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Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Cold War Prophet, Edward Luce’s recent best seller, gives us a chance to review not only the book itself but the last 300 or so years of Anglo American strategy, in which Zbig played his part.

To give the devil his due, Zbig was a key architect of the Soviet Union’s demise, which officially ended the Cold War. However, although his hatred for Russia is undeniable, I think it a stretch to give this prima donna more credit than he deserves and, as regards being on a par with diplomatic strategists of earlier generations, who is to know?

Zbig had a long innings, first as a senior advisor to American Presidents from JFK to Obama and then as chief consigliere to POTUS Carter, whereas the much more media savvy Henry Kissinger fulfilled the same role for George W Bush and, most famously, for Richard Nixon, Tricky Dicky as the Democrats called him.

But Tricky Dicky presents us with a problem in assessing Zbig’s grey matter because POTUS Nixon proved himself to be an incredibly intelligent man, not only when he was POTUS but in subsequent years, when he reinvented himself as the world’s preeminent elder statesman. From that, it can be deduced that both Zbig and Kissinger achieved fleeting greatness because they suited rather than shaped the needs of the Anglo-American alliance, much as court jesters did in royal palaces in times gone by.

Although Zbig was but one of an army of Sovietologists and one of an army of Russophobic friends the late Pope John Paul 11 had, it was America’s strategic needs, rather than any proven greatness on his part, that propelled him to the top of Washington’s totem pole. Those needs were spelled out by the British at NATO’s inaugural meeting, which were to keep Germany down and Russia out. Factor in China and Iran, which exploded on Zbig’s watch, and you have the CIA’s intray in a nutshell.

Although Iran was a pivotal hotspot in both world wars and in the earlier Great Game between Russia and Britain, the 1979 Islamic Revolution has yet to be properly analysed in the West and 40 years of Islamic violence, resulting in a militarily stronger Iran, has followed as a consequence of Zbig’s supposed genius. Tricky Dicky opened the door to China, which opens another can of worms my past articles have addressed and that leaves us with NATO’s centuries-old problem of how to bring down the Russian bear.

Fomenting internal dissent aside, there have been two traditional ways to do that and neither of them is a product of Zbig’s chats at the urinal with Carter or anyone else. These are a full frontal attack through Ukraine, Finland and the Baltic pimple states, and the other way is to block Russian access to the high seas. Both of these methods have been tried in the past, most notably in the Crimean war as well as the Napoleonic and Hitler campaigns and, to date, none have succeeded.

Though some of those failures are due to the World blunders of Napoleon and Hitler, more of them, as we shall see, might be due to the perfidiousness of Perfidious Albion.

Hitler was a blockhead, who stopped the tanks rolling up the British at Dunkirk and, when coupled with his switch to civilian aerial bombing in the Battle of Britain, lost any chance he may have had of prevailing; indeed, regarding that latter point, it is worth noting that Britain started the saturation bombing of civilian targets and Hitler stupidly took the bait. Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States was from the rock-scissors-paper school of strategy and his march on Moscow was driven by blind, deaf and dumb ideology.

Brilliant though Napoleon was, at least until he got the brainwave to march on an empty stomach to Moscow and then march all the way back, he really had no one to give him counsel. Although one could argue that a Zbig or Kissinger could have filled that role, that would not have worked unless they had the vast backroom staff the Prussian High Command first developed and which Pentagon’s war gamers now have in abundance.

Although Churchill was a racist drunkard, who despised the Japanese, “the wops of the Far East,” as he called them until the great General Yamashita captured Singapore, he had one key advantage that Napoleon did not. He had a War Office made up of the best of devious British minds, whose job it was to determine how best to play the weak hand Dunkirk had dealt them.

If we focus on Churchill, there are at least two points to note with that waster. The first is in his Fight them on the Beaches speech, he intones that it is fine if Albion falls to the Nazis as long as the New World, primarily the United States, assumes global control. The second thing is the mess he made of the disastrous Dardanelles campaign, to which we could also add slicing up the Third Reich through their soft Italian underbelly which proved a very tough nut indeed to crack.

Whatever about Italy, this lengthy and long winded blog posits that the Gallipoli campaign was Perfidious Albion’s dirty tricks department at work again, the objective being to pretend to help the Tsar by attacking the Turks but to let the Turks, Austro-Hungarians, Germans, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks combine to destroy Russia in accordance with Albion’s long term imperial objectives. Whatever its faults, the thesis that the Dardanelles was a feint to hasten the fall of the Tsar deserves much more scrutiny than I can give it here.

And much the same applies to current Russian President Putin, who makes his way into this review because Zbig long ago identified him as the primary obstacle to NATO’s criminal looting of Russia’s resources. Though Putin has many shortcomings, his biggest failing in Zbig’s eyes and in the eyes of most Western “strategists” (LOL) is he stopped them robbing Russia blind and stopped Russia’s descent into being a hopeless basket case. Not quite up there on the World medal podium with Napoleon at Austerlitz or Yamashita’s Malayan campaign but it is an achievement all patriotic Russians should be eternally grateful to him for, even if that makes him NATO’s primary party pooper.

Though Zbig is gone and Putin is not, NATO’s three main problems of Iran, China and, especially, Russia, which is wise to the guiles of Zbig and the rest of NATO’s court jesters, remain. Though the jokers might know all of Russia’s weak points, they seem to be able to do precious little to exploit them, bar making Putin their lightning rod to bring Russia to heel.

But even as they call Putin all the schoolyard insults they can muster, they might really like to take a look at this excellent Russia Today article, which explains the sausage factory of the Russian strategic thinking process. Though Russia’s end product might not have the same marketing geniuses that Luce and his fellow scribes perform for their NATO equivalents, the end product, as evidenced by the war in Ukraine, stabilisation in the Caucasus and access for the Russian navy to the high seas seems a pretty solid product and who, in reality, is all that interested in what the Russian chef does in the kitchen as long as the sausage hits the mark and ticks all the necessary boxes?

As things currently stand, because Russia seems more than capable of fighting its own corner, NATO should consider abandoning Zbig’s policies of brigandage and subversion and it is to give them their Damascene moment that I offer my own strategic master plan, even if it does not get to Trump’s ear the way Zbig’s bile got to Carter’s. It is better and infinitely less stressful to buy products off Russia rather than fight them for it. Not good news for politicians and hot air windbags who get kickbacks from the arms industry, it is true, but good for those Ukrainian and other soldiers, who are at the business end of the Zbig windbags of our own times.