Was Zbigniew Brzezinski America’s most important foreign-policy guru?

ON THE PAGE, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s fate is always to be compared to Henry Kissinger. It was the same in life. The two men arrived in New York from central Europe under the looming shadow of fascism in 1938, just six weeks apart. In the 1950s both sought a tenured professorship at Harvard. Kissinger became Richard Nixon’s foreign-policy guru and in 1977 Brzezinski took over from him under Jimmy Carter. After his rival died in 2017, Kissinger offered the assessment that, among American national security advisers, Brzezinski would rank among the two greatest strategic thinkers. (No prize for guessing who came first.)