Zbig Brzezinski saw that in the long run Russia could only hold the Warsaw Pact countries together through threatened and sometimes actual use of force.

Zbig:
The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Cold War Prophet
EDWARD LUCE
(BLOOMSBURY, 560 PP, £30)
TABLET BOOKSHOP PRICE £27 • TEL 020 7799 4064

As this lengthy and accomplished biography demonstrates, the Polish-American Zbigniew Brzezinski was an outsider who, through determination and acute intelligence, worked his way into the American foreign affairs establishment. Appointed President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, he contributed to the very mixed results of that one-term presidency, but his predictions about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the persisting imperialist ambition of Russia, were influential at the time, and seem prescient today.

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