Edward Luce discusses how Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Carter, sought to bring down the USSR and end the Cold War by magnifying the Politburo' dilemmas.

During the Cold War, two dominant émigré figures emerged in United States national security strategy making: Henry Kissinger (Republican) and Zbigniew Brzezinski (Democrat). Zbigniew Brzezinski played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign, later serving as Carter's National Security Advisor. Often described as the realist 'Yin' to Carter's idealistic 'Yang,' Brzezinski was a trusted confidant of the President. However, his often-hawkish foreign policy stance created tensions within the Democratic Party and led to challenging relationships with colleagues in the State Department and Department of Defence. His efforts to bring down the Soviet Union earned the admiration of Ronald Reagan, whose Republican administration continued many of Brzezinski's policies. The consequences of some of these policies, though, caused problems later.

Edward Luce is the North America Editor of the Financial Times. He published a recent biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski that sought to reclaim Brzezinski's reputation as a leading architect of the strategy that brought the Cold War to an end without it becoming hot.

Further Reading

Edward Luce, Zbig. The life of Zbig Brzezinski: America's great power prophet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2025).

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Strategic Vision; American and the Crisis of Global Power, Basic Books, 2012, available at: https://archive.org/details/strategicvisiona0000brze

Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, Basic Books, 1997, available at: https://archive.org/details/grandchessboarda00brze_0/mode/2up

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century, Collier Books, 1993, available at: https://archive.org/details/outofcontrolglob00brze/mode/2up

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977–1981 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983).

Justin Vaïsse, Zbigniew Brzezinski: America's Grand Strategist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)

Can clear Ends exist in a radically uncertain world? Lord Mervyn King explains how to align Ways and Means without them.

Successive national security and defence reviews in recent years have adjusted their language about the nature of the world, moving from being one of competition, to uncertainty, to today's 'radical uncertainty'. Is the concept simply being used to justify the new review and differentiate it from the last one, or does it reflect a real change in the challenges nations confront? Have we moved beyond VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous), to BANI (brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible) and does it matter? And what does it mean for our approach to making strategy?

To guide us through these questions, we are joined by Baron Mervyn King of Lothbury KG. An economist by training, he graduated from both Cambridge and Harvard Universities, after time as an academic he became the Bank of England's chief economist. Between 2003-1013, he served as its Governor, where he was responsible for the United Kingdom's economic strategy during the 2008 global financial crisis. An accomplished academic, thinker and author, his book Radical Uncertainty with Professor John Kay considers the implications for decision making of this radical uncertainty.

Further Reading

John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-making for an Unknowable Future, Bridge Street Press, 2020.

Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler, The Decision Book: Fifty models for strategic thinking, Profile Books, 2023.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, Penguin, 2007.

Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Random House, 2006.

Dr Fiona Hill, one of the lead reviewers on the UK's 2025 Strategic Defence Review, discusses an expansive approach to defence and security for the modern world.

Dr Hill, who served the first Trump administration as a Russia expert, brings deep insights into Russian, American and British defence policy making.

Having identified Russia's obsession with recovering the old Tsarist Empire's borderlands, and anticipated Putin's strategic use of economic power to create dependencies in the 1990s, she sheds light on the thinking of Presidents Putin and Trump, and what is now needed by societies used to a peace dividend.

She also explains the challenges faced by the drafters of the UK's Strategic Defence Review, with limited means available to respond to a transformed international environment, with Russia an enemy, and the USA now an economic rival and a less reliable ally.

Dr Hill is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC and Chancellor of Durham University in the UK. She is on Harvard University's Board of Overseers, from where she gained her doctorate in history and was a Frank Knox Fellow. She co-authored Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013) and The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold (2003), both with Clifford Gaddy. She has been appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George by the UK and Knight First Class of Finland's Order of the Lion.

Often touted as the gold standard in national security strategy making, 1953's Project Solarium was President Eisenhower's way of developing a strategy to counter Soviet expansionism. With frequent current calls for a new Project Solarium, was the original project a versatile solution or was it particular to Eisenhower's presidency? Professor Walter Hudson explains.

By 1947 relations with the Soviet Union were viewed in Washington as an ideological tug-of-war that could only be won by one side. After the initial strategy of Containment had been crafted under President Truman, the US and its NATO allies massively increased defence spending once the Korean War broke out, fearing a series of further acts of Communist aggression. By mid-1953, however, Stalin was dead, the Korean War at its end, while the cost to the US of the Containment strategy adopted in 1950 was becoming unbearable. With Project Solarium President Eisenhower initiated a rethink not only of what American strategy should be, but also how that strategy was made and understood by his Administration.

Professor Walter M. Hudson from the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., guides us through the process adopted in 1953. A former US Army officer, he served in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Panama, Korea and Germany, and holds a PhD in military history from Kansas State University. He is the author of Solarium at 70: Project Solarium's Influence on Eisenhower Historiography and National Security Strategy, published in 2023 by the National Defense University.

Beatrice and Paul reflect on the lessons for strategy-making and strategy-delivery from their conversations with and about strategic leaders in earlier episodes. Previous sessions of Talking Strategy have explored the activities of great strategic leaders and commanders from around the world. In this final episode of the current season, Paul and Beatrice reflect on past conversations and try to identify what lessons might be drawn about strategic leadership and how that shapes the way strategy is made and delivered. While the concept of strategic leadership itself is contested, this episode draws out some consistent themes from earlier episodes. Based around the concept of strategic leadership as a fundamentally human endeavour, Beatrice and Paul explore how strategy is developed by understanding and shaping the external environment, by mobilising the resources available within the enterprise the leader controls, and by ensuring the internal culture encourages commitment from all.

Strategic leaders play an important role in making sense of the world around them, setting the direction for their organisation and mobilising it in delivering the strategy. But delivery depends on sometimes thousands of others investing their talents in ensuring the strategy's success. So, while individual strategic leaders, in all their diversity, often appear as heroes, they represent thousands of others too. Join Beatrice and Paul as they try to distil lessons from the greats covered by this podcast series and what we might take away to help liberate the talent of our own organisations to succeed.

Genuine transformation goes beyond structural and process reform. KornFerry's Khoi Tu discusses the crucial role of leadership and culture in strategy making and delivery.

In this episode we consider how strategy works in the commercial world. Ranging across a number of commercial sectors, Khoi Tu talks about the similarities and differences in strategy between defence and industry. Some elements, such as an ever-changing and competitive environment are shared, placing a premium on the right leadership and culture. But there are also differences.

He describes how all strategy is fundamentally about choices - choices about how one can win, how to instil a sense of purpose, and how to mobilise the team and make them adaptive to the environment. He also highlights how hard it is to find everything an organisation needs from a strategic leader in one individual, but asserts that taking a collective view yields better results - as Dr Christian Keller also argued when looking at the command teams led by Generals Lee and Grant (Season 4, Episode 15).

Khoi Tu is a senior partner at KornFerry Consultants, advising leadership boards in world-leading organisations. The author of Superteams: The Secrets of Stellar Performance from Seven Legendary Teams, his research covered the UK Special Forces, charities, and the arts and business sectors.

Thucydides set the 'gold standard' for a strategic analysis of war with his history of the Peloponnesian War: Dr Roel Konijnendijk explains how.

Thucydides, who lived almost two-and-a-half millennia ago, revolutionised strategic analysis by asserting the place of human agency rather than attributing events as being shaped by Gods or fate. This is something that Machiavelli repeats centuries later in The Prince. Thucydides claimed to have identified patterns of strategic behaviour that he thought would be enacted 'as long as human nature is the same'. A fascinating question, however, is whether strategists have behaved according to these patterns because they have been inspired to do so by reading Thucydides, or did he truly discover patterns of behaviour that endure throughout time and space? Are modern scholars projecting their own strategic world views into Ancient Greece or has our Ancient Greek heritage determined how we see the world? Finally, did Thucydides think that a world in which 'the strong do what they will and the weak have to put up with it' is the only possible one?

Dr Roel Konijnendijk is the Derby Fellow of Ancient History at Lincoln College, Oxford. After his PhD from University College London, he held several prestigious research fellowships and taught ancient history at UCL, Birkbeck, Warwick, Oxford, and Edinburgh. He is the author of Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History (2018) and Between Miltiades and Moltke: Early German Studies in Greek Military History (2022) as well as co-editor of Brill's Companion to Greek Land Warfare Beyond the Phalanx (2021).

General Marshall planned brilliantly for the US Army's rapid wartime growth and a 'Just Peace' for post-war Europe. Professor Bill Johnsen explains how.

General George C Marshall's (1880-1959) career as a strategist and strategic leader was impressive. As the Chief of Staff for the US Army, he oversaw a forty-fold increase in the size of the Army. Quick to spot talent and advance it out of turn, his appointments included Generals Omar Bradley, Lesley J McNair, George S Patton, and perhaps most crucially, Dwight D Eisenhower. Winston Churchill described Marshall as 'the organiser of victory'

After the War, he was appointed as Secretary of State, where he lobbied for the reconstruction of Europe that would build the capacity of nations exhausted by the War, and act as a bulwark against Soviet expansion. The European Reconstruction Plan, which would eventually become simply the 'Marshall Plan', earned him the unique distinction of being the only Army General to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Professor William (Bill) Johnsen is the former Director of Academics at the US Army War College, and a former Infantry Officer. He served in NATO working on the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty and the 1991 NATO Strategy. He is the author of numerous works, including Origins of the Grand Alliance: Anglo-American Military Collaboration from the Panay Incident to Pearl Harbor (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), and his latest manuscript, tentatively entitled War Councilors: The Combined Chiefs of Staff and the Winning of World War II, is under publication review.

Professor Lucy Riall explains Garibaldi's mastery of revolutionary war by harnessing military, political and populist levers of power to become a father of modern Italy.

Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882) was one of the world's greatest revolutionaries, leading resistance movements with irregular armies such as the Ragamuffins and the Red Shirts in Latin America and Europe. A crucial figure of 19th century liberalism and nationalism, he inspired millions. Che Guevara claimed that he was the only hero the world needs.

As one of the fathers of modern Italy, Garibaldi was the Risorgimento's Sword, to Count Cavour's Brain and Giuseppe Mazzini's Soul. Untrained as a soldier and often over-matched by his opponents, he nevertheless achieved victories against the French and Austrian Armies, the Papal States and in Sicily. Perhaps as impressively, he maintained the effectiveness of irregular forces in numerous retreats that might, under a lesser commander, have lost the morale of his citizen fighters against professional armies. Historian AJP Taylor described Garibaldi thus: 'He evoked from the people, and even from the politicians, a personal devotion almost without parallel in modern history; . . . and he showed himself the greatest general that Italy has ever produced.'

Professor Lucy Riall is a leading expert on modern Italy. She has written extensively on Italy's formation, as well as on Giuseppe Garibaldi. She is currently at the European University institute in Florence and a Visiting Professor at the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan.

Cyrus' exemplary leadership forged a patchwork of ethnicities into an empire that founded Persian rule in the Middle East, Professor Lynette Mitchell explains.

Cyrus the Great (or the Elder) is known to many through the Cyrus Cylinder exhibit preserved in the British Museum, which tells us that he was chosen by God for his special virtues to become 'king of the four corners of the world'.[1] Indeed, he created a Persian empire that extended from the Greek communities of Asia Minor to the marches of India. Ever since, virtues of a great strategic leader have been attributed to him, including by Xenophon who, as a Greek, might have been expected to be hostile to Cyrus' expansion. Instead, Xenophon took him as a model for the ideal leader in war and peace. Even today, the stories of his leadership are revered in management literature. But does the reality justify the acclaim?

Professor Lynette Mitchell of the University of Exeter has discovered her interest in the life and achievements of Cyrus from her earlier research on Greek culture and customs, on which she has published widely. Her book, Cyrus the Great: A Biography of Kingship, was published by Routledge in 2023.

[1] Irving Finkel (ed.): The Cyrus Cylinder: The King of Persia's Proclamation from Ancient Babylon. (London: I-.B- Tauris, 2013)