ABOUT THE EVENT

The Pacific Council, in partnership with UCLA’s Burkle Center for International Relations, is hosting conversation with Edward Luce on his most recent book Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet. Edward Luce is the Financial Times’s Chief US Commentator and Columnist. The conversation will be moderated by Kal Raustiala, Director, Burkle Center for International Relation and Senior Fellow, Pacific Council on International Policy.

ABOUT THE BOOK

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.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR 

Kal Raustiala is Director of the UCLA Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations, Promise Institute Distinguished Professor of Comparative and International Law at UCLA Law School, and Senior Fellow at the Pacific Council. His most recent book, The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire, won the 2024 Silver Medal from the Council on Foreign Relations.

ORDER THE BOOK

Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet is available via Simon & Schuster.

Sponsor(s): Burkle Center for International Relations, Pacific Council on International Policy