Living parallel lives, they counselled presidents and changed the course of the cold war. How would they steer America today?
“Although it spanned decades and influenced the course of two superpowers, the rivalry between Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, America’s great cold war strategists, merits equivalent hyphenation. Brzezinski-Kissinger was to US geopolitics what great pairing is to sport. Their core difference was over whether to sustain cold war détente — easing the strains — with America’s mortal rival or to resume ideological struggle with the USSR.
Kissinger won the battle of celebrityhood. In my view Brzezinski won their cold war dispute on points. Kissinger was wrong to presume the Soviets would be a permanent feature of the landscape. Brzezinski correctly saw the USSR’s dormant nations, including Ukraine, as its Achilles heel. Either way, their clash over how to manage the cold war mattered as much as today’s schism between those in Donald Trump’s world who laud his wish for détente with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and those who see both imposing a Munich-style disaster on Ukraine.
On the fate of Ukraine rests the future of war and peace. A key distinction from the Kissinger-Brzezinski era is that no one today can match either’s intellectual creativity, public reputation and diplomatic weight. America’s missing strategy, in other words, owes something to the absence of grand strategists.
What did they have that eludes their lesser-known heirs in today’s America? The simplistic answer is that Kissinger and Brzezinski were immigrants. Newcomers often value America’s freedoms more than its native-born and are statistically far likelier to start companies, win Nobel Prizes and indeed launch schools of thought.
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A richer pointer can be found in the tales of their emigration. It was no accident that a 15-year-old Heinz Kissinger arrived in America a month before Neville Chamberlain’s infamous 1938 betrayal of Czechoslovakia in Munich. A few weeks later, a 10-year-old Brzezinski caught his first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty having left Europe’s shores two days after Hitler completed his occupation of the Sudetenland.
Each had been raised in the “bloodlands” of interbellum Europe. One was a Jewish-German refugee whose extended family would be wiped out in the Holocaust; the other was the son of a Polish diplomat whose country would be razed less than a year later when the Soviets and Nazis spliced Poland in history’s ugliest vivisection.
They were marked in different ways by the harrowing fate of those they left behind. Given a choice between order and justice, Kissinger said he would always choose order. His people were liquidated amid history’s most brutal disorder. Brzezinski would have chosen justice. Wounded Polishness — a sense of amputated history — was the launch pad of his ambition.
Crucially, though, they shared a burning sense of the tragic. “As immigrants, we knew about the fragility of societies and we had an instinct for the transitoriness of human perceptions,” Kissinger told me in 2021, four years after Brzezinski died aged 89 in Virginia and two and a half years before Kissinger himself passed away in Connecticut having recently turned 100.
Kissinger was among the sources for my full biography of Brzezinski, which comes out next month. The difference between the two, in Kissinger’s view, was that Kissinger came from Germany but had not been defined by it, while Brzezinski had been defined by Poland, although it had “not set limits on what he became”.
But Kissinger wanted to stress what they had in common. Together, though with Kissinger as the pioneer, they supplanted the old Anglo-American elite. Figures such as Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson and John McCloy conducted diplomacy as a second career or part-time obligation. Kissinger and Brzezinski, on the other hand, were brash professionals who lacked the social ties of the Georgetown wise men. In Acheson’s words, the former were “present at the creation” of the US-made postwar order. Kissinger and Brzezinski grappled varyingly with the existential threat to that order.
More important, however, was their exposure to societal breakdown and the eternity of geopolitics — an experience that no Wasp could emulate. “The question is whether Americans can ever understand that we are living in a continuous experience that has no end, and that you can never segment life into different problems,” Kissinger said. “[As Europeans] we knew that we were living in a continuous history. It never comes to an end.” He might also have quoted the great American novelist William Faulkner, who said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The worldliness of these two modern-day viziers was also manifested in very different ways. Kissinger was seductive, a master of flattery and a maestro of the press conference. Brzezinski was better at making media enemies. His theory of the case — that the USSR was a gerontocracy in terminal decline — barely wavered. Kissinger, on the other hand, was strategically amorphous. He perfected the art of illusory action — “motion without movement”, as he called it. But he always gravitated back to his 1815 Congress of Vienna lodestar; a world in which great powers strove to be in balance. Brzezinski’s worldview was filtered through the smaller players — not just his native Poland but the myriad national groups within the USSR whose separatist inclinations he sought to awake.
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Kissinger was a juggler; Brzezinski a boxer. When the latter accused Kissinger of “acrobatics” during the Nixon years, they nearly fell out. In spite of their often irascible disputes, the Republican and Democratic sparring partners never stinted on dinners at Sans Souci, a French restaurant (since closed) near the White House. You went there to be seen. “One always learns more from ‘friendly critics’ than from uncritical friends,” Kissinger wrote to Brzezinski after one such meal in the early 1970s. It is hard to imagine such a garrulous frenemyship in today’s Washington.
The subject of tariffs never arose. Theirs was a time when the US was opening markets and laying the foundations of globalisation. On that, the two strategists absent-mindedly agreed — economics was not either’s strong suit. Today, Trump is bludgeoning that project into reverse.
Opening to China was a central feature of both Kissinger and Brzezinski’s careers. Does Trump yet have a China strategy? Notions of Trump pulling off a “reverse Kissinger” — bringing the Russians into America’s orbit, much as Kissinger exploited the Sino-Soviet split in the other direction — are fanciful. Steve Witkoff, the New York property developer, now Trump’s all-purpose envoy, has recently proved no match for Putin. A reverse Brzezinski — cutting ties with China and recognising Taiwan — is thankfully hard to foresee even with Trump’s unpredictability.
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Having all but gutted Kissinger’s détente, Brzezinski became known in China’s media as the “polar bear tamer” — the bear being Deng’s nickname for the USSR. Kissinger had wanted to keep an “equilateral” distance between the US, USSR and China. Under Carter, they became de facto partners.
Either way, it is hard to imagine Trump plunging into countless hours of tactical back-and-forth with China’s President Xi Jinping or Putin. Nor would Trump be likely to give his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, or secretary of state, Marco Rubio, anything close to Kissinger-Brzezinski latitude.
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How would each handle today’s Russian war on Ukraine? In spite of their differences, it is a good bet that neither Brzezinski nor Kissinger would have advised Trump to offer concessions to Russia ahead of peace talks. Sweeteners are meant to be dangled not gift-wrapped in advance.
Both would have been mortified by Trump and his vice-president JD Vance’s Oval Office humiliation in February of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. As a seducer, Kissinger caught most of his flies with honey. Razor sharp and occasionally prickly, Brzezinski was closer to a Venus flytrap. Neither would have seen Zelenskyy as prey, still less in front of the cameras.
It is impossible to imagine either speaking about Putin in the manner Witkoff recently did to the Maga broadcaster Tucker Carlson. Witkoff disclosed that Putin had said he had prayed for Trump in church after last summer’s assassination attempt. The Russian leader also presented Witkoff with a flattering portrait of Trump. Putin was “enormously gracious”, said Witkoff. “It takes balls to say that,” Carlson replied. Whatever becomes of Trump’s Russia-Ukraine peacemaking ambition, Putin seems to have a better read of Trump than Trump of Putin.
Late in life, Kissinger and Brzezinski nearly swapped their Russia positions. In a 2014 op-ed for the FT, Brzezinski argued for the “Finlandisation” of Ukraine, which would make it an unallied, though pro-western, buffer state between Russia and Nato. Even more startlingly, Kissinger endorsed Ukraine’s Nato membership following Russia’s 2022 invasion. Kissinger’s U-turn can probably be attributed to his habit of keeping within the bounds of consensus, one linked to the needs of Kissinger Associates, his thriving business. Access to the White House and other chancelleries was vital to his consultancy.
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Critics of Kissinger and Brzezinski have plenty of material to play with. “Henry Kissinger, war criminal, beloved by America’s ruling class, finally dies,” was Rolling Stone’s obituary headline. Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, his backing of Pakistan’s bloody suppression of the uprising in what was to become Bangladesh, the US-backed coup in Chile and wiretapping his own staff dogged Kissinger for the rest of his life. Yet he also negotiated the first nuclear arms control agreement and came close to clinching a second. Détente was no chimera. The older he got, the more Kissinger was treated as an oracle.
Brzezinski’s time in government left no blood on his hands. Carter was the only postwar president never to order soldiers into combat, although eight servicemen died in the aborted Iran hostage rescue attempt. Brzezinski did help lure the Soviets into Afghanistan in 1979, although it was obviously Leonid Brezhnev’s decision to invade. “They’ve taken the bait!” Brzezinski allegedly told an aide on hearing the news. The origins of global jihadism can partly be dated to then. But claims that Brzezinski played “godfather of al-Qaeda” are an absurd leap. The terrorist group was formed seven years after Carter left office.
Some argue that today’s conditions make it far harder for a Kissinger or a Brzezinski to emerge. In the digital age, geostrategic manoeuvring is so much more difficult to execute. Their by no means overlapping detractors say it is a good thing they lack contemporary equivalents. Yet, to paraphrase what one of Trump’s favourite movie characters, Hannibal Lecter, said of his interrogator, the world was more interesting with Kissinger and Brzezinski in it. And to edit-quote someone else, competing strategies beat no strategy.
When Brzezinski died, Kissinger was surprised how bereft he felt. The two had first met in Harvard 67 years earlier. “How central Zbig’s presence had been to my image of a world worth living in and defending hit home with an unexpected force,” Kissinger wrote to Brzezinski’s family on learning of his death. “I felt as if a sustaining pillar of the structure of the world I cared about had disappeared . . . We shared, I like to think, a cause, if not always our ambitions.”
In death, more than life, these two naturalised Americans seem to get along. As their era recedes, and as America repudiates the world it made, both figures deserve study.”
Political appointees have too little experience and too many delusions.
“America may have been temporarily chastened by failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, as it was after Vietnam. But there’s no reason that fresh, exuberant ill-judgements on the scale pushed by Rice and Bundy won’t again be made, and soon. After all, those deadly fiascos were just the worst blunders in decades of U.S. foreign policy miscalculation.
Why do such bad ideas get injected into the making of U.S. foreign policy, particularly with an ease rarely found in other advanced democracies?
Much is due to the political appointments system which the country uses to staff its government, including the national security apparatus. The White House has the responsibility to fill roughly 4,000 senior jobs throughout the federal departments and agencies. When it comes to roles concerning foreign policy and defense, such appointees from outside the executive branch often have more experience in academia, law firms or in business than on the front lines of world affairs. (The same method is applied to staffing at other departments, like Commerce and HUD — except bad ideas at Commerce or Labor are unlikely to cause international catastrophe.)
This freewheeling approach imposes inexperience, compels urgency, courts risk and foments illusions of being able to manage the ethnic, ideological and political concerns of other nations.
“I didn’t think it would be this tough,” Rice concluded on Iraq, echoing Bundy who came to admit of Vietnam that “this damn war is much tougher” than he had anticipated. The system — in which Rice and Bundy, among so many others, have flourished — creates all the wrong incentives when devising foreign policy even as it raises the risk of being gamed by rivals overseas. Of course, not all appointees have such flaws, just like not all career officials have real foresight. But it’s difficult to see why the outcomes of jousting with China, waging proxy war against Russia and courting a showdown with Iran would be any better than the results of past turmoil.
Furthermore, the problem with the system of political patronage goes deep: The influence of cabinet members and nearly all ambassadors can be secondary to that of their subordinates who structure and execute decisions day-to-day at State, the Pentagon and on the NSC staff. Unlike in any other serious country, these hands-on operating roles of government are all open to political patronage, including key positions affecting war and peace: undersecretary of defense for policy, counselor at the State Department, assistant secretary of defense for international security, ones at State for political-military affairs. Also in the mix are assistant and deputy assistant secretaries in both departments for all regions of the globe. Various office directors and senior staff add their weight.
Some slots require Senate confirmation; most not. Appointees from outside federal departments and agencies may be fewer in one administration, more so in another. But the result is always a kaleidoscope of new arrivals and random talents. Meanwhile, embers are drifting down on powder kegs.
America wasn’t always so reckless in the world. It took Kennedy’s thousand days in office to make incaution systemic.
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Why the sudden shift? During the Kennedy presidency, every form of U.S. military power was multiplied. Appointee positions expanded geometrically, and vigorous men of all backgrounds quickly filled them. Professors, previously for the most part advisers to the departments dealing with national defense, suddenly became line practitioners. Kennedy moved his national security adviser — Bundy, who appointed people of his own — into the West Wing and promised a “long twilight struggle year in and year out” against ruthless, godless tyranny. The youthful and energetic men who came to power in January 1961 saw few limits and acted accordingly.
Later administrations kept the illusions of what U.S. political-military clout could accomplish, along with the habit of deploying professors and think tankers in hands-on roles, with no better results. To be sure, great accomplishments have surrounded the many self-deceptions. America defeated the Soviet empire, created sound alliances and had a short, focused, effective intervention in Kosovo, as in Kuwait. Yet the record as a whole is chilling: not just the failed wars but all the befriending of murderous sheiks and shahs, an illusory détente in the 1970s that buttressed Soviet Russia, to be followed in the 80s by upholding Saddam Hussein, later capped by nation-building in places where nations barely existed. And worst of all, the country keeps repeating its follies on a colossal scale.
Today, the Office of Presidential Personnel fills about 635 jobs at State and Defense, and several hundred more at Homeland Security and elsewhere that address foreign policy. At the NSC, which has a staff over 300, roughly 20 percent of the most senior people are appointed, the rest being detailed from the military and a range of government agencies.
Stephen Hadley, who succeeded Rice in 2005 as national security adviser, defended this approach after a lecture I gave in Washington, in 2019, on foreign policy shortfalls. Much is due to the executive branch structure’s depending on one figure being in charge. Accordingly, a president most effectively exercises power by personalizing the instruments of state right down to the level of daily implementation — especially in foreign affairs where, constitutionally, the president has vast latitude.
Basically, in this view, spirited, clever and well-schooled individuals then get pulled into the system. They are people like current national security adviser Jake Sullivan, a lawyer who had entered government in 2009, becoming Vice President Joe Biden’s chief national security aide; he then spent four years teaching and policy consulting during the Trump years, until Biden became president. Or like Rice, who in 2001 returned to Washington for a second stint in government — having spent two years at the NSC during the George H. W. Bush presidency — after a decade at Stanford. And people like Bundy too, who was new to public life when coming to Washington at the start of the Kennedy administration, after a dozen years teaching at Harvard.
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These representative careers are emulated by other men and women with establishment credentials, stellar political networks and ambitions to enter America’s civilian national security cohort, or to attain foreign policy roles in general. They arrive from law firms, universities, think tanks, congressional offices, business and journalism, and they include former career professionals who’ve left government, then to return with political backing. In all, the actual number of years they serve in the executive branch is low compared to Foreign Service officers and civil servants who’ve risen in the merit-based ranks.
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It’s a unique approach. In Europe, Japan, Brazil, Russia and China, ministries are filled instead by permanent, though frequently rotating, career officials. Career diplomats and foreign policy professionals hold important roles sometimes effectively up to cabinet level.
Ideally, the Washington way assures a valuable tension between an administration’s more original, politically-savvy appointees — alert to the short term — and an ongoing, knowledgeable, inherited staff attuned to longer challenges. However, what ends up happening in practice is that the country’s civil service and Foreign Service are diminished: Political appointees from outside the federal departments, relatively untried on the frontlines, tend to hold the decisive, career-enhancing roles like deputy assistant secretary and above. Chances of serious misjudgment increase.
Part of the tragedy is that most anyone whose life included years of mediating between warlords in N’Djamena, or equally dismal tasks during decades of actual responsibility, could have told professors Rice or Bundy that war was going to be “tough,” and could have said so before the thousands of body bags started arriving home.
That sort of gritty, practical, career-long experience exemplifies the Foreign Service, among other parts of the federal merit-based hierarchy. It fosters an expertise that’s hard to acquire elsewhere, even if a lawyer or professor or think tank researcher has more than one or two forays into government.
Questions of relevant, practical experience among many political appointees is one of several problems with the patronage system.
During 2001, for example, the Bush administration’s new undersecretary of defense for policy — a huge job that involved managing the Defense department’s international relations — arrived from a six-man law firm. In his memoirs written after he left for a think tank in 2005, this recent enthusiast for invading Iraq and thereby transforming the Middle East derided the country’s diplomats for their inclination to “fret about the risk” of war.
Forty years earlier, it was Bundy — with no more useful experience than this undersecretary — who mocked the professionals at State for lacking “energy” when harsh decisions of escalation and regime change had to be made on Vietnam. Unsurprisingly, in the run-ups to both Iraq and Vietnam, it tended to be those experienced, long-serving professionals — men and women required to know something of history, foreign cultures and languages — who doubted that America could recast entire cultures overnight.
A second limitation arises from the relatively short stints in government among these appointees. Institutional memory becomes spotty as they come and go. Those confirmed by the Senate stay in office for an average of 17 months. Below them, others may serve slightly longer, before returning to private life. It’s a form of unplanned obsolescence.
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A system which depends heavily on short-term officeholders imposes a sense of urgency on itself. And urgency is dangerous when, say, negotiating arms accords — or deciding just how to evacuate Kabul or Saigon. Appointees — often focused, clever and determined people — are able to push their priorities through bureaucracies that are less certain or obsessed. These officials may be comparative amateurs. Yet they must act right now before competing urgencies are tabled, or their administration is swept from office.
A third limitation of many appointees — shared by cabinet members — is the recurring belief that America can pretty much shape entire geostrategic environments, like the one around Beijing.
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Today, after a debacle with many similarities, retired General David Petraeus — always politically attuned, and sounding like a just-appointed assistant secretary — writes of what should have been done to “manage” Afghanistan on a “sustained, generational” scale. Words like that say a lot, and they parrot a half-century of high civilian officials. This isn’t merely shorthand for a robust foreign policy. It’s a small step to assuming that Asia or the Middle East can be smoothly administered, or fine-tuned, if the right tools are applied.
Here too a difference has long existed with professional diplomats who are skilled in non-coercive persuasion. Seldom are Foreign Service Officers, who are frequently marginalized anyway from the big decisions, to be found among the “global architects” of whom novelist John le Carré writes. Those are officials at the top who are busily crafting “a secret tuck here, and a secret pull there… and a destabilized economy or two” to save democracy everywhere.
Worst of all, the appointee system is a gateway to power for a certain type of political figure. These are people whom the opportunities offered by the modern state tempt into an eternal trifling with danger and extremity. And it’s to the excitements of war and peace that they are drawn. Nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt called them “emergency men,” and the genre has abounded in Washington.
During the discussion with Hadley, he asked me what I meant by “fine-tuning.” A successor of his, John Bolton, who served 18 months under President Donald Trump, offers an example. Bolton is a true amateur, and fits Burckhardt’s description. He’s spent only 14 divvied up years of a nearly five-decade career working on these matters in government. Law firms, politicking, early domestic duties at the Justice Department and think tanks consumed his time. (Nor do TV interviews and op-eds issued from research centers compare to owning a problem while in office, however briefly.) Yet he tells of staging coups during stints of public service — pointless acts if even true, really, because there’s little chance that Washington will be able to control what comes next, whether Saigon in 1963 or Cairo in 2013, or who-knows-what tomorrow.
To boast in 2022 of staging coups recalls another national security adviser who described himself in 1972 as “the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into town.” Each man was daydreaming of uncanny abilities.
Henry Kissinger held that slot at the time. President Richard Nixon, who knew much about foreign affairs, observed that Kissinger was one of those people who foment crises “to earn attention for themselves,” adding that the Harvard professor — in his first government job — would have set one off over someplace like Ecuador had Vietnam not been in play. Many crises did erupt, and worse: bungling in Cambodia and in Pakistan that abetted genocide, and so too in East Timor which he believed to be Muslim, not Catholic, and “in the middle of Indonesia,” plus bolstering a disastrous right-wing coup in Chile, just to begin. Meanwhile, Kissinger imitated Kennedy’s own NSC adviser, McGeorge Bundy. “The defect of the State Department is low energy,” he advised Nixon.
As would Kissinger, Bundy embodied emergency: Any resolute action had to be superior to restraint. An early hawk on Vietnam, he saw bloodshed during his first visit to Asia in 1965. The U.S. commander in Vietnam recalled Bundy developing a “field marshal psychosis,” and America then intervened big.
Political appointees aren’t the only ones to blame. Generals, legislators, carefully sieved Foreign Service Officers and their counterparts in the civil service, as well as at CIA, can push foolish notions too. (CIA has few appointees, and its problems instead occur from a decades-long hermetic insularity.) It’s the brass, after all, which keeps assuring politicians that the silver bullets of airpower will deliver a decisive edge: drones in the Middle East, helicopters in Vietnam and B-29s in North Korea. Yet these aren’t the men and women who are driving decisions day-to-day.
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But there’s a thin line between hopes of “shaping” the world and trying to exert open, direct control over what other countries might or might not do. Watch old habits unfurl as dangers mount, whether from Russia, Iran or from China, forever “on the march.”
The language of public debate is getting loud, and it’s unoriginal. “Vacuums of power,” “emboldened opponents,” “Munich!,” of course, and “a test of US resolve,” as well as “shaping” this or that vast entity. Excitable professors join Blinken’s new Foreign Affairs Policy Board who write, actually in italics, of “ruthlessly blocking an opponent’s way forward” and explicitly urge a new Cold War. Meanwhile, civilian control of the military, which depends on a keen sense of what can and cannot be accomplished by force, hasn’t improved in any way at all.
Victory has been called the ability to face greater problems without fear. The steadiness which makes that possible can be seen in the case-hardened, enduring qualities that the U.S. Navy brings to refueling its ships in a storm: “Not easy, just routine.” These are strengths of focus, of deadly seriousness about the country’s needs, and of seasoned professionals who work with few illusions. In contrast, to keep indulging White House patronage is like playing dice at the heights of foreign policy making.
At best, the political appointee-to-career personnel ratios might change, though in fact little will be done to improve the staffing problem. Foreign and defense policy has become a trellis on which the well-connected grow careers, and too many influential figures profit from revolving doors, as do the companies where they cash in. Yet knowing of these failings might induce a healthy skepticism toward what journalists label the “national security establishment,” and also toward our country’s commitment, as stated in the latest national strategy document, to “defend democracy around the world.”
Ultimately, America’s peculiar approach to selecting talent undercuts the ability to handle strategy, let alone grand strategy, which entails unifying long-term ends with the most broad-based means. For a lifetime, with the fewest of exceptions, what passes for considered policy has instead been a twisting sequence of ad hoc decisions, hammered out under the stresses of domestic politics. How could results be otherwise?”
