Biographies

Power management based on trust and not on force

A comparison of the political visions of Jacinda Ardern and Zbigniew Brzezinski

12 September 2025

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What do the young, charismatic prime minister of a country on the periphery of the world (to use no more colourful formulas) and the national security advisor to the president of the indispensable country have in common? A proponent of compassion in the social age and a realist convinced that only force could defeat the Soviet Union? A character public enough to preside over councils of ministers in the seventh month of pregnancy by the scholar who declared in class at the age of 10 that he was passionate about foreign policy? An autobiography that, however sincere, tends inexorably to take the author's side and a biography whose author (Edward Luce of the 'Financial Times'), however full of admiration for the protagonist, never falls into hagiography?

Actually a lot, both on a personal, political and professional level.

Insider Paths

Neither was born with a spoon in his mouth. If Jacinda Ardern has the courage to put forward a model of exercising power that is at the antipodes of the style of the strongmen who multiply at all latitudes, it is also because she has been able to overcome the persistent doubt that she is not up to the challenge of leading New Zealand and its citizens. The daughter of a small-town provincial policeman, she also had to deal with the unwieldy legacy of Helen Clark, prime minister in 1999-2008 and senior UN official in 2009-17.

While Brzezinski certainly did not lack self-confidence, his was also an outsider's path. Admittedly, Zbig was the son of a Polish diplomat, but he found himself without a country to represent. He grew up in Germany during the years of Hitler's rise to power before settling in Canada and changing countries again to pursue an academic career (doctorate at Harvard and professor at Columbia). When he arrived in Washington in 1977 as Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, he was an outsider, immediately compared to Henry Kissinger, another exile and intellectual, crowned with the Nobel Peace Prize and the post of Secretary of State.

Complex for both was their relationship with religion, strongly present in the early years - Brzezinski educated by the Jesuits, Ardern by the Mormons - and then progressively abandoned - doubts on the part of the former, whose ashes were thrown to the wind in Virginia, and the latter's strong commitment to gay rights and abortion.

Policy choices based on analysis

In different ways, the belief that public policies should always be chosen on the basis of analysis, rather than being dictated by ideology and emotion, is similar. Ardern owes his global celebrity above all to the way he handled the covid-19 crisis - study of public health data, draconian countermeasures (notably border closures and quarantine for returning Kiwis), contact tracing and vaccination without ifs and buts - which limited deaths to 25. Brzezinski, who also harboured a grudge against Moscow for the enslavement of Eastern Europe that threatened to influence its actions, always adopted an empirical approach to measuring the Soviet Union's ideological and political weaknesses, although he had less luck in advising Carter on Iran.

Betting on trust, not strength

A further common element is the emphasis on trust, not force, as an essential tool for effective policy-making. Luce pays particular attention to the close and unprecedented relationship Brzezinski established with Pope John Paul II, aided by language, while Ardern notes how sincerity is rewarded by voters because it shows that politicians are human beings, in whose hands power can be placed.

The most important impression left by Luce's book is that the US no longer produces great strategists like Brzezinski (or Kissinger). Perhaps there is less need for them than the generation that matured in the wake of the destruction of the Second World War. Perhaps the problems of world (dis)order require specific skills and leave little room for strategic depth. It would be nice to think that the one proposed by Ardern - who, ironically, now works at Harvard - is a new paradigm that, if widely adopted, would produce true win-win solutions and not pure rhetoric. Unfortunately, it is difficult to harbour such optimism.

Jacinda Ardern

A Different Kind of Power.

Crown, pp. 352, $32

Edward Luce

Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet

Simon & Schuster, pp. 560, $35