Picture Muhammad Ali limbering up for his great Kinshasa “rumble in the jungle” with George Foreman. Or Björn Borg squaring off for a Wimbledon centre court final with John McEnroe. Most fittingly, ruminate on chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer ahead of his 1972 Reykjavík “match of the century” against Soviet opponent Boris Spassky.
Although it spanned decades and influenced the course of two superpowers, the rivalry between Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, America’s great cold war strategists, merits equivalent hyphenation. Brzezinski-Kissinger was to US geopolitics what great pairing is to sport. Their core difference was over whether to sustain cold war détente — easing the strains — with America’s mortal rival or to resume ideological struggle with the USSR.
Kissinger won the battle of celebrityhood. In my view Brzezinski won their cold war dispute on points. Kissinger was wrong to presume the Soviets would be a permanent feature of the landscape. Brzezinski correctly saw the USSR’s dormant nations, including Ukraine, as its Achilles heel. Either way, their clash over how to manage the cold war mattered as much as today’s schism between those in Donald Trump’s world who laud his wish for détente with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and those who see both imposing a Munich-style disaster on Ukraine.