Zbigniew Brzezinski: Intellectual Gadfly or Grand Strategist?

Abstract

“I could see some of Zbig's prejudices,” President Jimmy Carter told me in 2002. “Zbig, to some extent like Kissinger, was very concerned with the Soviet Union … Normalizing relations with China drove the Soviets up the wall.” Carter leaned toward me: “Brzezinski was my treasure.”1 An intellectual biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski is overdue. Justin Vaïsse has stepped into the void. He brings several advantages to the task: an accomplished French historian as well as a practitioner (he is the director of policy planning at the Quai d'Orsay), he writes well (the translator has expertly captured the clarity of the original French), and in 2008, when he was at the Brookings Institution, he developed a “relationship of trust” with Brzezinski (479).2 This led to the former national security adviser giving Vaïsse access to his papers at the Library of Congress, which remain closed to most researchers. Zbigniew Brzezinski: America's Grand Strategist is organized chronologically, with five chapters tracing Brzezinski's intellectual development, culminating in a long chapter on the White House years, followed by a denouement covering the subsequent almost four decades. The introductory chapters make good use of the closed Brzezinski papers and describe well the way that men like Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger—foreign-born, academics, Catholics, and Jews—displaced the WASP “wise men” of the earlier era.