Henry Ford is said to be "history is a bunk". One can easily imagine Donald Trump saying the same thing. In addition to Vladimir Putin of Russia, who drilled prejudice on the Tsar map to find excuses for land grabbing, those with authoritarian impulses tend to restore scholarships, including history.

Just as Swampians may be tired of listening right now, my biography of Brzezinski (Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Great Power Prophet of America) is released next Tuesday, May 13. In the weekends, evenings, vacations and feet absent from a few leaves, I have been immersed in the longest study of my life so far, which is the richest.

Surprisingly, my marriage survived and my daughter didn't hate me. But my wife, Niamh King, I couldn’t do that without me, often jokes about three people in our marriage. You have to be a little obsessed with writing a biography. She once joked that whenever she asked me to pass salt, I would ask "Salt I or Salt II?", referring to the strategic weapons restriction treaty of the 1970s. I didn't, but she was not wrong. But now, the book is owned by its own private Idaho for five years and has been in the hands of others. I have to convince people that the story of the great American strategist who died eight years ago is related to today. This is my situation.

Now is the child of the past. Without knowing how we get here, we are orphans of Trump, shaking our fists in a world we don’t know. Like his immigration scholar-ruler Henry Kissinger, who is the first Cold War thinker in the United States, is a student of history and a scholar of American rivals. His knowledge of Russia and the Soviet Union was almost as great as his ignorance of Iran, which proved to be his - President Jimmy Carter's nemesis.

As Miami real estate developer Steve Witkoff, who jumped from Moscow to Riyadh to find a deal to solve the world’s toughest problems, it’s hard to avoid the contrast between today’s ignorance and yesterday’s knowledge. Marco Rubio now has the unexpected difference that he has become the first person since Kissinger served as secretary of state and White House national security adviser, and he is far more informed than Witkoff. But he gets the job by playing the Greek chorus for whatever Trump says, even if the dinner time is the opposite of breakfast time. Yes, men cannot be strategists. But when Kissinger quipped himself, the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor are likely to get along now. Trump's first national security adviser, Mike Waltz, was deported to the Siberian exiled United Nations, and he disagreed with Trump's consent in Iran and Russia.

Brzezinski is very familiar with the Cold War rivals in the United States. As he predicted, the seeds helped sow the seeds during Carter’s age, and the Soviet Union collapsed its ossified weight eight years after Carter left the office. In the title "Defense" of Time Magazine, Strobe Talbott explains how Brzezinski predicted and tried to promote everything that was achieved with the demise of the Bolshevik Empire.

The years after the fall of the Berlin Wall were the peak of American triumphalism. Instead of joining the United States in the long-term applause of itself and liberal capitalist democracy, Burzinsky wrote a book, out of controlpredict why the United States will be revoked by its arrogance. He argues that the United States is developing a cookie kit that quietly doesn't understand what it means. Unipolar America does not believe that it needs to study the world: on the contrary, the world must learn from the United States. Brzezinski predicts that the United States will inadvertently create a "victimized alliance" that includes the side that Russia, China, Iran and others believe they have lost in history. This is the stimulating message of 1993. This is also a prophecy.

Now, we are dealing with the consequences of a grand strategy that the United States abandoned more than thirty years ago. To master a multipolar, unstable, ever-changing new global landscape (called “geopolitics” for the title of “revenge” by some), we must relearn the lessons of knowledge as a power. Trump 2.0 is the peak ignorance of the United States. Today is especially a great time to learn how we get here and what we are missing. I should emphasize that this is not Hagiography. Like Kissinger, Blinchinsky encountered many mistakes. But he interacts with the world with a ruthless itinerary, and it is simply a chronicle. He died in May 2017 just a few months after serving Trump's first president. He was born in 1928 in a privileged Warsaw family, the year when Stalin consolidated his power. That's where my book begins.

Thanks to anyone who wants to book my book.

I'm going to visit my New York colleague Jonathan Derbyshire this week, the National Bureau of FT's American Opinion Editor. Jonathan, I'm sorry to send you my extracurricular meditation. It won't happen again. As a training philosopher, you are perfect for answering the following questions: What are the best cases for studying history? Have I exaggerated its value?

Recommended reading

• This week my column looked at Elon Musk’s pain from Washington. I don't know what will happen to his so-called Ministry of Government Efficiency. But I came to the conclusion that if there was a saw saw, Musk invented it.

• I was in London this week for Tina Brown’s Truth Teller Meeting in honor of her late husband, Sir Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times, and a groundbreaking investigative journalist. During that time, I had a really engaging podcast conversation with Zbig and the “Two Matt Bulls” (Matthew d'Ancona and Matt Kelley) from The Revenge of Geopolitics.

• When it comes to geopolitical revenge, read my former colleague Farhan Bokhari's careful analysis of the current India-Pakistan security crisis, which was a Pakistani journalist for FT before it.

• Finally, if you happen to be in Washington, D.C. this Saturday, consider entering the FT weekend festival at the Kennedy Center where I will have a (uncontroversial) conversation with the former chief strategist of Donald Trump and announce the enemy of “globalist” Steve Bannon. Other speakers include my colleague Roula Khalaf, editor of FT, columnist Gillian Tett, and British ambassador in Washington, Peter Mandelson, who is undoubtedly keen on trade in sprinkling beans on the UK.

Jonathan Derbyshire responds

Thanks, Ed. I'm still in awe of your ability to write weekly columns while writing Magnum Opus, and I can't wait to read it.

As for your question, I have never formally studied history, and although the 19th-century German thinker Hegel and I doubt Brzezinski would be familiar with it, they did say that my ancient philosophy of academic discipline was ideologically arrested. It makes me feel bad, and it's not a bad description - I and I are trading now anyway.

But the best philosophical case about historical research may not come from Hegel, but from his predecessor Leibniz, who famously wrote: "The present is full of past and harboring a future." And if he is right about it, then intentional historical ignorance of the situation seen in the Trump administration is worse than idle.

I wonder, however, whether it is actually a trouble for the great powers and their messengers, at least at the stage of their decadence, not only is it believed that they will shape history, not be shaped by it, but can it be completely left behind? We know what happened after this arrogance.