America's past is a prologue – even for Trump

“The story is superimposed,” said Henry Ford. One can easily imagine that Donald Trump said the same thing. With the exception of the Vladimir Putin of Russia, which leads Tsarist cards in search of pretexts in the field, those who have authoritarian impulses tend to revive the scholarships, including history.

As Swampans could now be tired to hear, my biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski (ZBIG: The life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the great prophet of America) is published on Tuesday May 13. I started this gigantic research project during Covid. On weekends, in the evening, on vacation and during several FT leave, I have immersed myself in the longest research in my life and the most enriching intellectually.

Surprisingly, my wedding survived and my daughter does not hate me. But my wife, Niamh King, without whom I could not have done this, often joked by saying that there were three people in our marriage. You must be a little obsessed with writing a biography. She used to joke every time she asked me to pass the salt, I asked “Salt I or Salt II?”, Referring to the strategic limitation treaties of the 1970s. I did not do it but she was not far away. But now the book, which was clean Idaho private for five years, is in the hands of others. And I have to convince people that the story of a large American strategist who died eight years ago is relevant for today. Here is my case.

The present is the child of the past. Without knowing how we arrived here, we are orphans Trumpian who shake our fists in the world that we do not understand. Brzezinski, like his immigrant scholarly colleague, Henry Kissinger, and George Kennan, the original great thinker of the Cold War in America, was a student in history and a scholar of American opponents. His knowledge of Russia and the Soviet Union was almost as great as its ignorance of Iran, which turned out to be Nève – and President Jimmy Carter -.

While Miami’s real estate developer Steve Witkoff is jumping from Moscow to Riyadh in search of transactions to solve the most thorny problems in the world, it is difficult to avoid the contrast between today's ignorance and the knowledge of yesterday. Marco Rubio, who now has the unexpected distinction of being the first person since Kissinger has been both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to the White House, is much better informed than Witkoff. But he obtained the work by playing in the Greek choir to what Trump says, even if it was the opposite by dinner to what he was at breakfast. A man yes cannot be a strategist. But as Kissinger joked on himself, the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor are now likely to get along. Mike Waltz, Trump’s first national security adviser, who was banished from UN's Siberian exile, disagreed with Trump against Iran and Russia.

Brzezinski was intimately well informed of the opponent of the American Cold War. As he had planned and helped sow the seeds during the Carter years, the USSR collapsed under the weight of his ossification eight years after Carter's departure. In a play for Time magazine under the title, “Vindication of a hardliner”, Strobe Talbott explained how everything that Brzezinski had predicted and tried to facilitate had come with the disappearance of the Bolshevik Empire.

These years which followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall were the moment of the peak of American triumphalism. Instead of joining the prolonged ovation from America to itself and in liberal capitalist democracy, Brzezinski wrote a book, UncontrollableProviding why the United States would be canceled by its pride. He argued that America developed a single -size toolbox that calmly ignored the public for which it was signified. Unipolar America did not think that it needed to study the world: the opposite, the world must study America. Brzezinski provided that the United States would inadvertently generate an “alliance of the lesion” which would include Russia, China, Iran and other powers of resentment that felt on the losing side of history. It was a cacophonic message in 1993. It was also prophetic.

Now we are dealing with the consequences of an America that abandoned the great strategy more than three decades ago. To master the new multipolar world landscape, unstable and always changing – known by some under the name of “revenge of geopolitics” – we must relearn the lesson that knowledge is power. Trump 2.0 is a peak of American ignorance. Today, in particular, this is the right time to understand how we got here and what we miss. I must emphasize that it is not a hagiography. Like Kissinger, Brzezinski was wrong. But he studied and engaged with the world in an implacable route which is simply exhausting at the chronicle. He died in May 2017 just a few months after Trump's first presidency. He was born into a privileged family in Warsaw in 1928, the year when Stalin consolidated power. This is where my book begins.

Thank you to all the swamps who want Pre -order my book.

I am turning this week to Jonathan Derbyshire, my colleague based in New York, who is the American opinion publisher of the FT. Jonathan, I'm sorry to inflict my parascolary reflections. This will not happen again. As a philosopher by training, you are exceptionally well placed to answer the following question: what is the best of cases to study history? Am I overvalued its value?

Recommended reading

• My column this week looked at Elon Musk's painful release from Washington. I do not know what will happen to its so-called ministry of government efficiency. But I conclude that if there is one thing like a chainsaw that Boomerangs, Musk invented it.

• I was in London this week for the Trina Brown Truth conference, which she created in memory of her late husband, Sir Harold Evans, the editor -in -chief of the Sunday Times, and a pioneer investigation journalist. While I'm here, I had a really absorbing podcast conversation with “Both matts” – Matthew d'Ancona and Matt Kelley of the new European – on Zbig and the revenge of geopolitics.

• And talk about the revenge of geopolitics, read This Fresh analysis of the current Indo-Pakistani security crisis by my ex-colleague Farhan Bokhari, former Pakistani correspondent for the FT.

• Finally, if you are in Washington DC this Saturday, remember to fall into the FT Weekend Festival At Kennedy Center, where I will be in a conversation (undoubtedly controversial) with the former chief strategist of Donald Trump and enemy of “globalism” of Donald Trump, and confessed “globalism”, Steve Bannon. The other speakers include my colleagues Roula Khalaf, editor-in-chief of the FT, and the columnist Gillian Tett, as well as Peter Mandelson, the UK ambassador to Washington, who will undoubtedly be wishing to overthrow the beans of the trade agreement that Great Britain has just concluded with the United States.

Jonathan Derbyshire answers

Thank you, ed. I remain impressed by your ability to write a weekly column while composing your Magnum opus, which I can't wait to read.

As for your question, I have never studied history, although the German thinker of the 19th century Hegel, with whom I suspect that Brzezinski would have been familiar, said that philosophy, my old academic discipline, is his own time apprehended in thought. Which strikes me as not also a bad description – a single self -flattering description, in any case – of the profession that you and I are now practicing.

But perhaps the best philosophical case for the study of history does not come from Hegel but from its predecessor, Leibniz, who wrote that “the present is saturated with the past and pregnant of the future”. And if he was right on this subject, then the voluntary historical ignorance of the genre you see in the Trump administration is worse than the idle.

I wonder, however, if it is actually a assailed temptation for the great powers and their emissaries, at least in their decadent phase, to believe not only that they shape history, rather than shaped, but that they can leave it completely? And we know what comes after such pride.