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Table of Contents
About The Book
An intimate and perceptive biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski—President Carter’s National Security Advisor and one of America’s greatest geopolitical thinkers and grandest strategists—from one of the finest columnists and political writers at work today.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was one of the key figures who helped bring about the demise of the Soviet Union. As National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, and counsel to presidents from John F. Kennedy onwards, Brzezinski converted his role as a leading American Sovietologist onto the global stage. George Kennan and Henry Kissinger are often held up as America’s most influential Cold War strategists but Brzezinski’s impact on helping bring about the end of the USSR was greater. As a Polish emigré to America who witnessed the destruction of his family’s home and country at the hands of the Nazis and the Soviets, Brzezinski became one of America’s foremost scholars of totalitarianism. He believed in the importance of understanding the enemy and in speaking their language. His friendship with Pope John Paul II—a Pole and the first non-Italian to hold that role in almost half a millennium—was critical in preventing the Soviet invasion of Poland.
Brzezinski’s lifelong competition—and on-off fraught relationship—with the more loquacious Henry Kissinger was perhaps the most important US rivalry of the Cold War and afterwards. Nixon and Kissinger opened up China to the West in the early 1970s. Brzezinski and Carter normalized US-China relations and decisively tipped the chessboard against Moscow at the end of that decade. Far blunter and more acerbic than Kissinger, Brzezinski was inevitably less of a darling with the global media. But his historic legacy—notably his critical role in bringing Kissinger’s stalled Détente to an end—is arguably greater. Brzezinski’s monumental contributions to American foreign policy have been underreported, leaving a hole in our understanding of Cold War history and its aftermath, notably America’s response to the 9/11 attacks, which he lamented. His role in having armed the Afghan Mujahideen to fight the Soviet invaders in 1980 was also latently controversial. Edward Luce’s biography corrects the underweighting of Brzezinski’s remarkable impact on America’s place in the world, telling the almost cinematic story of a life that spans most of the 20th century and beyond, and in doing so, narrating a new version of the end of the Cold War.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was one of the key figures who helped bring about the demise of the Soviet Union. As National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, and counsel to presidents from John F. Kennedy onwards, Brzezinski converted his role as a leading American Sovietologist onto the global stage. George Kennan and Henry Kissinger are often held up as America’s most influential Cold War strategists but Brzezinski’s impact on helping bring about the end of the USSR was greater. As a Polish emigré to America who witnessed the destruction of his family’s home and country at the hands of the Nazis and the Soviets, Brzezinski became one of America’s foremost scholars of totalitarianism. He believed in the importance of understanding the enemy and in speaking their language. His friendship with Pope John Paul II—a Pole and the first non-Italian to hold that role in almost half a millennium—was critical in preventing the Soviet invasion of Poland.
Brzezinski’s lifelong competition—and on-off fraught relationship—with the more loquacious Henry Kissinger was perhaps the most important US rivalry of the Cold War and afterwards. Nixon and Kissinger opened up China to the West in the early 1970s. Brzezinski and Carter normalized US-China relations and decisively tipped the chessboard against Moscow at the end of that decade. Far blunter and more acerbic than Kissinger, Brzezinski was inevitably less of a darling with the global media. But his historic legacy—notably his critical role in bringing Kissinger’s stalled Détente to an end—is arguably greater. Brzezinski’s monumental contributions to American foreign policy have been underreported, leaving a hole in our understanding of Cold War history and its aftermath, notably America’s response to the 9/11 attacks, which he lamented. His role in having armed the Afghan Mujahideen to fight the Soviet invaders in 1980 was also latently controversial. Edward Luce’s biography corrects the underweighting of Brzezinski’s remarkable impact on America’s place in the world, telling the almost cinematic story of a life that spans most of the 20th century and beyond, and in doing so, narrating a new version of the end of the Cold War.
About The Author
Financial Times
Edward Luce is the Financial Times’s chief US commentator and columnist. He is the author of three acclaimed books: The Retreat of Western Liberalism (2017), Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (2012), and In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (2007). He appears regularly on CNN, NPR, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and the BBC. He lives in Washington, DC.
Product Details
- Publisher: Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster (May 13, 2025)
- Length: 544 pages
- ISBN13: 9781982173647
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Raves and Reviews
“Zbig is a magnificent and highly readable chronicle of the life and times of one of the most important American strategists of the 20th century, written with an appreciative eye for both the man and the politics of the time he helped to shape.” —Francis Fukuyama, author of Liberalism and Its Discontents
“Edward Luce’s Zbig is not only the definitive biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a crucial figure in the history of the Cold War, but also a book with real insights into the nature of power—especially the ways in which intellectual valor and good faith can come into conflict with the ugly realities of the world. For anyone who wants to understand the history of America and the world, this is a useful and important book.” —Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc.
PRAISE FOR THE RETREAT OF WESTERN LIBERALISM:
One of the Washington Post’s 50 notable works of nonfiction in 2017, an Amazon Top 100 book of the year, and a Financial Times and Economist best book of the year
“Timely and informed, providing an important overview of the dynamics in an increasingly interconnected and fragmented planet . . . In his prescient 2012 book, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent, Luce uncannily anticipated the politics of resentment and the bitter fights over immigration that would fuel ‘Brexit’ and last year’s American election. And in this new book, he lucidly expounds on the erosion of the West’s middle classes, the dysfunction among its political and economic elites and the consequences for America and the world.” —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“Many around the globe sense a systemic crisis. To understand the nature of this crisis, we could not find a better guide than Edward Luce’s The Retreat of Western Liberalism . . . . Luce writes in fluid prose, moving from a telling statistic to a striking quotation. Throughout, one is struck by his command of the material and the activity of his prose?he is unsparing in his condemnation of the elites who didn't see this coming.” —Fareed Zakaria, New York Times Book Review
“Mr. Luce offers a useful wake-up call to elites, urging them to focus on the very real struggles of America’s besieged middle class before we all lose the freedom and democracy we cherish . . . [A] concise, accessible and valuable work.” —Lawrence J. Haas, Wall Street Journal
“What the book offers is . . . a panorama of the unravelling world order as riveting as any beach read. Luce’s project is to explain what the recent dark turn in Western politics?the rise of ultranationalism, populist demagoguery, cultural insularity, and social unrest?has to do with global economics. It’s a story of trade balances and technological disruption, but also a withering dismantling of Western liberalism’s faith in progress.” —Elias Muhanna, New Yorker
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