At 85, Zbigniew Brzezinski is still the Democratic Party’s best answer to Henry Kissinger. As a global strategist, he has a well-deserved reputation for penetrating insights and prescience dating to the early Cold War. Brzezinski began to write as far back as the 1950s, and later in his first major book, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (1960), that the Soviet bloc was not the great monolith everyone thought it was—and he argued, long before almost anyone else at senior levels of the American government (including Kissinger), that a U.S. policy of subtle counterforce could eventually divide the captive Iron Curtain countries from Moscow. Later, as Jimmy Carter’s hawkish national security advisor in the mid-to-late 1970s, Brzezinski proved to be the proto-Reagan of the Democratic Party, looking for ways to undermine the legitimacy of the USSR. When Moscow invaded Afghanistan in 1980, he pressed Carter to begin the process of funding the mujahideen so as to drain Soviet power. Indeed, in a recent interview Nikolai Patrushev, the current secretary of the Russian Security Council, ascribed the problems of the late Soviet Union to what he called the Brzezinski “strategy of weak spots” and said the United States was still pursuing the same provocative doctrine against Moscow today.