The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century is Zbigniew Brzezinski's prescient analysis of "the terminal crisis of communism." One of the most astute foreign policy experts of our time, Brzezinski argues that the advent of communism was a critical phenomenon in the history of the century. From the Cold War, to the building of the Berlin Wall, Sputnik, the Vietnam War, and the war in Afghanistan, Americans have lived in the light of the Soviet Union as their predominant and most forbidding antagonist. But Marxist theory has proved a failure, as have its practical applications. "By the next century," Brzezinski concludes, "communism's irreversible historical decline will have made its practice and its dogma largely irrelevant to the human condition. Prospering only where it abandons its internal substance even while retaining some of its external labels, communism will be remembered largely as the twentieth century's most extraordinary political and intellectual aberration."