← Morning Joe
Morning Joe
BONUS EPISODE: What today’s leaders can learn from Zbigniew Brzezinski
00:23:50
Ed Luce joins Joe Scarborough to chat about his critically acclaimed biography “Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet”. Ed explains the strategic brilliance and character complexities of this foreign policy giant, as well as what America’s leaders can learn from Brzezinski’s legacy.
Loading summary
Transcript62 lines
- [00:00]
Jen Psaki
Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start. Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to don't know the difference between matte paint, finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is. With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro, you just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates and read reviews all on the app. Download Today.
- [00:32]
Ed Luce
FOREIGN.
- [00:43]
Joe Scarborough
Good morning, Joe. In the afternoon we have with us Ed Luce. He's a U.S. national Editor and columnist for the Financial Times and also the author of Zabig the Life of Zabingu Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet. Ed, thank you so much for being with us.
- [01:00]
Ed Luce
It's a delight. Joe.
- [01:02]
Joe Scarborough
ED the reviews for Zabig have just been extraordinary. Over the top, I must say, though, the I was only concerned about one review and that was my wife. And from the first read through, she has just, she has been so moved by it and, and, and also so moved by the the work that you did, the depth of the character, showing not only the extraordinary sides of her father, but also the challenging sides as well. Talk about your journey in writing this book and where it's brought you.
- [01:40]
Ed Luce
Well, I have to say, I mean, Mika's response and that of her brothers Mark and Ian has been, you know, a particular delight because there were uncomfortable things in there and, you know, they did take a sort of gambling in handing these papers and diaries and things to me with, you know, without any conditions, knowing that they would read it at the same time as everybody else. And so, you know, their response to this has been particularly gratifying because, you know, not everything in there about their dad was necessarily comfortable reading. And that kind of gets your question, the, the endeavor of trying to get to the bottom of a character, the wellsprings of that person's life, to really explain their journey and who they became. That is a relentlessly intrusive and inquiring and nosy business that a biographer undertakes, but it's also an absolutely gripping one. It's sort of like researching a historic detective novel reconstructing Spig Brzezinski's life and the extraordinary sort of narrative of that life from interwar Europe, from Warsaw, where he was born in the 1920s, to the first few months of Trump's first administration, when he died in May 2017. The nature of the story of his life history is quite gripping.
- [03:17]
Joe Scarborough
And Mika turned everything over to you, but there was one letter that her Father wrote, it was a very harsh, tough letter to Mrs. Brzezinski, basically telling her, you know, fix your hair. And Mika, I remember Mika telling me that she showed you the letter and then she burned the letter in front of you, saying you could have everything but this. And you just smiled politely. And I read the book and I said to Mika, you go, you do know Ed put the letter in the book. So you may have thought you burned the one letter out of the millions of documents. I said, but he had a copy of it and he put it in the book. And she laughed. She goes, yeah, I know. She said, that's just how true he was. His quest to get to the bottom of my father's character. And, and you did that. And, you know, he. He was a brilliant, brilliant strategist who served in one administration. And I thought the Economist Review, talking about how he was brilliant, but he was also too blunt at times, often worked against his political interests, as, as opposed to Henry Kissinger, who knew how to play all sides.
- [04:39]
Ed Luce
Your late father in law, Joe was not. He wasn't a charmer, although the more you got to know him, I think the more you realize there were much softer characteristics inside. But his exterior was, you know, there was always something of the Polish cavalry charge in Brzezinski's character. I mean, he would go for people he thought were less intelligent than him and that, you know, cover most of humanity and not spare people's feelings. And I think Kissinger was very different in that regard. It was quite funny, one of the interviews that Kissinger gave me for this biography, and he was probably 98, 99 by this point, he said something I knew full well not to be true, which he said, Mr. Luce, I read your columns before anybody else every single morning, and I knew for a fact that wasn't true. But a little piece of you is going out, but you, you know, he's really got a point. He's obviously a talent spotter. And so seduction and flattery work, even when the object of that flattery is fully aware it's blowing smoke. Brzezinski wasn't like that. He had the misfortune, I guess, in terms of the inevitable comparisons between Kissinger and Brzezinski, of having served a president who's been sort of written off Jimmy Carter and only one term, whereas Kissinger served. Served two terms, so eight years, double the time. And he served Nixon, who, regardless of what you think of his domestic sort of criminality and Watergate, et cetera, was a brilliant foreign policy president. And so that's a misfortune in the comparison between the two because Brzezinski's impact on American foreign policy was greater.
- [06:33]
Joe Scarborough
Yeah. And that's one thing the Economist review brought out and others have brought out is that that on so many subjects, Brzezinski was right, Kissinger was wrong. On, on talk about detente. Kissinger's detente versus Brzezinski's confrontation and, and, and Dr. Brzezinski's understanding that, that the Soviet Union was not what Kissinger, Nixon and everybody else thought it was. And he believed that the wall could be brought down.
- [07:15]
Ed Luce
Absolutely did. And this was a sort of core difference in their strategies. Kissinger believed in Detron because he thought the Soviet Union would be around forever. And indeed, more than that, he thought the Soviet Union was going to overtake the United States technologically. And this had been a sort of feeling that was doing the rounds since 1957, since the Soviets launched the first satellite, Sputnik. And Kissinger really held onto that through the 1970s. And Brzezinski as a Sovietologist at Harvard in the 50s, 60s, he developed this view which was borne out by events. And by the end of the Cold War, he developed this view that the Soviets were. It was a system with a very, very limited shelf life because it could not contain its nationalities within. They did not see themselves as Soviet citizens. They didn't speak a language called Soviet. They saw themselves as Ukrainians, as Georgians, as Kazakhs, as Tajiks. And that Achilles heel led him to be deeply skeptical of the whole basis of detente. And so detente really unraveled under Carter because of Brzezinski. And Brzezinski was very much sort of fighting the State Department. Cyrus Vance took really the Kissinger view. Brzezinski eventually defeated him pretty comprehensively. And Carter sided with Brzezinski. But that laid the basis, the predicates for Reaganism. And Ronald Reagan twice tried to recruit Brzezinski. This very unorthodox. I think it would have been the first and last time in US history as his national security, as Reagan's national security advisor, a man from a different party.
- [09:06]
Joe Scarborough
You know, it's interesting, you say turn him down. It's interesting that in the 21st century. And Mika and I see this when we go around the people's sign. But Dr. Brzezinski was a hero of democrats, a hero of the left. Why? Because he got the Iraq War right. He and Prince Scowcroft were two of the only people that were speaking out Loudly in the. The Washington foreign policy establishment, the really, the really powerful voices. But one of the. One of the really surprising things in reading your book was just how hated, how loathed Dr. Brzezinski was by the Democratic left, by the Kennedy wing of the party, by the Strobe Talbot wing of the mainstream media. So much so that you write about how he was booed at the 1980 Democratic convention. Talk about how he got both the Cold War right and he got a rock right. But in doing so, he made powerful enemies, first on the left and then on the right.
- [10:28]
Ed Luce
It is. I mean, that's a sort of brilliant contrast to bring up, Joe, because it does get to the essence of who Brzezinski was as a man, as a figure, as a public figure. And that was somebody who did not belong to groups or factions. I mean, he operated according to where his intellect took him and where his strategic sort of sense took him. And in the late 70s, that acquired him notoriety. On the liberal left, the Ted Kennedy wing, as you pointed out, he was known as Darth Vader. Remember, this is the time of Star wars, right?
- [11:08]
Joe Scarborough
So he was Darth Vader before Dick Cheney was Darth Vader.
- [11:12]
Ed Luce
He was. He got there first. And unlike Dick Cheney, although a little bit like Liz Cheney, it should be mentioned, he then became a darling of the left. Is Cheney because of Never Trumpism and Brzezinski because his critique of the global war on terror, about how Bush was pursuing it, Bush Jr. Was pursuing it, and then more sort of dramatically of the Iraq war, really sort of gave him almost hero status on the left in the early 21st century. The Mirror image of how they had viewed him in the late 1970s. And you mentioned Strobe Talbot, a very fine, a very sort of distinguished journalist who was Time magazine in the 70s and a definite skeptic and critic of Brzezinski in 1989, when the Wall finally fell, and more importantly, a few months earlier, when Poland elected Solidarity, that sort of broke that. That was what really broke the communist system. He wrote cover story with the headline Vindication of a Hardliner. And of course, that was Brzezinski.
- [12:26]
Jen Psaki
MSNBC's Jen Psaki, host of the Briefing.
- [12:29]
Chris Hayes
We've never experienced a moment like this in our country. And it leaves us all with a choice. Are we going to speak out or are we going to be pressured into silence? I've worked for presidents. I've faced the tough questions from the press and even threats from the Kremlin. And if there's one thing I've learned it's that you can't cower to bullies. You don't need to be hopeless. We have our voices and I will continue using mine.
- [12:49]
Jen Psaki
The Briefing with Jen Psaki Tuesday through Friday at 9pm Eastern on MSNBC.
- [12:55]
Chris Hayes
Hey everyone, it's Chris Hayes. This week on my podcast, why Is this Happening? Progressive grassroots group Indivisible's co founder and co executive director Leah Greenberg.
- [13:04]
Leah Greenberg
If there's anything we know about successful movements to defeat autocracies around the world, successful movements to take down dictatorships is that they build broad coalitions and the coalition may not be united by anything other than the their opposition to what is currently happening. And that is okay.
- [13:20]
Chris Hayes
That's this week on why Is this Happening? Search for why Is this Happening? Wherever you're listening right now and follow.
- [13:25]
Jen Psaki
Stay up to date on the biggest issues of the day with the MSNBC Daily Newsletter. Each morning you'll get analysis by experts you trust, video highlights from your favorite shows.
- [13:35]
Chris Hayes
I do think it's worth being very clear eyed, very realistic about what's going on here.
- [13:40]
Jen Psaki
Previews of our podcasts and documentaries, plus written perspectives from the newsmakers themselves, all sent directly to your inbox each morning. Get the the best of MSNBC all in one place. Sign up for msnbc daily@msnbc.com what was.
- [13:56]
Joe Scarborough
Amazing is though, that from the, the time he first got to Harvard in the early 1950s through 1988 into the beginning of 1989, he, he was attacked from the left. He was attacked as a Cold War hawk. But then you're right, 1989, everything changed. He was vindicated. He also, reading through your book, he was vindicated on Afghanistan. He kept warning Jimmy Carter kept warning the State Department. They, they wanted, they wanted to figure out if they could make Afghanistan work. They kept warning about, about the Soviets moving into Afghanistan. Same thing, you know, fighting the State Department on Iran where the State Department wanted to deal with Ayatollah Khomeini. And you even said, I guess it was Ambassador Sullivan who said that Khomeini would be a Gandhi like figure. I'm curious and I'm going to ask you what he got terribly wrong in a minute. So people don't think this is just sort of like hometown fan worship on my part. And again from talking about a man who did call me stunningly superficial. But.
- [15:17]
Ed Luce
What, he didn't mean it?
- [15:19]
Joe Scarborough
No, he was, he did not. He was a wonderful man. But it's just, but you know, the funny thing is when he did that, I was Thinking, oh, my God, this guy will do anything to win a fight. The moment. And I was reading about his roommate in Harvard who, who was from, I think, Lithuania, who said the same thing. I w. You. When I was reading through the book, I go, oh, my God. He, he was dealing with him in a dorm. I was dealing with him on, on national television. But in the short term, he had very sharp elbows. He had to win every fight he was in. And talk about that for a minute. And then I want you to talk about how did he manage to get the Cold War? Right. How did he manage to get Iraq? Right. How did he manage to get Afghanistan and Iran? Right? How. How did he go through the process and get so many things right that so many others around him got wrong?
- [16:24]
Ed Luce
Yeah, I mean, you, you are in very fine company. And, and, and they're in fine in your company, too. And being one of the targets of a Brzezinski sort of live public argument in which, as you say, he took no prisoners. I mean, most people would.
- [16:40]
Joe Scarborough
But by the way, I can say it, I can say it now. He was also wrong. He was wrong in that argument. And he was. And I told him at the time, I said, you stand alone here. What makes you so right and everybody else so wrong? But anyway, go ahead.
- [16:56]
Ed Luce
Actually, just to sort of fill in the details there. What you were arguing about was whether Clinton had got close to an Israeli Palestine deal in Camp David in the year 2000, and who was to blame for sinking that deal. And you were arguing that Yasser Arafat was the one who torpedoed it, I think correctly. And Zbig was arguing the opposite. But as you found out, he doesn't sort of argue and then declare a truce. His aim is to beat his opponent to death into the ground.
- [17:34]
Joe Scarborough
Exactly.
- [17:35]
Ed Luce
And weirdly, you know, then the next day or the next, and I heard this so many times from students and fellow academics and people in public life that the next day he would then incorporate some of your argument or maybe all of it.
- [17:49]
Joe Scarborough
Right, right.
- [17:50]
Ed Luce
So he tested ideas to destruction. But I think you're right. You were, you were correct on that.
- [17:55]
Joe Scarborough
Well, I mean, it was just jousting and, and it's something, you know, we. I love retelling the story because a southern politician understands, you know, self deprecation is. It's a very, very powerful tool, whether it's coming from your mother, your child, or in this case, your future father in law. But, but, you know, he, he sort of. He gave me a little wink, you know, and a smile. Afterwards. And, and it was. Again, it's just he, he loved the verbal jousting. But, but let's, let's, let's go back to his analysis of different issues. Whether it was a Cold War, whether It was the second Iraq war, whether it was Afghanistan and Iran in 79. How did he, what process did he use to, to. To get to conclusions and, and to get it right more often than not?
- [18:49]
Ed Luce
So he called the Cold War correctly and I think Kissinger incorrectly. This was the one big idea of their time. I remember a British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, wrote that Winston Churchill was wrong on everything. The gold standard, not giving India independence, the Irish question, except the one big thing that mattered, where he was right and pretty much alone. And that, of course, was on the nature of the Nazi.
- [19:19]
Joe Scarborough
He picked the right one.
- [19:20]
Ed Luce
One right.
- [19:21]
Joe Scarborough
Meacham and I often share our favorite quote about Churchill, which was when he. When Winston was right, he was right. When he was wrong. Oh, my God, Yes.
- [19:34]
Ed Luce
And that then gave rise to Isaiah Berlin's characterization of the fox and the hedgehog. Hedgehog knows one big thing. It gets one big thing right, which is protect self, protection. The fox is cunning and does a lot of sort of clever tactical maneuvers. And I would say that when it comes to the grand strategy in the Cold War, Brzezinski was the hedgehog and Kissinger was the fox. And Brzezinski's predictive confidence on the Soviet Union, which was the product of learning Russian, visiting Russia, testing all his theories to destruction and refining them, was that he had an insight into what was going on behind the Iron Curtain that Kissinger simply lacked. Kissinger had a different approach to strategy, and it was the big power approach. Brzezinski had the, I suppose the loser's perspective, the smaller nation's sense of injury that came from being Polish or for that matter, Hungarian or Ukrainian. And he weaponized that. And that sort of big insight produced it was not just, you know, gave him a stellar record predictively as a Sovietologist, but also in terms of strategy when he was in government. So I would say that that's the main thing. But he got other things right, like Iraq, I mean, Iraq, I think. And some friends of him of his sort of really emphasized this point. Brzezinski was really embarrassed about how late he realized Vietnam was a blunder, that Vietnam was a real quagmire, because he had dutifully supported the war up till 1966, 67, and others. Some had turned against it sooner. And so he was very quick out of the starting blocks with Iraq.
- [21:38]
Joe Scarborough
But you were saying. So he opposed, though, Vietnam Pre Tet in 60 what, 67.
- [21:48]
Ed Luce
Yes. He, he came to realize that more more troops just meant more death, no strategic advantage. So he wrote a paper for Lyndon Johnson, in fact, saying that nobody read it. But he then put it into practice as the foreign policy advisor to Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 campaign. And unfortunately, you know, perhaps fatally, Humphrey felt unable to break as vice president from lbj, his president, who was by this stage, monomaniacal.
- [22:26]
Jen Psaki
Introducing the WEEKNIGHT on msnbc, Join hosts Alicia Menendez, Michael Steele and Simone Sanders Townsend for a spirited conversation challenging each other and our leaders about the biggest issues of the day.
- [22:39]
Joe Scarborough
It's about knowing what you are for, who you are for. That's what politics is about.
- [22:44]
Ed Luce
It's engagement.
- [22:45]
Chris Hayes
We are going to dive deeper into the legal side of today's breaking news.
- [22:49]
Jen Psaki
The weeknight, Monday through Friday at 7:00pm Eastern on MSNBC.
- [22:55]
Chris Hayes
Bob Menendez is the first U.S. senator to go to prison in more than 40 years.
- [23:00]
Jen Psaki
It is, to me, an inexplicable and tragic way for him to go.
- [23:04]
Chris Hayes
I'm Nancy Solomon. Join me as I take a look at the senator's bribery scheme involving Egyptian spies.
- [23:10]
Ed Luce
That's pretty unusual.
- [23:11]
Chris Hayes
And the woman that dazzled him.
- [23:13]
Ed Luce
Hi, it's me calling my very handsome senator.
- [23:17]
Chris Hayes
Listen to Dead End, the Rise and Fall of Goldbar Bob Menendez from wnyc. Wherever you get your podcasts, a lot.
- [23:26]
Leah Greenberg
Of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story. But right now you probably need more on up first from NPR. We bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes because no one story can capture all that's happening in this big crazy world of ours on any given morning. Listen now to the upverse podcast from npr.
- [23:50]
Joe Scarborough
Yeah, so I told you I would I would hold you for 15 minutes and you've been very kind with your time here. I what what else do you think people that are listening right now should know about Dr. Brzezinski? What will they learn from your book that will help them in trying to figure out where we should go as a country, where we should go in the world in the coming years?
- [24:22]
Ed Luce
In a way, what this biography is, it's about what is it that goes to make up a grand strategist? And of course, there's all the very particular human story. They're really very gripping story of Brzezinski's life. But what is it that you can extract from that for today? And I think a Strategic mindset is one that is able to understand your adversaries and your friends as well as they can. The more you can view the world through their lens, the better you can shape how they act or manipulate how they act to your advantage, presumably, therefore, to avoid war, to get them to do what you want without war. And that is a time old, sort of an age worn insight of any kind of statesmanship throughout human history. But Brzezinski really embodied it. And what is that? It's about knowledge. It's about the quest for knowledge. And I think, to put it mildly, the Trump administration and Donald Trump himself do not value or even notice knowledge. In a way, knowledge is for losers. It's like the sort of green eye shade of academia, accountants. These are people who don't really know the value of anything in the Trump worldview. And I think he's very, very diametrically wrong. And a posh word for stupid would be astrategic. But a lot of what Trump is doing is astrategic. And we need strategy now more than ever. It's even more dangerous than the bipolar world Kissinger Brzezinski had to grapple with. We're living in a multipolar world and that's far less predictable. And so knowing what you're doing, knowing about the other players, these other poles, is even more important. And I think his life tells us, I think it screams that to us, particularly today.
- [26:27]
Joe Scarborough
The book is a big the Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's great power prophet at loose. Thank you so much. You're so kind. Greatly appreciate it.
- [26:39]
Ed Luce
Now I should thank you. Thank you, Joe. I really enjoyed that.
- [26:42]
Joe Scarborough
All right, thanks so much and thank you for listening. We'll see you tomorrow morning on Morning Joe.
- [27:06]
Jen Psaki
MSNBC presents a new original podcast, the Best People with Nicole Wallace. This week, she sits down with NBA coach Doc Rivers Bricks.
- [27:16]
Joe Scarborough
The resiliency that you have to have in life and in sports is what eventually will get you to the top.
- [27:24]
Jen Psaki
The best people with Nicole Wallace listen now. For early access ad, free listening and bonus content, subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts.