russian empire. Russification is a tool of control, but also a source of deep resentment. And we must weaponize that resentment to stimulate rebellion, dissidents, whatever it might be, from places like Tbilisi and Kiev, et cetera. It was a very bold suprem, extremely arrogant in a way, sort of shot across the bow at prevailing orthodox Soviet studies of that time. In which he also implicitly criticizes the godfather of America's early Cold War strategy, George Kennan. George Kennan had formulated the doctrine of containment to try and prevent the spread of the Soviet border westwards into Europe, but also southwards and eastwards. He said that's all very well, but what we must look at, and Kennan doesn't, is the fact that inside that Iron Curtain there are significant weaknesses. There is a sort of Rube Goldberg contraption, the USSR which we must exploit. And so containment is necessary, but insufficient. We must have an ideological strategy to undermine the ussr. That's the sort of kernel of it. And I say it's unusual because that is the strategy that's sort of still recognizable in 1989 when the Cold War comes to an end.
- [19:23]
Martin DeCaro
Understandable how someone of Polish origin would feel that way. He was right. Brzezinski was right in his analysis, not just of the Poles, but yes, the other Eastern bloc countries. Those people didn't want to be part of a communist empire. Maybe the ruling elites in those countries were on board. But even in Poland that was the least Soviet of the Soviet bloc in the East. And Brzezinski obviously, obviously knew that from his family ties, his family experience.
- [19:48]
Edward Luce
The Catholic Church had not been shut down in the way that sort of religious practice was suppressed in other satellite countries. Agriculture had not been collectivized in the way it had in most other Soviet satellite states and of course within the ussr. And part of the reason for that is Poland was very much a sort of product of Russophobic history, the, the sort of birthplace or rebirth of Poland. This was a stubborn and resistant satellite and the Soviets didn't want to provoke an insurgency against. Against Moscow. And several times in the 50s in particular came close to occupying Poland because it was seen as the recalcitrant child. It was also the largest of the satellite states by far, and therefore the most significant.
- [20:39]
Martin DeCaro
So he found containment inadequate to the task. He said rollback. He called it the hollow militancy of rollback, referring to 1956, Hungary, 68, Czechoslovakia. He also bought into the so called betrayal at Yalta. FDR was not at his best. Stalin did get the better of him, but the Red army had already occupied. I know I'm bouncing around the chronology here, Edward, but the Red army was already in Poland. There was no way to get it out. I just mentioned these things because this is. We're trying to get to where Brzezinski came down on how to speed along the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, which he said was, as you just explained, was weak. There were internal weaknesses there to exploit. He believed the US had a responsibility, not just an ability to do this. But he wasn't a warmonger. You know, he did criticize the policy of rollback, the hollow militancy, but he wasn't also ready to send in the armed forces into Czechoslovakia either in the 60s. Sorry for this very long setup here, Edward, but tell us, what was his plan to speed along the end of the Soviet Union?
- [21:43]
Edward Luce
I think it was FDR's, in Polish sort of hearts and minds. It was FDR's willingness to accept the implicit spheres of influence doctrine that offended the poll or worried the Poles, and which Brzezinski sort of became a great critic of. He believed that this should not just be passively accepted as part of a, as you say, monolithic Soviet bloc, which was neither monolithic nor legitimate in his view. And his strategy was. You had John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. He formulated this doctrine of rollback liberation of the captive nations, as it were, which of course in practice would have meant nuclear war. And therefore it was all or nothing. It was just a sort of rhetorical stance that sounded hawkish but did nothing to save the Hungarians in 1956. And indeed, John Foster Dulles issued a very pro forma sort of statement, tut tutting, the Soviet invasion of Hungary and nothing more. And that was the hollow militancy that Brzezinski was trying to point out. His alternate strategy was called peaceful bridge building, peaceful engagement, not necessarily in the first instance with Moscow, but with the satellites. In other words, very much not Seeing this as a monolith, because if it's a monolith, you just go to Moscow, you don't bother with anybody else. If you see it as a mosaic, well then you stimulate ties, peaceful ties, commercial loans, some technology sharing, sports events, youth exchanges, student programs, just to sort of loosen Moscow's grip on the satellites, but also to reduce Moscow's neuralgia about America's subversive aims. And so there was an inherent contradiction in there which he constantly grappled with. But this was the strategy that JFK nominally picked up and LBJ a little bit more. And Brzezinski did. He wrote speeches for jfk. I don't overstate his closeness to him, but JFK did consult him as a candidate and as a senator. And lbj, he got a pretty obscure job in the LBJ administration. Brzezinski being Brzezinski, which is relentlessly entrepreneurial, aggressively self promoting, Brzezinski being Brzezinski, he managed to get LBJ to adopt in a very significant speech this strategy in 1966. And we can talk about that speech if you like, but it was the alternative to rollback to liberation.
- [24:20]
Martin DeCaro
He was relentless, as you say. He was arrogant, sometimes lacked diplomatic or finesse or the tact necessary in the halls of power, but sounds like he's a dovish hawk or a hawkish dove wants to speed along. The end of the Soviet Union sees it as illegitimate. At least the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe where his home country is captive, peaceful bridge building. Am I right to say that's hawkish dove or dovish hawk? I'm not sure where he comes down in all of this.
- [24:48]
Edward Luce
I find it hard to classify. I mean, he was a conventional hawk on Vietnam till a little bit before the tet offensive in 1968. And I think for the rest of his life he was pretty embarrassed about how late he was to understanding the logic of the Vietnam War, the self defeating logic of the domino theory as applied in Southeast Asia. He didn't speak Vietnamese or Thai or Cambodian in the sense that he did speak Polish and Russian and his wife was from Czechoslovakia. So he didn't have anything like the intuitive feel and grasp and therefore strategic mouse applied to other parts of the world that he did in Eastern and Central Europe. Is it hawkish or dovish? It's hard to say. There are periods in his career, particularly when he was Carter's national security Advisor, where he was identifiably the hawk within the administration. But relative to the Committee on Present Danger and the emerging neocons you know, the Scoop Jackson people, the Paul Nitzes, the Paul Wolfowitzes, those types. He was very much not a hawk. So it just depends, you know, it's a relative term, isn't it? He wasn't a dove either. So this is where these labels are not that illuminating. He was a pragmatist who had a burning desire to see the end of the USSR by whatever practical tools necessary. And he did not see open, direct sort of kinetic military escalation as a practical tool.
- [26:22]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, we're having these debates today. Foreign policy restraint versus interventionism or primacy? What does it mean to be a realist or an idealist? I found that Brzezinski was hard, if not impossible to pigeonhole. Was he a primacist?
- [26:38]
Edward Luce
It depends which stage of his career that you identify. I mean, if you go to the last decade or two of Brzezinski's life, he is constantly engaging with the fact that America's relative decline is in process and inevitable and that its primacy is a passing thing and that we must look to construct a world that suits our interests in a post American era. So he did recognize, you know, the, the passage of history, the rise of the east, the shift from an Atlantic to a Pacific world. But he wanted to sustain American primacy. He wasn't an American exceptionalist. He didn't see providence as, you know, sort of guiding America's role in history, but he pragmatically saw his adoptive country as best place to prevent another grand Eurasian empire in the world island of Eurasia from threatening American liberty and that of its allies in Europe. So to that extent, yes, he was a primacist, but I think he was a fairly realistic one. He saw a sell by date, a fairly near term sell by date on America's ability to shape the world. And he had been a really lacerating critic of unipolar Americanism, of unipolar American foreign policy in the Bush Jr administration and to some extent even in the 1990s after the Cold War.
- [28:04]
Martin DeCaro
That was the so called unipolar moment. I'm not sure how long it lasted back to the 1970s. Brzezinski reaches the White House in 77. He's becoming more and more critical of detente. So I mentioned Kissinger before, who was a primacist. He did not want to rule the world in an accommodation 5050 with Brezhnev, which was Brezhnev's idea. Detente is tricky. Kissinger 1975, Helsinki Final Act. Recognizes the borders of Eastern Europe, meaning That's the Soviet sphere. Yet at the same time Kissinger was not interested in allowing Soviet influence to enter the Middle East. There's something else going on there too which where I think Carter and Brzezinski really seize upon. I think this is their most important positive foreign policy legacy. The human rights was at the second or third basket of the Helsinki Final Act. So yes, you do get the recognition of the illegitimate Soviet borders in Eastern Europe but you can then undermine Soviet power or the Soviet control by backing the human rights. The dissidents behind the Iron curtain like Czechoslovakia's Charter 77 wasn't a question. Ed, I'll try to pose a question here. Why don't you just talk about Brzezinski's criticisms of detente and how he was able to use that third basket of the Helsinki Final act to undermine Soviet control.
- [29:25]
Edward Luce
It's very interesting the debates that Brzezinski and Kissinger had in the 70s because they were very close, they hadn't really become enemies. When Kissinger was selected as Nixon's national security advice, to everybody's surprise, they were quite close colleagues. They'd meet a lot, debate a lot, exchange a lot of correspondence which is fascinating to read. And Kissinger felt the sting of Brzezinski's criticisms as the 1970s wore on because he believed detente was basically peaceful bridge building. Brzezinski's criticism was its peaceful bridge building to Moscow. It's bipolar peaceful bridge building which is quite different to what he was recommending. He had a more subversive bridge building to Eastern Europe.
- [30:08]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah. To Warsaw, to Prague.
- [30:11]
Edward Luce
Exactly. I guess to some extent this bespeaks of Kissinger's desire for order and stability between great powers. His sort of Metternich Castlereagh 1815 Congress of Vienna view of the world. And Brzezinski had a little people, a smaller nation sort of perspective, being Polish in origin. So there is that. There are several ways I could take this. Your question, it was open ended.
- [30:35]
Martin DeCaro
Too many questions in the question. His criticisms of detente and how those kind of meshed with how he and Carter used the stipulations in the Helsinki Final act to support the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain.
- [30:48]
Edward Luce
So the recognition of post war boundaries, including you know, Poland's boundaries with Germany and Poland's boundaries with the Soviet Union, this was something that Brzezinski had been strongly supportive of as a way of relaxing countries like Poland that Germany wasn't going to be revascist and take back the bits of Poland that It had lost in 1945. That was part and parcel of what Brzezinski all along wanted. And it was the key piece of the Helsinki final act. The third basket on human rights was something Western Europeans backed by people like Brzezinski insisted on. Kissinger was very reluctant. But it was an allied process, not just an American driven one. And so the third basket was included in. Kissinger kept reassuring Brezhnev, don't worry about it. It's small print. It's just pro forma. You're not gonna, you're not gonna have to actually permit freedom of expression, association, movement and religion. They accepted Kissinger's assurances. Carter then comes in, as long as.
- [31:53]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
I am president, the government of the United States will continue throughout the world to enhance human rights.
- [32:01]
Edward Luce
Brzezinski's urging says no, no, we must take these literally. And I don't want to give the impression Brzezinski invented the human rights thing out of nothing. You know. That third basket was concluded in 1975 by the Ford administration.
- [32:15]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
But it is important that you recognize the deep devotion of the American people and their government to human rights and fundamental freedoms and thus to the pledges that this country conference has made regarding the freer movement of people, ideas, information.
- [32:36]
Edward Luce
And signed by Gerald Ford. So it was there for plucking before Carter was even inaugurated. You had this ferment going on in Eastern Europe. You had these Helsinki watch groups, particularly in Czechoslovakia. I mean Vaclava Havel was really beginning to make his name as a nuisance. But in Poland, inside the USSR were Jewish refuseniks. Andrei Sakharov was becoming a very, very famous prisoner of conscience. 1977 was when amnesty International gets awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. So you can see that this is an idea whose time has come, which was how Brzezinski phrased it. And he used Helsinki's third basket to really stimulate dissidents behind the Iron Curtain and provoke and annoy the Soviets who had taken Kissinger at his wor and believed that America was breaking its word. Non interference in each other's political systems.
- [33:34]
Martin DeCaro
That was Kissinger's amoral approach to foreign policy, at least in this instance. So Brzezinski the pragmatist. But then, and this is where I led my review of your book when it came to the weak underbelly or Soviet support for clients in the developing world then called the third World. This is where I was puzzled by Brzezinski's stridency. He was an anti communist and as a pragmatist I was surprised, he being the pragmatist, I guess I'm one too surprised by his stridency about the so called arc of crisis, almost a psychological domino theory. So just to give everybody a brief history lesson here, there's a war that broke out between, what was it, Somalia and Ethiopia over a desert, the Ogeden Desert. And Brzezinski was annoyed that the United States didn't stand up to the Soviets when they came to rescue. Well, both of those countries were Soviet clients at one time or another. They switched sides. It's a whole mess. We don't have to get into it here. And then he also thought that the United States wasn't strong enough in other areas. And that is why areas of Soviet influence is what I'm talking about in this arc of crisis. And that is why in Brzezinski's view, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. They were emboldened by US weakness, I guess, in his view. I think he was way off there. What's your verdict?
- [34:57]
Edward Luce
Yeah, I don't think US weakness was what caused the Soviets to invade Afghanistan. I think it was Soviet fear of American strength, which Brzezinski had been busy stoking. He was a supporter of a non kinetic, an ideological supporter. But I went through, through various Pashto and Dari radio programs of the insurgency in the Afghan countryside against the pro Soviet government there in Afghanistan, in Kabul, he stoked Soviet paranoia. He didn't, certainly did not create the insurgency, but he was pleased to see it. And he, with some sang froid, saw it as the potential to give the Soviet Union their own Vietnam, their own quagmire. Of course, Afghanistan bordered the Soviet Union and it bordered all these Muslim republics, these secular Muslim republics in which mosques had been pretty much systematically closed since 1917, but which still had Muslim populations, some of whom practiced and felt to be the Islamic part of the Brzezinski Achilles heel thesis, which is these people feel like they're essentially governed by an atheist Moscow, by a Russian empire. And so he sought to stimulate that and the work, by the way, in the early Carter administration he did sort of on the quiet in a clandestine way. He did step up various support programs for broadcasting inside the Soviet Union to stir ferment. And so Brezhnev needed no second invitation. I think the Soviets would have invaded Afghanistan anyway. And I think, I think they had a paranoia that it was about to fall into the American camp. And even, I mean, remember, Brezhnev's pretty old, he's on a lot of medication. He drinks a lot of vodka. He's often slurring Politburo. Minutes from that time are kind of embarrassing. And the Soviets are trying to shield from the world just how degenerating Brezhnev's health condition is. But. So he's a paranoid old man.
- [37:00]
Martin DeCaro
He said he was semi catatonic at this point in his life.
- [37:04]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
He was.
- [37:05]
Edward Luce
And he'd have his moments, as people suffering from degeneration do, but he was going in one direction. So I think he would have invaded, and I think history shows he would have invaded the Afghanistan anyway for fear of American expansionism. You know, Brzezinski was wrong to say that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a product of American weakness. It was a product of mutual misunderstanding, I guess, a sort of version of the security dilemma where each is assuming the worst of the other and the ubiquity and omniscience of the other, and no agency on the part of people in their part of the world, whether they be in the Ogaden or in the Hindu Kush. The Cold war was totalizing.
- [37:50]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
U.S. national Security Adviser Brzezinski flew to Pakistan to set about rallying resistance.
- [37:57]
Edward Luce
He wanted to arm the mujahideen without revealing America's role.
- [38:02]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
On the Afghan border near the Khyber Pass, he urged the soldiers of God to redouble their efforts. We know of their deep belief in God. We are confident that their struggle will succeed. That land over there is yours. You'll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail and you'll have your homes and your mosques back again because your cause is right and God is on your side.
- [38:48]
Martin DeCaro
Sergei Radchenko, in his excellent book To Run the World, deals with the Soviet the decision making. Was it strategy, as you say, with the weak underbelly, the weak Muslim underbelly. We need to put down this Muslim insurgency and restore a communist regime or solidify a communist regime. Or was it ideology, communist ideological reasons, or a combination of both? I think Radchenko says it was a combination of both, but overlaid with prestige. The Soviet Union, no matter how bad a shape the country was in, could never really say no to its clients. So I guess Brzezinski was right in a way. But to get to the next and related subject here in my review, I start off with where Brzezinski, many years later, is given an interview with a French weekly magazine. And the interviewer asks him, you know, now that we know what's happened. It was the 1993 World Trade center bombing Interviewer says, do you regret having brought together because the COVID aid to the Mujahideen starts under Carter, not Reagan. Do you regret having brought together all these Islamists in Afghanistan? Money, weapons, legitimacy, the whole thing. And Brzezinski responds, regret what? What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War? Ed, is it fair to judge Brzezinski for not foreseeing the unintended consequences of US support for the Mujahideen?
- [40:19]
Edward Luce
I mean, it's pretty easy to paint here, man, Carter as being naive about the Frankenstein they'd created. I mean, they did appeal to the Organization of Islamic Countries sort of more broadly to fight against the atheist Soviet invaders. And they said, we both have God, the Soviets are atheist. And it sounds from a post 911 or post 93 perspective to be either very naive or cold bloodedly pragmatic. And I suspect, you know, Carter's the first and Brzezinski is the second. He was dubbed even after 911 as the Godfather of Al Qaeda. And I think that is a little bit unfair. Yeah, that's unfair because Al Qaeda doesn't form until the late 80s later on into the Reagan era. But sure, they stoked the Mujahideen against a secular pro Soviet regime and then a secular Soviet dictatorship.
- [41:13]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
The United States shares with the Muslim world a deep religious faith and this provides us with yet another basis for our friendship.
- [41:27]
Edward Luce
Even after 9 11, Brzezinski was kind of dismissive. He said, look, the trade off here. And he was a great critic, by the way, of how the Bush administration conducted the global war on terror up to and including of course, the invasion of Iraq. He was a great critic of that as being an overreaction that would blow back in America's face to what really is a police problem, which is dealing with terrorism rather than a geopolitical problem. And I would say he'd at least get in terms of six of one, half a dozen or the other, he'd at least get half of that argument in his favor, perhaps more. But yet he was unapologetic about unleashing what was a bunch of fundamentalists.
- [42:06]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
A Soviet occupied Afghanistan threatens both Iran and Pakistan and is a stepping stone to possible control over much of the world's oil supplies. The United States wants all nations in the region to be free and to be independent. If the Soviets are encouraged in this invasion by eventual success and if they maintain their dominance over Africa, Afghanistan and then extend Their control to adjacent countries, the stable, strategic and peaceful balance of the entire world will be changed.
- [42:49]
Martin DeCaro
So one strength of your book is that the events you cover don't feel like they're in the distant past. We're still witnessing the ripple effects, the consequences of events such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was not just an event, it was a process still playing out today. Iranian revolution. I think it's self evident as to why that's important. The balance between. And this is an issue. Was an issue relevant then, it's still relevant today. Trying to balance between emphasis on human rights and then power politics, geopolitics, national interests in Iran. Brzezinski wanted the Shah to spill blood, to crack down, because the Shah was too important to have him, you know, run out of his fiefdom and so the United States would lose its island of stability in the Middle East. What's your take on Brzezinski there and why he backed the Shah for so long, as did Carter. And they had terrible information. They didn't know what was going on on the ground there, but go ahead, Ed.
- [43:49]
Edward Luce
Lots of terrible information, one of which lack of knowledge about the terminal condition the Shah was in, the lymphoma he was suffering. Also about the fact that the Shah being paranoid, like many autocr, had kept his military at each other's throats. The last thing you could expect was them to unify and crack down. There was so much deliberate distrust by design that a coherent military response such as the one Brzezinski was calling for was inconceivable. That's imperfect. Well, that's wrong information he had. And then of course the fact that the source of this ferment, the real threat, came from the mosques, not from pro Soviet, not from the Left Party, the Tudeh Party, not from the kinds of revolutionary insurgents that Brzezinski had been dealing with all his life, but from a theocratic source. That's something that he missed as well. So he was ignorant about Iran. He was in good company. Even the US Ambassador in Tehran, William Sullivan, he was ignorant about what was going on.
- [44:52]
Martin DeCaro
He had no clue what was going on until very late. And he was there.
- [44:56]
Edward Luce
He was there. But he took sort of a three month vacation in 1978 in the summer, because he said, it's just stable as far as the eye can see. The DIA and the CIA, I mean, so the whole apparatus was really caught with its pants down and Brzezinski was no exception. Quite sort of fascinating reading some of the memos that Brzezinski hurriedly got assembled to instruct Carter on what the difference is between a Shia and a Sunni. There was just no understanding of that. So I did interview Carter on this. You know, he post deceased Brzezinski, to put it that way. And he said the great letdown, the great failing in Brzezinski's service to me was on Iran. And I think that's correct and I think it resonates today. There was a famous dinner that Brzezinski had with the Shah's ambassador, legendary ambassador in Washington, Ardeshi Zahedi, to commemorate the 18th birthday of the Shah's son, Reza Pahlavi. That's when a lot of this plotting was like, how can we get the military to crack down on these protesters? Is happening. And that same 18 year old Reza Pahlavi is now 65. And some of the demonstrators, although our information is so murky, it's so opaque, but some of them allegedly would like to see this same man 47 years later almost to the day. By the way, the Shahleif, I think it was 1-16-79. So 47 years almost to the day. And his son is now 65 and is potentially either, you know, the figurehead of a post theocratic regime or the Ahmed Chalabi complete sort of fantasy that we in Washington hold. We will see. But you're right, history doesn't die, it goes on. And ripple effects. Ripple effects are very visible in a lot of the issues that Brzezinski and Carter were grappling with in the 70s.
- [46:53]
Martin DeCaro
I got one more question for you. I neglected to bring up Brzezinski's admirable position on the Israeli Palestinian conflict. And he was in favor of Palestinian autonomy and just could not take how Menachem Begin was a fanatic in that whole process. The Camp David accords. People should read your book. You do a great job with your treatment of Camp David and Brzezinski's ideas there and how he was unfairly pummeled as an opponent of Israel simply because he wanted to be even handed with the Palestinians. There's too many issues here in my review. I couldn't get to them in our 45 minute interview here. We're not going to get to everything that's all right. People should read the book. Last thing. NATO expansion. Was Brzezinski for it? Against it? Maybe for it. For certain countries. And how did he feel, if at all, about the argument that NATO expansion is provocative to Russia?
- [47:43]
Edward Luce
He was aggressively for it. And when Clinton signed that first data Expansion, the accession of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999. Brzezinski was the first person he thanked. And it had been a reluctant Clinton who'd been sort of persuaded via, of course, the arguments also of his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who had been Brzezinski's PhD student in Colombia in, in the 60s. So a protege, Oborzinski. He was aggressively in favor of NATO expansion, there's no doubt about it. He was, though, a lacerating critic of the NATO 2008 summit towards the end of the Bush Cheney administration, in which Ukraine and Georgia are promised at some future unspecified date, NATO membership, which he saw as an invitation for Russian aggression. As we welcome new NATO allies, we.
- [48:40]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Also affirm that the door to NATO membership remains open to other nations that.
- [48:44]
Edward Luce
Seek it in the Balkans and beyond.
- [48:48]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Here in Bucharest, we must make clear that NATO welcomes the aspirations of Georgia.
- [48:53]
Edward Luce
And Ukraine for their membership in NATO.
- [48:56]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
And offers them a clear path forward.
- [48:59]
Edward Luce
To meet that goal. That window, however long it lasts, is when you invade these countries and sure enough, you know, you have, you had Russian adventurism pretty much straight away in Georgia. He evolves on this question and he actually ends at the point in an op ed in my newspaper 2014, following the annexation of Crimea, saying that Ukraine should be Finlandized, it should be a buffer state, it should not join NATO. That would be too provocative. But it should be a de facto sort of part of the West. And I don't think he mentions membership of the European Union, but implicitly that was the kind of, of status he was envisaged. His mind evolves pragmatist on this question.
- [49:42]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, that strategic empathy towards Russia. You don't have to agree with how the Russian establishment feels about being threatened by NATO. NATO is a defensive alliance, but from their point of view. So it sounds like he had some strategic empathy there, understanding that Poland, Czechoslovakia, or I guess it was the Czech Republic, Hungary, the first three, the late 90s, that's one thing. Russians didn't like it, they couldn't stop it. But when you're talking about Ukraine and Georgia, that's a whole different ballgame when it comes to Moscow's perspective. And he understood that.
- [50:13]
Edward Luce
And I mean, I don't attribute this to sort of wistfulness of your autumn years. I don't think, you know, I don't think his mind really, I don't think it deteriorated too dramatically, although slowed as he got in his last few years. But he did increasingly look to the post America, post primacy world, world and to the sort of transcendent questions, if you like existential ones, including cyber warfare. I mean, I guess his stance on AI would naturally flow from that where he alive today. But of course, climate change and international terrorism and organized crime. That there were certain issues that posed such collective threats to humanity that the US and Russia and China and others, but particularly those three needed to find a modus vivendi. And he talked a lot about that in his final years. And I think that does sort of bespeak of an evolution. You know, this was the man who was known as Darth vader in the 1970s by the Kennedy sort of wing of the Democratic Party. He did evolve. It's not quite so simple as he went from being a hawk to a dove because he was only a hawk relative to certain parts of the political spectrum in the Cold War he was. But if you took another vantage point. But he did evolve into a more post American way of thinking. He saw the post American world and felt America was not doing enough to plan for that world, to shape that world. Is the American empire crumbling?
- [51:44]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
No, I don't think it's crumbling, but I think it's lost its sense of direction. I think Obama has been trying to restore it, but his promise has been better than his performance. And as a consequence, I think there is a sense of unease in the world at large about the American role. And I think there is a sense of uncertainty and anxiety in the country, which, as I've just said, is very vulnerable to sudden shock effects. What do you feel is the most important thing you've accomplished in your life professionally? I'm going to leave that to other others to appraise. I know what I've been doing. I know the challenge that I faced. I know the outcome of it. I think I know that I was part of it. But that's about all I want to say. In general terms, then, is there anything you would like to achieve still?
- [52:34]
Edward Luce
Is there something on your agenda that's outstanding?
- [52:37]
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Well, to the extent that I can, I would like to continue influencing the way we look at the world and anticipating the kind of things we ought to be doing in the world that are, on the one hand, as I used these words before, morally imperative, but on the other hand, strategically desirable and attainable because the world is changing. And I used the word complexity a second ago. It is becoming more complex. And I would like to help Americans understand that they need to act intelligently within complexity is greater than ever before.
- [53:15]
Martin DeCaro
And that was Bigny F. Brzezinski in an interview with Al Jazeera English in 2010. He died in 2017. On the next episode of History As It Happens. When is it culturally appropriate? When is it historically accurate to invoke fascism or Nazism? When making comparisons to the creeping authoritarian in American society today? That's next. As we report History as it Happens, remember, you can sign up for my free newsletter, go to Substack and search for History as it Happens.