Latest news with #grandstrategy
Washington Post
10-07-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
The brilliant immigrant who advised presidents and predicted the Soviet Union's fall
In 1950, a 22-year-old émigré with an unpronounceable name living in a frigid Canadian city wrote a master's thesis that predicted the fall of the Soviet Union — and helped to set in motion the strategy that eventually ensured its collapse. This anecdote comes near the start of 'Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet.' It's one of many remarkable episodes recounted by the book's author — Edward Luce, the U.S. national editor and longtime columnist for the Financial Times — and the one that earns the 'prophet' in the book's subtitle. 'Zbig' is the long story of a brilliant Polish immigrant who became America's top Sovietologist, then a leading grand strategist, then a serial presidential tutor — he would, over time, counsel John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama. But of all his roles, the most famous was the four years he spent as President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser.
Washington Post
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
America is overextended. After Iran, here's a better way forward.
A. Wess Mitchell is a principal at the Marathon Initiative and served as assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian affairs from 2017 to 2019. The 'simultaneity problem,' as it's known in military circles, has been the most serious grand strategic challenge facing the United States for some time now. The past two National Defense Strategies made clear that the U.S. is prepared to militarily confront only one major adversary, and that it should be China. And to do that, it needs to find ways of reducing U.S. commitments in Europe and the Middle East, ideally without producing intolerable risks in those theaters.
