America’s Power Problem: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Today

0:00I think doing what Biden did, which is to say Trump was an aberration that America is back, would be a mistake. I think he would caution very incremental, gentle, non-dramatic, constant gardening of rebuilding relationships slowly and not pretending life is a social media contest. The confidence around the world in the United States is so shaken. You cannot undo that at the stroke of a magic wand. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us now is the U.S. national editor and columnist at the Financial Times. He's also a bestselling author, Ed Luce. The title of the book is Zbigniew.

0:37Hopefully I'm saying that right. It's The Life of Zbigniew. Zbigniew? Zbigniew. Zbigniew Brzezinski. Okay, well. Zbigniew or if you want to be really pedantic, Zbigniew. Zbigniew. All right, so there you go. See, they don't pay me to pronunciate things, though, at loose. They know where I'm from, okay? But anyway, this book is awesome. It is about Mr. Brzezinski's life. He was former national security advisor, but so much more. And in this title, it's America's Great Power Prophet. So much to say about him. But before we get into the book, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into writing?

1:18I think you have a very interesting life story, Ed, so let's start there. Well, I got into writing. I guess my grandmother, my dad's mother, she was a playwright in a stage where there weren't too many female playwrights. And she would write me these long letters when I was at these pretty ghastly English boarding schools as a child. And those letters were so lyrical and morale boosting that got me into writing and reading more importantly. So I'd blame my grandmother. I find that your writing style is very compelling because it's, you know, You use the word pedantic, but you are the least pedantic writer of anybody that I've read in a biography because you lay out the facts.

2:02The writing is crisp. You want to turn the page into the next chapter. But when I closed the book, the first thing that came to my mind, and I want you to react to it, is this was a realist, this man. This man had grown up in Eastern Europe. He's a product of Poland and the Cold War environment and the communist aggression in Poland, also the Nazi aggression in Poland. And so he had this very realistic approach, but he was going up against people that probably didn't have his life experience. Jimmy Carter didn't have his life experience. Others in the American political, we're from a nation of isolationists and we're from a nation that prior to the 9-11, we didn't really have a lot of bloodshed or violence in the nation.

2:52so tell us about that because to me that's the thing that i was left with the most is this was a guy knocking on the heads of people trying to explain to them the existential dangers that were out there during the cold war yeah i think that's very astute anthony i mean the he had a sense of the tragic and i actually he shared that with his great rival and frenemy Henry Kissinger, who of course also came from the bloodlands of interwar Europe. And they both, through seeing what happened to their families and to their home nations, came across the Atlantic with this strong sense of the thinness of civilization, that it has to be defended, that it's never done, that history's never over.

3:41And I guess Brzezinski, as big as he became known. He refused to anglicize his name, which you would approve of, I think, as do I. Yeah, of course. He wouldn't anglicize his name. He came up against the wasps, really, my people, the Anglo-Americans, who were from very privileged backgrounds and thought that foreign policy was a sort of gentleman's second fiddle, that that's what he did as a public obligation and brzezinski was a man on a mission uh very much a professional foreign policy person and so his clashes really initially with with all the the wasp elites the georgetown set well i mean that's the very same group of people that believed alger his right and they they they because they had this patrician culture and they had this club-like atmosphere but again what i found a bit well it's so interesting about this his life experience directly influences judgment Of course, when they sent George Kennan, one of their own, to Moscow, a couple of years in Moscow, he too figured out the danger, right?

4:49He very famously put that telegram together, a sign did X, but it was a 10 ,000 word telegram expressing the danger, creating this policy of containment that Brzezinski believed in and wanted to help prosecute in a bipartisan way. but tell let's go to uh the bloodlands of central europe tell us about the desecration there that you so beautifully write about i want i want if you don't mind to capture his origin story because i really do think that's central to all of his future decision making and his policy initiatives absolutely these are his formative years when he's forged and his dad who is a Polish diplomat.

5:31In that brief interwar period where Poland existed as a Second Republic, it had been born in the Treaty of Versailles, it ended the First World War. The creation of Poland was Woodrow Wilson's 13th point out of the 14 points, famous 14 points he had. And his dad, Brzezinski's And a junior diplomat manages in 1938 to get posted across the Atlantic, not a promotion, consul general in Montreal, but he knew exactly what was coming. And he got Brzezinski out of the way and the family out of the way a few days after the Munich, the notorious Munich agreement where Chamberlain had basically submitted to Hitler.

6:17um so the timing was perfect but from the other side of the atlantic this 11 year old at the beginning of the war is big hears through his dad on the radio about the opening of the first world war and the opening of the first world war is the partition of his native poland not just the partition between the nazis and the soviets this nazi-soviet pact um this devil's pact but it the raising of the streets of Warsaw in which he'd grown up, grown up that he knew so well. And he listened to this every night on Radio Warsaw. And then one night the radio went quiet, except for the first 11 notes of a Polonaise by Chopin, the Polish composer.

7:01And then a couple of weeks later, that went and was replaced by Deutschland über alles. So you can imagine this young mind from the sort of elysian comfort of the sort of higher altitude bits of montreal you can imagine what anguish what sort of defining anguish um this instilled in that young mind and i did get hold of all of his diaries and he started keeping them then and they are fascinating they're a chronicle of this blitzkrieg this horror of total war yeah listen i mean you know when you when you live through that, you're influenced by that. I think one of the problems we're having now, Ed, is that none of us have lived through this.

7:42You know, we've we've had 80 years of peace and prosperity, which, you know, as Barbara Tuchman once said in The Guns of August, it increases the bellicose of rhetoric. It allows for the foment of nationalism. When you've when you've seen this type of bloodshed, you're more interested in unification and to protect each other, less less interested in devolvement, which is happening today. But let's go to his architecture. Something in the book I did not know, I'll share this with people. I always saw him from my glance as a good national security advisor, a good promoter of American sort of the policy of containment and foreign policy.

8:22But he was really one of the great architects of the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. He put a lot of things in place during the Carter administration that I didn't know about. Share with us some of the things that he did, which other leaders like Ronald Reagan, frankly, benefited from years later. That's absolutely right. I mean, he was, you know, a leading Sovietologist, first and foremost, you know, at Harvard, then Columbia. And he became Carter's tutor, in fact, after he set up something called the Trilateral Commission. and Carter as governor of Georgia joined it. But the sort of key aspect of his Sovietology was that he said this system, the Soviet system, has an Achilles heel.

9:08And this Achilles heel is the nations. You've got all these countries like Poland, you know, captive nations, as they called them. But you've also got the republics within the USSR, the Ukrainians, the Georgians, the Tajiks, etc., who believe themselves not to be part of a new socialist paradise, but to be part of a Russian empire in Marxist clothing. And he said that, but they don't feel Soviet. And he famously kept asking, have you heard Soviet spoken as a language? And his strategy was to dismantle the Soviet Union by promoting these nationalisms, these national resentments. And he sort of formed that into a strategy that Carter picked up in 1977 when he came into office.

10:01In fact, his first trip as president, a state visit, was to Poland. But he promoted all these human rights groups, including the Polish Solidarity Movement, which eventually led to the unraveling of the Soviet Union. He promoted underground literature, Samizdat. He endorsed Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet Union's biggest dissident. He stoked ferment peacefully, not through supplying arms, but through ideological support to the very resentful peoples of the Soviet empire. And this was something that even George Kennan, with his great insights, not to mention Henry Kissinger, simply ignored. They took the Soviet Union to be a permanent feature of the landscape, and Brzezinski believed it was declining, fragile, and that America's job must be to accelerate its end.

11:02And that's pretty much what happened. Of course, there are other players involved. And Reagan picks up on what he inherits from Carter. He doesn't undo any of it. He picks it up and the nuclear modernization, the support for solidarity, et cetera. But Brzezinski was very much its architect from the American side. I mean, again, this is sort of a contemporary question. I want you to channel Mr. Brzezinski for a second because you state in the book more or less that he believed that geopolitics was destiny. And so, but today we've got social media, domestic polarization. We've got obviously economic nationalism.

11:46Would he still see foreign policy as the primary driver of history today? Or what would he be thinking about today looking at the fracturing that you and I are witnessing? That's a really good question. I mean, your point about social media, I mean, it's a hell of a lot more difficult to conduct foreign policy in any serious long-term form. And it's only worth it if it's, you know, for keeps. If you've got a strategy, that means long-term. The idea of doing this whilst you're constantly having to respond and signal and be relevant on social media, it's so much more difficult. You know, he died, Brzezinski died in 2017.

12:28So it was a few months after Trump took office in his first term. So he had seen the impact of social media. In fact, he had a relatively active Twitter account in his last years. He'd also seen the resurgence of Russian nationalism and the emergence of China as a peer competitor. So he would still and was then preoccupied with the geopolitics of this. But he was in despair about what he saw as the cultural and moral decline of the West, of Western democracies internally, inside our sort of what you were mentioning earlier, Anthony, the 80 years of having no real lessons about what happens when it goes wrong, like war, revolution, civil war, all these things.

13:20you know a bit like a bull trader who's who's only known a bull market they have no idea what a crash looks like um similar sort of wild risk taking that we have in our spirit nowadays we we don't really know the scale of the risks we're taking and i think he would be focused even though this wasn't his predominant area he did towards the end of his right life write a lot about education or the declining education, declining reading, declining knowledge of other countries and languages as being a genuine national security problem, regardless of your ideology, whether you're conservative or liberal, a genuine national security problem for the United States.

14:07Yeah, I think it's well said. And I want to ask you about the frenemy relationship with Henry Kissinger. Obviously, they saw some things eye to eye, but they had different views of foreign policy. I would say Kissinger's view, and I've read Neil Ferguson's bio, felt like Kissinger had more realism. Brzezinski had more foundational understanding of good versus evil, if you don't mind me putting it that way. And if you disagree, please chime in. But Whose worldview has aged better, Ed Luce?

15:11But he brought an equal sense of the tragic. Most of his family, extended family, had died in the Holocaust. And he was asked more than once, this is Kissinger, if you had a choice between order or justice, which would you choose? And he said, I would always go for order because I think he saw that tragedy as being a product of disorder. Brzezinski, I think, would have given, he wasn't posed the same question, but he would have said justice. He had this deep and burning sense of wounded Polishness, which he wanted to restore, even as he became more and more American. And their difference in philosophy, well, Kissinger was a realist and a realist, classical realist, says, we don't care about the internal politics of countries we're dealing with.

16:02All we assume they have is interests, just like we have interests. And it's a cold world. uh brzynski was a lot more zealous in terms of believing that the character of other regimes did shape how they behaved even if their interests and they changed their perception of what their interests were and the soviet union was a classic example it promoted worldwide revolution that's a different sort of idea of your own interest than a more typical state i guess if you apply their their views and i'm not sure what label i would give to brzezinski kissinger i would agree as a realist i mean you could say an idealist realist or a realist idealist which you know is a bit of a mouthful i had this professor and i think i mentioned this to you after i finished your book i i had this professor at tufts at the fletcher school when i was there and his name is professor delphine or he's no longer with us unfortunately he was an austrian uh professor so he grew up in Austria and he was old enough to witness by 12 years old when the Nazis took over.

17:07And so he had this very hard line view. I feel Brzezinski was in his category. Yes. So, you know, idealism, I guess. But to me, it was like, look, this is right or wrong. And this is what America needs to do to stay on the good side of this battle for Western liberalism and for Western freedom. I feel like Kissinger was more willing to parlay, if you will. Am I wrong in thinking that, Ed? If I am, tell me. No, you're not. I mean, I think Kissinger would, he celebrated the word amoral, not immoral, but amoral, is that we don't allow values to cloud our judgment. And Brzezinski, I think, did think that values had to shape your judgment.

17:53And he did see Russian, post-Soviet Russia under Putin. He did warn about what would happen. He said they'll need Ukraine. Without Ukraine, there cannot be a Eurasian empire. With Ukraine, they will just become an appendage of China. With Ukraine, they can restore Russia's former greatness. And so he saw that as it would be immoral not to counter that because other people's freedoms, if not just the Ukrainians, would be in jeopardy. But he wasn't what we used to call a neoconservative. He didn't believe that our liberal democratic stamp could simply be imposed on very different cultures. And so he was quite a critic of the Iraq war.

18:42And so his life's arc is interesting because, you know, he was Darth Vader to the liberals during the Carter years. The Ted Kennedy liberals really did revile Brzezinski. You're right about it. Yeah, no, I saw the strain and intention there. So I'm going to, if you don't mind, because it's so fascinating for me, I want you to channel Brzezinski. I'm going to ask you some lightning round questions. Okay. All right. So you give me a few sentences. Okay. Was he right about everything or just early? what what would you say there i mean he seemed to have gotten a lot right he got a lot right i mean you know the the soviet union's demise the fact that um yuclide's heel but also the economic you know redundancy of the system he got that right he wrote a a book a very impressive book on japan in the early 70s saying japan has peaked now this is years before people start getting what we used to call japanic that it's the next superpower he saw through that um and he understood their demography he understood their demography precisely and then in the 90s he did predict that you know history is not ending and great power politics will return with a vengeance and it wasn't a very popular view of fukuyama's book end of history sold a lot more than what brzezinski warned but what brzezinski warned was there would be an axis of the aggrieved of countries that felt like they were on the losing side at the end of the Cold War.

20:11And we see that axis now with Putin, Xi, Iran, North Korea, etc. He did get some things wrong, though. I mean, and most famously and consequentially, Iran. He badly advised Carter, and it led to Carter's undoing. Yeah, there's a great book about that. The King of All Kings just came out, which I read, precisely says that. All right, let's go to NATO for a second. Is NATO a strong point for the West or is it an inertia point? What would Brzezinski say about NATO today? I think he would be arguing today for the rest of the West to recreate the West. Because right now, clearly, America is de facto, even if it's still a member of NATO, it's de facto not an ally of most Western European nations and indeed of Canada.

21:02And so he would see NATO as having to transfer into European Union defense arm. It's no longer really viable. Let's go to, not President Trump, but let's go to the next president, whoever he or she may be. It's January of 2029. Channel your Brzezinski. What would be the advice? What would be one mistake that he would want the future president to avoid? Well, you don't step into the same river twice. So I think doing what Biden did, which is to say Trump was an aberration and we're back to America is back, would be a mistake. I think he would caution very incremental, gentle, non-dramatic, constant gardening of rebuilding relationships slowly and not pretending life is a social media contest.

21:52That the confidence around the world in the United States is so shaken. You cannot undo that at the stroke of a wand, a magic wand. Right. Okay. I'm down to the five words. okay so in our podcast we take five words from your book it's the end of the show uh i'm gonna say the two words soviet union you're gonna say what i'm gonna say bankrupt um marxist imperial project right and but helped pushed into bankruptcy by guys like brzezinski yeah pushed into bankruptcy by facilitated into bankruptcy yeah american power generally good but in fact the only power capable on a global scale of doing good but that doesn't mean to say it can't turn bad right good good intentions sometimes bad outcomes right yes correct generally good intention we're talking about the trump era as much as i'm talking about the last you know 80 years since the end of the second world war uh the cold war the cold war bipolar Washington, Moscow.

22:59Very different to a multipolar world. It's much less easy for physics to stabilize and have an equilibrium when there's more than two poles. A lot more history has come into play, right? It's not the end of history. There's multiple histories happening at once. Revenge of history. Revenge of history. Okay. Henry Kissinger. extraordinary impresario a brilliant man uh a fox but ultimately wrong on the biggest question of his time which was the nature of the cold war he believed the soviets were here forever and we should essentially live with them yeah well that was the whole policy of detente versus what brzezinski was saying um you know i had the opportunity this is a little bit of a sidebar i had the opportunity to be in the room during the transition team in December of 2016 when Dr.

23:48Kissinger came to speak to us. And, you know, he had said some things to Trump that, you know, obviously Trump ignored. But one of the things he said was that they needed to figure out a way to get Putin pushed back off of the Ukraine. He was very worried about what happened in Crimea and suggested that the Obama administration did not handle that well. Of course, we learned that Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin have a different relationship than all of us thought day one. All right, so I'm going to give you the last word, sir. Zibinu, I'm pronouncing it right, Brzezinski. What would you say? An amazing product of America, a meritocratic America with a thirst for knowledge that promotes talent, regardless of whether they've got an American accent or a pronounceable name.

24:40That he was therefore quintessentially American. There were a lot of fun parts of your book, Ed, but one of the fun parts for me was Mika Brzezinski, okay, driving around the golf cart at Camp David, right? before you go just tell us a quick story about that before i leave she she very nearly ran over menarche in bacon the israeli leader she also by the way spilled caviar into dengzhaop the chinese leader's lap they were serving him on his first visit to america at their home she was 11 spilled caviar into his lap and got so flustered she tried to clean it up with a napkin which was a source of great amusement to the pint size i mean because I know her.

25:23I love those stories about her, you know, and it was a great, it was great affect in the book. And listen, I congratulate you on the book, best, New York Times bestseller, deservedly so. Number two on the foreign affairs list this year, which there are no number twos in life, Ed. I consider you a number one. The title of the book is a big, The Life of Zygmunt Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet, legendary Edward Luce. What's next for you, sir, before you go? I'm trying to keep up with what's going on. So my day job with the Financial Times here in Washington has not yet permitted me to think of my next book.

26:02It's just been 18-hour days, seven days a week. We're looking forward to your next book. And obviously, I always look forward to your columns. It's an interesting world. We're in an interesting world, sir. It's going to get worse before it gets better. That's my prediction because it just seems that that's the way it's going to go for right now. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much, Anthony. That was a real delight.

26:54negative risk conditions are considered that the costs are about to be