1 Threat or opportunity?
Kissinger, Brzezinski, and the demise of the Soviet Union
Jussi M. Hanhimäki
Introduction
“When Bush 41 became president, he asked me what I thought the big event of his presidency would be, and I said, the gradual disintegration of the satellite orbit over the next decade. So I didn’t think it would happen within a year”.1 In this manner Henry Kissinger reminisced, in 2014, about his thinking a quarter of a century earlier. Like many others in 1988–1989, Kissinger had feared that the process of reform unfolding in the Soviet Union and the increasingly emboldened displays of Eastern European independence could easily have led to a violent crackdown as had happened, for example, in 1956 in Hungary and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia. In early 1989 Kissinger had, accordingly, pushed for a tacit deal with Moscow: if the USSR allowed liberalization in Eastern Europe, the incoming Bush administration would do nothing to encourage members of the Warsaw Pact to exit the Soviet-dominated alliance. He had certainly not been contemplating the imminent demise of the Soviet Union.
In March 1989, two months into the Bush presidency, Zbigniew Brzezinski published his views on the future of the Soviet Union and communism. The title of the book, completed in the fall of 1988, said it all: The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century. It did not win Brzezinski new friends in the Kremlin. His views also seemed to contrast significantly with those of Kissinger. “Gorbachev has unintentionally placed on history’s agenda the possibility of the actual dismantling of the Soviet Union”, Brzezinski wryly observed.2 Gorbachev’s reforms and developments in Eastern Europe, he opined in March 1989, showed that the world was “moving into the post-Communist phase even more rapidly than we were entitled to expect even a year ago.”3 The implication was clear: it was hardly a time to offer a lifeline to America’s major long-term adversary. If Kissinger evoked memories of Soviet and Warsaw Pact interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s, Brzezinski warned against “another Yalta”: a betrayal of Eastern Europe akin to the 1945 agreements when Franklin Roosevelt had accepted – or so the popular perception holds – de facto Soviet control over the region that included Brzezinski’s own native Poland.4
The point of the contrast is not to argue that the late Zbigniew Brzezinski5 was correct while Kissinger was wrong. In the end, the two appear in agreement on most of the substantive issues: communism was in decline, the Soviet Union as an entity was in difficulty, and the United States, as a consequence, faced an uncertain situation. Brzezinski appears to have seen the situation and its implications more clearly than others. But this was to be expected: he was an expert on the matter – a “Sovietologist” – whereas Kissinger’s knowledge of the internal problems of socialism and the Soviet system was far more limited. The more interesting point of this apparent contrast between two of America’s most celebrated scholar-practitioners is how close to each other their ultimate policy recommendations for the Bush administration were throughout the course of 1989.
Caution was the key. Both Kissinger and Brzezinski viewed the transformations underway in the Soviet bloc and the implications such changes had for American policy with varying degrees of hope and concern. Both wished to see the reforms succeed. While disagreeing about the nature and speed of the transformation, their recommendations were broadly similar. Kissinger, anticipating a long drawn-out evolution, emphasized the need to manage the process via means he knew best: high-level diplomacy and, if necessary, secret agreements. Brzezinski, who could see the evidence of irreversible Soviet demise more clearly than most other observers, understood that this did not provide a blueprint for action. It was difficult, even in early 1989, to accept that a totalitarian system could simply collapse on its own. There were plenty of “stakeholders” willing to use means of repression to stay in power. And, perhaps more to the point, American policy could as easily prolong as it could hasten the demise of communism.
Kissinger and Brzezinski’s different views offer a glimpse at the uncertainty that was so evident among American policy-making elites accustomed to thinking in Cold War terms. The mix of hope and concern prevalent among American policy-making circles in the waning moments of the Cold War resulted in a policy of extreme caution and lowered expectations. In retrospect, this may have all been for the good. But it was also frustrating. In a nutshell: being “on the right side of history” was one thing; how to take advantage of this contingency was something else. And, as is argued below, neither Kissinger nor Brzezinski could – in 1988–1989 – provide a clear vision (let alone a blueprint) on how to minimize the threats and maximize the opportunities provided by the extraordinary developments of these years.
Outsiders
The parallel lives of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski are well known to students of American diplomacy. Each came from a particular European background that had left them little choice but to build new lives in North America amidst the upheaval of World War II. Born in 1923 to a middle class Jewish family in Furth, Bavaria, Kissinger was 15 when his family migrated to the United States. Having escaped the horrors of the forthcoming Holocaust, the Kissingers settled in New York. In 1943, 20-year-old Henry enlisted in the army and became a naturalized US citizen; by the end of the war he was back in Germany as part of the American occupying force. He returned to the United States in 1947, enrolled at Harvard University, completed his BA in 1950 and a PhD in the Government Department in 1954. After a sojourn at the New York-based Council of Foreign Relations – where he wrote his first best-seller, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1955) – Kissinger returned to Harvard as professor and co-director of the Center for International Affairs.6
While a graduate student at Harvard, Kissinger encountered a promising young Sovietologist of Polish origin. Zbigniew Brzezinski was five years younger than Kissinger. The son of a former Polish diplomat who had been stationed in Canada when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Brzezinski spent his youth in Montreal. He earned BA and MA degrees from McGill University (in 1949 and 1950 respectively) and then went to Harvard to work on his PhD. While Kissinger studied the diplomatic settlement at the closing stages of the Napoleonic wars, Brzezinski focused on the biggest issue confronting American foreign policy-makers: his dissertation, completed in 1953 and published in 1956, was entitled The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism. Brzezinski eventually became an American citizen in 1958 (despite having lived in Montreal for over a decade he never applied to become a Canadian).7 Failing to obtain a tenured position at Harvard, Brzezinski moved to Columbia University where he headed the recently established Research Institute on Communist Affairs.8
Both were, hence, products and beneficiaries of the Cold War university. Their specific fields of expertise – International Relations and Nuclear Strategy in Kissinger’s case and Area Studies/Sovietology in Brzezinski’s – were blooming in Cold War America. Although both were outsiders with difficult last (and in Brzezinski’s case even first) names, the two made the most of the opportunities for engaging with policy-makers. And, as young ambitious Harvard scholars with access to national and international networks, Kissinger and Brzezinski could also benefit from institutional credibility and unequalled funding opportunities to build careers that went far beyond that of traditional professors.
They rose to the occasion. Ambitious to boot, both Kissinger and Brzezinski actively and successfully sought to bridge the gap between academia and policy-making. Both were sought for advice and expertise by such think tanks as the Council of Foreign Relations. Both acted as occasional consultants to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s; Brzezinski even spending two years (1966–1968) as a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. Both had a significant Rockefeller connection: Kissinger acting as Nelson Rockefeller’s major foreign policy advisor throughout the 1960s and Brzezinski receiving the backing of David Rockefeller in setting up the Trilateral Commission in the early 1970s.9 They had different views on domestic politics: Kissinger choosing the Republicans and Brzezinski identifying with the Democrats. Indeed, during the 1968 presidential election each supported a losing candidate: Kissinger acted as New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s major foreign policy advisor throughout the Republican primaries, while Brzezinski was the head of Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s foreign policy task force. Richard Nixon, after defeating Humphrey in November 1968, eventually tapped Kissinger as his NSC Advisor.10 For the next 12 years, until the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, either Kissinger (1969–1977) or Brzezinski (1977–1981) played a central role in the making of US foreign policy.
Kissinger’s appointment as national security advisor and eventual elevation to secretary of state broke some glass ceilings. Perhaps most importantly, Kissinger became the first naturalized citizen to occupy such key posts in American foreign policy, hence paving the way for others (such as Brzezinski). Kissinger came from the world of academia which, as such, may not have represented a major breakthrough: John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s NSC Advisor McGeorge Bundy had, after all, been the dean of Harvard College and would later become history professor at New York University (NYU). But unlike Bundy and most of those who had occupied influential positions previously, Kissinger was a truly self-made man with very limited direct government involvement before Nixon selected him for the NSC post. Indeed, German-born Jewish professors were not natural members of the East coast foreign policy elite personified by men like Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson, or, indeed, Bundy (who came from a wealthy Boston family with close connections to, for example, former Secretary of State Henry Stimson). Kissinger – with his immigrant background, throaty German accent, and knowledge of history – represented a sharp contrast to the WASP, suave, private-schooled, and, usually, independently wealthy men that had dominated US foreign policy decision-making for decades. That Richard Nixon had a particularly strong dislike of these “East coast elites” probably partly explains why he found Kissinger an attractive choice in 1969. By 1973 Nixon, deep into the Watergate scandal, was less excited about appointing him secretary of state. But while much of the Nixon administration was eroding, Kissinger stood out as the diplomatic superstar; for the next two years, through Gerald Ford’s first year in office, Kissinger – simultaneously secretary of state and national security advisor – was, in effect, America’s foreign policy czar. And while his image took a battering from Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter during the 1976 presidential elections, Kissinger left office in early 1977 as one of the most respected men in America.
It was a hard act to follow. Yet, in early 1977 Brzezinski was in many ways more prepared for the challenge than Kissinger had been eight years earlier. He had been an early supporter of Carter’s campaign and, as his archives testify, prepared for a potential position in government ever since the disappointing result of the 1968 presidential election. But Kissinger’s success had made Brzezinski “less special” as a choice to head the National Security Council. This was clear from the relatively muted public reaction to his nomination: already in early 1969 Kissinger had merited a Time magazine cover; in comparison Brzezinski’s appointment was hardly noticed.11 Nor was being Catholic and of Polish origin apparently much of an issue or an obstacle in 1976. Yet, Brzezinski himself had worried about the influence that any residual prejudice might have on his ambitions and showed extreme sensitivity to any hint of discrimination based upon his background. Only two years before being nominated NSC advisor Brzezinski wrote to Averell Harriman wondering why the former ambassador to Great Britain and the USSR had implied that Brzezinski’s Polish background would somehow make it impossible for him to deal “objectively with the US-Soviet relationship”. In a characteristically no-nonsense style Brzezinski made the connection to Kissinger’s celebrated shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East one of his principal points: “let me say bluntly that I do not feel that Henry Kissinger’s background disqualified him from dealing effectively with the Middle Eastern problem”. And, to drive the point home to one of the pillars of the post-war foreign policy establishment, Brzezinski added: “nor do I think that your background as a millionaire capitalist prevents you from dealing intelligently with the Soviet communists”.12
Brzezinski’s reference to Kissinger’s success is also indicative of the two men’s complicated relationship. In the public eye, they were often viewed as rivals, holding very different views about, say, US policy towards the Soviet Union: Kissinger was the key practitioner of détente, Brzezinski one of its fiercest critics. During the 1976 presidential election, the Carter campaign’s attacks on Kissinger’s “lone ranger” diplomacy were, at least in part, authored by Brzezinski. Kissinger, not blind to such connections, at one point in March 1976 called Brzezinski “a total whore”. Yet, as Justin Vaïsse has pointed out, this is actually the only (recorded) derogatory remark of its kind. In reality, throughout their respective tenures in office, Kissinger and Brzezinski retained a cordial – if distant – relationship that reflected their unique accomplishments: two self-made outsiders that had risen to the top of America’s foreign policy-making hierarchy and, by doing so, helped remake the rules of access to that privileged elite.13 Ultimately, Kissinger and Brzezinski were probably the two most important individuals – save perhaps the presidents they worked for – in determining the course of US foreign and national security policy in the “long 1970s” (ca. 1969 to 1981).
Similar career paths and mutual respect did not translate to identical policies. Historians will undoubtedly continue to debate whether something fundamental changed after the 1976 election (when the roles of the two were essentially reversed) or whether continuity was the dominant feature in US foreign policy from Kissinger to Brzezinski. On the one hand, the Carter administration brought to a conclusion a number of the policy initiatives of the early 1970s. The gradual opening to China that began with Kissinger’s secret 1971 trip finally resulted in the normalization of diplomatic relations in early 1979 and Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the United States (and to Brzezinski’s house). The SALT II agreement – the negotiations having been blocked in the mid-1970s – was concluded and signed in the summer of 1979 in Vienna. In the Middle East, t...
