NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An intimate and masterful biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski--President Carter's national security advisor and one of America's leading geopolitical thinkers--from one of the finest columnists and political writers at work today.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union's demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw--the heart of central Europe's bloodlands--Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at his homeland's razing by Nazi Germany and the Red Army into a lifelong quest for liberty. Born the year that Joseph Stalin consolidated power, and dying a few months into Donald Trump's first presidency, Brzezinski was shaped by and in turn shaped the global power struggles of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As counsel to US presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, and chief foreign policy figure of the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski converted his acclaim as a Sovietologist into Washington power. With Henry Kissinger, his lifelong rival with whom he had a fraught on-off relationship, he personified the new breed of foreign-born scholar who thrived in America's "Cold War University"--and who ousted Washington's gentlemanly class of WASPs who had run US foreign policy for so long.
Brzezinski's impact, aided by his unusual friendship with the Polish-born John Paul II, sprang from his knowledge of Moscow's "Achilles heel"--the fact that its nationalities, such as the Ukrainians, and satellite states, including Poland, yearned to shake off Moscow's grip. Neither a hawk nor a dove, Brzezinski was a biting critic of George W. Bush's Iraq War and an early endorser of Obama. Because he went against the DC grain of joining factions, and was on occasion willing to drop Democrats for Republicans, Brzezinski is something of history's orphan. His historic role has been greatly underweighted. In the almost cinematic arc of his life can be found the grand narrative of the American century and great power struggle that followed.
About the Author :
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.
Review :
Economist Best Books of 2025
Washington Post Notable Nonfiction of 2025
Foreign Affairs Best Books of 2025 "Deeply and meticulously researched . . . a highly readable reminder of how US and global politics looked and felt before the Cold War ended. Brzezinski is portrayed vividly, warts and all." --Guardian
"In writing this gem of a book, Luce has rendered a genuine service to history." --Tom Donilon, Foreign Affairs
"Zbig is a pleasure to read, written in the same plainspoken, lucid prose as Luce's columns. Luce does a wonderful job reconstructing old policy debates in all their nuance. . . . Many events in this book, from the Middle East struggles to relations with Moscow, chime with crises occurring today. But its era and personalities are also profoundly unlike our own. Perhaps the most striking difference is the longtime presence of such a deeply learned, devoted, and optimistic intellectual at the heart of U.S. foreign-policy-making. Brzezinski's diligence and his confidence in his adopted homeland may seem almost quaint by current standards, but we could use more of those traits, and more people like him, today." --Washington Post
"With Zbig, Edward Luce, one of the sharpest political pens of our day, has shown himself to be, in addition, a biographer of genius." --William Dalrymple, author of The Golden Road "One of the great US strategists of the Cold War and its aftermath. Zbig proved prescient in his fear that the US and Europe would squander the opportunity presented by the fall of communism to build a new world order. In Vladimir Putin, he recognized the West's Nemesis earlier than almost anyone else. Ed Luce's meticulous and engaging biography is beautifully balanced. He leaves you in no doubt how desperately we lack the new generation of geopolitical strategic thinkers who can boast Zbig's acuity and prescience." --Misha Glenny, author of McMafia
"Zbig is an astonishing biography that will change the way history looks at Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Cold War. Drawing on Brzezinski's previously secret personal diaries, Luce shows the reader how this brilliant Polish-American foresaw the coming decline of the Soviet Union--and used every tool of American policy to make sure it happened. Luce explains how time after time Brzezinski got the big issues right--from Russia and China and the Middle East. But he's also searingly honest about Brzezinski's flaws--his intellectual arrogance and sometimes ruthless ambition. Through Brzezinski's life, he was constantly compared to his émigré intellectual twin, Henry Kissinger. Readers of this book will likely conclude that Zbig was the true visionary." --David Ignatius, New York Times bestselling author
"This is best book ever written about a national security advisor. It's also by far the best biography on Brzezinski--a towering figure in American foreign policy." --David Rubenstein, author of The Highest Calling
"Zbig is a brilliant study of an American statesman, a compelling biography of both a man and a moment, the beginning of the end of the Cold War. What Kissinger, his friend and rival, was to Republicans in the 1970s, Brzezinski was to the Democrats--a formidable intellect and advocate who saw the Soviet threat more clearly than most in the upper echelons of power in Washington. This is history that matters more than ever today, given the resurgent threat from Russia, powerfully rendered by the great Ed Luce." --Susan Glasser, coauthor of the New York Times bestsellers, The Man Who Ran Washington and The Divider
"A brilliant architect of the American Century, Zbigniew Brzezinski deserves a brilliant biography, and Ed Luce has given us just that: a sensitive, deeply researched, and fair-minded portrait of a man who had a remarkable journey and has left America, and the world, the most significant of legacies." --Jon Meacham, author of And Then There Was Light
"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
