Zbigniew Brzezinski’s determinedly hawkish views about the Cold War made him, for decades, the bane of liberals, Democrats, and foreign policy doves. When, as President Carter’s national security adviser, he made a brief appearance before the 1980 Democratic National Convention, he was roundly and loudly booed. In Washington, he made so many enemies among the elite that Time magazine did a cover story titled “Almost Everyone vs. Zbig.” Brzezinski had, the Time story said, “shown poor judgment in indulging his visceral anti-Russian sentiments and his combative, provocative personality.” His angular face and Polish-accented English helped fill out the thin stereotypes of Brzezinski as hardened and somehow otherworldly.

Then, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the popular perceptions of the longtime Sovietologist and foreign policy guru changed. Starting in 2003, Brzezinski became one of the most prominent opponents of the American invasion of Iraq. After that, his ideas—set forth in an unending series of op-eds and television appearances—were embraced by liberals and attacked by neoconservatives. In the witty description of his biographer Edward Luce, “Brzezinski’s Darth Vader had morphed into Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

Luce’s new book about Brzezinski, simply entitled Zbig, offers penetrating insights into Brzezinski’s long career and evolving ideas, many of which hold continuing relevance today. Brzezinski’s core belief, enunciated not just during his time in the White House but over decades in academia and in his many books, was that the Soviet Union was weaker, more vulnerable, and potentially less enduring than the American foreign policy establishment believed. These days, a comparable issue lurks in the ongoing debates about China: Is the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping as powerful as outside commentators proclaim it to be, or does it have underlying internal political weaknesses that will eventually come to the fore, as happened in the Soviet Union? The countries are not the same, but those assumptions of monolithic might that Brzezinski challenged with respect to the Soviet Union may also be worth questioning with regard to China.

Brzezinski, who died in 2017 at age 89, also set forth predictions about today’s world that have proved strikingly prescient. In the early 1990s—as the Soviet Union was unraveling, most Western leaders were basking in triumphalism, and George H.W. Bush was crowing about a “New World Order”—Brzezinski warned repeatedly of the rise of a future “antihegemonic” grouping of Russia, China, and Iran to challenge that American-led order. Such a coalition “would be reminiscent in scale and scope of the challenge once posed by the Sino-Soviet bloc, though this time China would likely be the leader and Russia, the follower,” Brzezinski wrote in 1997.

He wasn’t always right. Even with respect to the Soviet Union, where he proved largely accurate, Brzezinski misjudged from time to time. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, President Reagan, together with Secretary of State George Shultz and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, perceived Gorbachev as a markedly different kind of Soviet leader—in Thatcher’s earlier description, “a man we can do business with.” Brzezinski, in contrast, was among the skeptics who viewed Gorbachev as just another product of the Communist Party system. He joined forces with Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and a host of other prominent Cold War leaders to denounce Reagan’s efforts at diplomacy with Gorbachev. “Beneath the velvet glove [Gorbachev] always wears, there is a steel fist,” wrote Nixon at the time. As it turned out, the skeptics were profoundly wrong.

Luce, the well-known Financial Times columnist and author of previous books on modern India and on the decline of Western liberalism, has delivered a highly readable account of Brzezinski’s career and thought, one that makes a solid case for the significance of his ideas about a weak, deteriorating Soviet Union in any history of the end of the Cold War. Noting that some Russians view the Soviet collapse to be the result of a plot hatched by Brzezinski, Luce concludes: “Brzezinski’s Cold War impact is as underappreciated in today’s US as it is overstated in Russia.”

Virtually all analyses of Brzezinski’s outlook on the world start off at the same point: that he was Polish, as though that single fact could explain (or discredit) everything he said. So it is worth noting that Brzezinski lived only three years of his long life in Poland, and then only as a small child. (Years later, when Brzezinski began corresponding with the Polish Pope John Paul II in his native language, he had to apologize for what might be “amusingly ungrammatical” language. “I never attended Polish school,” he wrote.)

He grew up mostly in Canada. His father, Tadeusz Brzezinski, was a Polish diplomat dispatched to Montreal as consul-general when Brzezinski was ten years old, and Zbigniew went to both high school and McGill University there. (Brzezinski’s father lost his diplomatic post after the Communist takeover of Poland, but his parents remained in Montreal for most of the rest of their lives.)

Still, as an émigré, Brzezinski retained an intense identification with Poland, and that in turn led to his antipathy toward the Soviet Union, which was occupying his country of birth. From McGill, Brzezinski went to Harvard for his doctorate, became a Soviet scholar, and was thus swept up in the burgeoning intellectual debates about the Cold War that would continue for decades.

Luce’s biography is at its best in tracing these intellectual battles. One fashion in academia in the 1950s and ’60s was “convergence theory,” which held that the Soviet Union and the United States would eventually, as the result of sociological trends, outgrow ideological differences, become more like each other, and learn to cooperate. Brzezinski strongly rejected the idea of convergence: The Soviet Union was fundamentally different and would remain so, he argued. (Fifteen to 20 years ago, there were echoes of this debate when some intellectuals envisioned enthusiastically that Washington and Beijing would join together in a “G-2” or “Chimerica” to steer the course of world affairs.)

Separately, others of Brzezinski’s prominent academic colleagues maintained that the many nationalities inside the Soviet empire (like the Kazaks, Tajiks, and Georgians, not to mention the Ukrainians) were of ever-decreasing importance, because the non-Russian minorities had come to identify as Soviet citizens, just as there were American citizens of myriad nationalities. As Luce recounts, Brzezinski usually responded with a droll question: “So do they speak Soviet?”

His outlook put Brzezinski at odds with what he described as the “WASP elite” who dominated Soviet policy in Washington for much of the Cold War and believed that the Soviets could be dealt with via traditional diplomacy. Averell Harriman, the most senior of the Soviet hands, who had negotiated with Joseph Stalin during World War II, variously denounced Brzezinski as a “fool” and a “menace” with “absolutely no understanding of the Russians.” Harriman’s views about Brzezinski were shared by other Wise Men such as Chip Bohlen. Carter appointed Brzezinski to be national security adviser because, as governor of the state of Georgia, he had worked closely with Brzezinski on the Trilateral Commission, the foreign policy organization with members from the United States, Europe, and Japan that Brzezinski himself had helped to create. After Brzezinski’s appointment, the members of the WASP elite quickly gravitated toward one of their own, the new Secretary of State Cyrus Vance (who had earlier served as an aide to Harriman). Years later, after he had left the White House, Brzezinski described the ensuing tensions in scathing terms. “As a member of both the legal profession and the once-dominant WASP elite, [Vance] operated according to their values and rules, but those values and rules were of declining relevance,” he wrote.

Much later, in 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing revolutions in Eastern Europe, Brzezinski ended his battle with the elites in triumph. Strobe Talbott, the same Time correspondent who had done the earlier cover story denouncing Brzezinski’s supposedly poor judgment (and who himself generally reflected the views of the foreign policy elite), published an interview with Brzezinski. It was called “Zbigniew Brzezinski: Vindication of a Hard-Liner.”

A continuing, entertaining sideshow in Luce’s biography is Brzezinski’s long, often rivalrous relationship with Henry Kissinger. Indeed, Kissinger emerges as the second most important character in the book. The two men were colleagues at Harvard; they were often lumped together as the nation’s two leading foreign policy intellectuals and strategic thinkers, who became national security advisers back-to-back.

Their ideas and underlying assumptions about the Soviet Union differed. Kissinger was famously pessimistic and gloomy. When it came to the Soviets, he assumed that the United States was in decline, that the Soviet Union was catching up, and that American foreign policy needed to accept this lugubrious reality. Brzezinski, on the other hand, thought it was the Soviet Union that was in decline, and that the United States should do whatever it could to stress and challenge the Soviets, by, for example, deepening American engagement with Eastern European countries. And while Kissinger was a self-avowed realist, Luce writes that Brzezinski “belonged to no recognizable school of foreign policy; neither consistently a hawk nor a dove. He had little time for labels such as ‘realist’ and ‘idealist.’”

As Kissinger and Brzezinski each separately made the transition from academia to positions of power, their careers were intertwined. After he won the 1968 election, Richard Nixon named Kissinger as his national security adviser. Luce describes Nixon’s appointment of Kissinger as the moment Brzezinski realized that he, too, could aspire to that post. It was, as well, the beginning of Brzezinski’s intense rivalry with Kissinger. In 1976, Brzezinski worked with candidate Carter to make denunciations of Kissinger a staple of his presidential campaign. And after Carter was elected, Kissinger became a leading critic of the new President’s policies. At one point, Kissinger came into the Oval Office for a private meeting with Carter solely to criticize Brzezinski.

Luce draws the contrasts between the two men well. Their personalities were strikingly different: Brzezinski was coolly analytical and unemotional; Kissinger was vain and sensitive. Brzezinski was relatively straightforward; Kissinger was cunning, constantly maneuvering either to put himself into a position of power or to stay in one. Moreover, Luce writes, “In glaring contrast to Kissinger, who was a master of seduction, Brzezinski had limited patience with the media.”

After leaving office, Brzezinski was content to stay outside government and occupy himself in the world of ideas and academia. Kissinger often tried to return to power somehow, whether in a top-level job in Washington (he tried to become Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state) or as a presidential emissary or intermediary to various Soviet and Chinese leaders. Their approaches to money could not have been more different either: Kissinger formed his own consulting firm to rake in a fortune from the business community—blazing a new trail for foreign policy officials after they leave government—and became a prominent member of the New York elite. Brzezinski lived a relatively modest life with his wife, an artist, at their home in northern Virginia, surrounded by ducks, chickens, dogs, cats, and, as Luce describes, a family pony named Strawberry who sometimes wandered into the kitchen.

Luce, who was given access to Brzezinski’s private papers, uncovered one of the most biting lines ever written about Kissinger. In a corollary to the old Lord Acton aphorism, Brzezinski wrote about Kissinger: “I conclude that, although power corrupts, the absence of power corrupts absolutely.”

And yet, in some weird variant of academic politesse, Kissinger and Brzezinski maintained a continuing relationship through the years. They dined regularly to exchange views. “One always learns more from ‘friendly critics’ than from uncritical friends,” Kissinger wrote to Brzezinski in 1973. “Dear Henry, get well soon!” Brzezinski wrote to him in 1982. “Your friends miss you; your enemies need you.”

Luce’s biography contains some minor flaws. Sometimes it bogs down in background material, such as in its account of the convoluted lead-up to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The last chapter, on Brzezinski’s final years, is too discursive. And there is a bit too much needless detail on the ups and downs of Brzezinski’s parents and children. (This may be a reflection of the fact that this is a family-authorized book; Luce is a frequent guest of Joe Scarborough and Zbig’s daughter, Mika Brzezinski, on “Morning Joe,” and her divorce from a first husband and marriage to Scarborough become a part of the narrative.) But the heart of the book, and the best of it, lies in its depiction of Brzezinski as, in Luce’s words, “one of America’s leading Cold War scholars.”

It is interesting to speculate on what Brzezinski would say about the world we confront today. Take China, for example. Brzezinski held for years far too rosy a view of China and the prospects for reform there. But his views were an outgrowth of the fact that China was, in the 1970s and ’80s, a close partner of the United States against the Soviet Union. Now that China has emerged as a powerful adversary of the United States (as Brzezinski predicted in the 1990s), would he be a China hawk? I suspect so.

What about the Middle East and Iran? Brzezinski was in the White House at the time of the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt, and also during the Iranian revolution that overthrew the Shah. He consistently supported an independent but demilitarized Palestinian state, with no right of return for Palestinians to their homes from before 1947. (Because Brzezinski was critical of Israel, and because of his Polish roots, he was sometimes accused of antisemitism. Luce explores and fully rejects this charge.) On Iran, Brzezinski was among those who favored, and actively explored, the use of force by Iran’s generals to support the Shah and suppress protests in the streets. He thought a government including Ayatollah Khomeini would lead to carnage. “[Brzezinski] wanted Iran’s military to launch a coup, which, he insisted, would be the lesser of two evils,” writes Luce. “Carter refused to support an explicit coup.” Taking all of that into account, and given Brzezinski’s strong opposition to the American invasion of Iraq, would he have favored the Trump Administration’s military attack, with bunker busters, in Iran? One could argue that either way: Brzezinski’s deep hostility toward the Iranian regime would have conflicted with his skepticism of Israel and his later-in-life anti-interventionism.

On one current issue, we can be surer than sure of Brzezinski’s reaction: Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked attack would have further confirmed all of Brzezinski’s lifelong beliefs about Russian imperialism. As far back as the 1940s, in his master’s thesis at McGill covering the Soviets’ problems with nationalities, Brzezinski had written, “The Ukrainians have a definite national tradition, customs, culture, literature, and history.” In 1992, after the Soviet collapse, Brzezinski predicted “a serious collision” over Ukraine. The Russian minorities there would become disaffected, he wrote, and the Kremlin might in turn exploit the grievances “as the leverage for destabilizing Ukrainian statehood.” For Brzezinski, the invasion of Ukraine would have hit too close to the home he never quite had.

Overall, Luce’s Zbig not only gives us an excellent portrait of a central figure in American foreign policy, but it also shows how that man succeeded in challenging the orthodoxies of his time. It turned out that Brzezinski’s Polish roots were an asset, not a defect, in understanding the Cold War.