Remarkably, as postgraduate students in their twenties, both men devised a blueprint for tackling the Soviet threat and stuck with it throughout their lives. Brzezinski’s MA thesis in 1950 at McGill claimed to have identified a weakness that had eluded US experts. Communism, which presented itself as internationalist, in reality became an apology for Russian chauvinism, causing resentment throughout the Eastern Bloc. Fostering internal opposition would therefore hasten the empire’s demise – the opposite of Washington’s passive response to the uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
Fortunately for Brzezinski, he had the opportunity to see this through. As geopolitical supremo under Jimmy Carter, he ushered in an ideologically oriented foreign policy, holding the Kremlin to account for its human rights abuses, building bridges with dissidents behind the Iron Curtain and moral leaders, including Pope John Paul II, luckily a Pole. This policy would continue under Ronald Reagan, who chatted frequently with Brzezinski and wanted him to revive his role as national security adviser. It must have been a magical moment when, in 1989, he found himself in Poland to witness Solidarity activists elected to government, opening the floodgates in other Soviet satellites. Brzezinski’s appreciation of the power of ideology extended to Islamism; arming and funding the mujahideen in Afghanistan drained Russian resources, albeit inviting the later accusation that he was the ‘Godfather of Al Qaeda’. It also made him take seriously Ayatollah Khomeini’s ideological pronouncements despite the state department’s portrayal of him as a Gandhi-like consensus-builder.
Kissinger was no less confident in his youthful convictions, though his Cold War strategy differed dramatically. His Harvard dissertation in the 1950s examined the Concert of Europe architects, Austria’s Metternich, and England’s Castlereagh. Working together after the Napoleonic Wars, they laid the foundation for a balance of power that won Europe a century of peace. He felt even closer to Prussia’s 19th-century arch-realist Otto von Bismarck, the subject of a 1968 article, ‘The White Revolutionary’. The Iron Chancellor taught him how statesmen can serve their countries through negotiating alliances with rival powers. ‘On reading it’, Brzezinski told him, ‘I had the feeling of understanding better some of your current political involvements!’ While Brzezinski was focused on the circumstances of his time, Kissinger’s gaze was fixed on the past: Athens and Sparta, the Peace of Westphalia, the Congress of Vienna – all examples of how peaceful coexistence starts with accepting other powers’ spheres of influence.