Saturday, May 27th., 2017
Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter, Dies at 89
Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter, Dies at 89
Zbigniew
Brzezinski, the hawkish strategic theorist who was national security
adviser to President Jimmy Carter in the tumultuous years of the Iran
hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970s,
died on Friday at a hospital in Virginia. He was 89.
His death, at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, was announced on Friday by his daughter, Mika Brzezinski, a co-host of the MSNBC program “Morning Joe.”
Like
his predecessor Henry A. Kissinger, Mr. Brzezinski was a foreign-born
scholar (he in Poland, Mr. Kissinger in Germany) with considerable
influence in global affairs, both before and long after his official
tour of duty in the White House. In essays, interviews and television
appearances over the decades, he cast a sharp eye on six successive
administrations, including that of Donald J. Trump, whose election he
did not support and whose foreign policy, he found, lacked coherence.
Mr.
Brzezinski was nominally a Democrat, with views that led him to speak
out, for example, against the “greed,” as he put it, of an American
system that compounded inequality. He was one of the few foreign policy
experts to warn against the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
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But
in at least one respect — his rigid hatred of the Soviet Union — he had
stood to the right of many Republicans, including Mr. Kissinger and
President Richard M. Nixon. And during his four years under Mr. Carter,
beginning in 1977, thwarting Soviet expansionism at any cost guided much
of American foreign policy, for better or worse.
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He
supported billions in military aid for Islamic militants fighting
invading Soviet troops in Afghanistan. He tacitly encouraged China to
continue backing the murderous regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia, lest the
Soviet-backed Vietnamese take over that country.
He
managed to delay implementation of the SALT II arms treaty in 1979 by
raising objections to Soviet behavior in Vietnam, Africa and Cuba; and
when the Soviets went into Afghanistan late that year, “SALT disappeared
from the U.S.-Soviet agenda,” as he noted in a memoir four years later.
Mr.
Brzezinski, a descendant of Polish aristocrats (his name is pronounced
Z-BIG-nyehv breh-ZHIHN-skee), was a severe, even intimidating figure,
penetrating eyes and strong Polish accent. Washington quickly learned
that he had sharp elbows as well. He was adept at seizing the spotlight
and freezing out the official spokesman on foreign policy, Secretary of
State Cyrus R. Vance, provoking conflicts that ultimately led to Mr.
Vance’s resignation.
Where
Mr. Vance had endorsed the Nixon-Kissinger policy of a “triangular”
power balance among the United States, China and the Soviet Union, Mr.
Brzezinski scorned such “acrobatics,” as he called them. He advocated
instead what he called a deliberate “strategic deterioration” in
relations with Moscow, and closer ties to China.
Moving Fast
By
his own account, he blitzed Mr. Carter with memos until he got
permission to go to Beijing in May 1978, over State Department
resistance, to begin talks that would lead to full diplomatic relations
seven months later. Immediately after the trip, he appeared on “Meet the
Press,” unleashing a slashing attack on the Soviet Union that Mr. Vance
deplored as “loose talk.”
Mr.
Brzezinski was also a prime mover behind the commando mission sent to
rescue the American hostages held by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s
revolutionary forces in Iran after the overthrow of the shah of Iran,
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi — a disastrous desert expedition in April 1980
that claimed eight lives and never reached Tehran. Mr. Vance had not
been informed of the mission until a few days before. It was the final
straw: He quit, “stunned and angry,” he said.
Mr.
Brzezinski’s rationale for the rescue attempt was, perhaps inevitably,
rooted in his preoccupation with Soviet influence. He contended that
trying to gain the release of the hostages through sanctions and other
diplomatic measures “would deliver Iran to the Soviets,” although many
thought that outcome highly improbable, given the fundamentalism of the
clerics running the country. Besides, he said, success would “give the
United States a shot in the arm, which it has badly needed for 20
years,” a reference to the quagmire of the Vietnam War.
Soviet
aggression in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America was by no
means a figment of Mr. Brzezinki’s imagination. But his strict
adherence to ideas in which virtually every issue circled back to the
threat of Soviet domination was remarkable even for those tense times,
when many in the foreign policy establishment had come to regard détente
— a general easing of the geopolitical tensions between the Soviet
Union and the United States — as the best course.
In
his scholarly certitude, Mr. Brzezinski sometimes showed a tendency to
believe that any disagreement between theory and reality indicated some
fault on the part of reality. In his 1962 book “Ideology and Power in
Soviet Politics,” for example, he asserted that the Communist bloc “is
not splitting and is not likely to split” just as Beijing and Moscow
were breaking apart.
With
the breakup of the Soviet Union, Mr. Brzezinski allowed that it would
make sense for the United States to engage with Russia, though
cautiously, as well as China, “to support global stability.” And
although he condemned Russian meddling in elections in the United States
and elsewhere, he thought the effects were only marginal relative to
the underlying problems shaking up Western societies.
In any case, aside from his ideological principles, he had both personal and historical reasons for abhorring the Soviet system.
A Soviet Refugee
Zbigniew
Kazimierz Brzezinski was born in Warsaw on March 28, 1928. His father,
Tadeusz, was a diplomat who took the family along to France, then to
Germany during the rise of Hitler in the 1930s and, fortuitously, to
Canada on the eve of World War II. When the Russians took over Poland at
the end of the war, Tadeusz Brzezinski chose to retire in Canada rather
than return home.
The
younger Mr. Brzezinski graduated from McGill University in Montreal in
1949 and earned a master’s degree there in 1950. Then it was on to
Harvard, which granted him a doctorate in political science in 1953 and
appointed him as an instructor. He and Mr. Kissinger were among the
candidates for a faculty position; when Mr. Kissinger won an associate
professorship in 1959, Mr. Brzezinski decamped to Columbia University.
He
was not always consistent in his positions as he moved between one
situation and another. When he was appointed to the State Department’s
Policy Planning Council in 1966, he had already become an outspoken
defender of United States engagement in the Vietnam conflict.
In
1968, after riotous antiwar protests at Columbia and elsewhere, he
wrote in The New Republic that students should not be allowed to “rally
again under the same leadership,” meaning they should be tried and
incarcerated.
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“If that leadership cannot be physically liquidated, it can at least be expelled from the country,” he wrote.
That
same year, however, he resigned from the State Department planning
council as a protest against expanded American involvement in the war in
Indochina under President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Then
he became a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Hubert H.
Humphrey, who defended the expansion in his 1968 presidential campaign.
His
bond with Jimmy Carter developed through the Trilateral Commission, the
group David Rockefeller created in 1973 as a forum for political and
business leaders from North America, Western Europe and Japan to
consider the challenges facing industrialized countries. Mr. Brzezinski
was the commission’s first director. (Mr. Rockefeller died in March.)
In
1974, Mr. Brzezinski invited Mr. Carter, then the governor of Georgia
and a rising Democratic star, to become a member. Two years later, Mr.
Carter was the Democratic nominee for president, and he hired Mr.
Brzezinski as a foreign affairs adviser.
Vying for Influence
From
the start of his tenure as Mr. Carter’s national security adviser, Mr.
Brzezinski jockeyed for power. He reserved for himself the right to give
Mr. Carter his daily intelligence briefing, which had previously been
the prerogative of the Central Intelligence Agency. He frequently called
journalists to his office for what he called “exclusive”
not-for-attribution briefings in which he would put his own spin on
events, to the annoyance of Mr. Vance.
And
although he was familiarly called Zbig and could be very engaging, he
was quick to smack down reporters who dared to challenge his ideas. “I
just cut off your head,” he told a journalist after one such retort.
A
prolific author, Mr. Brzezinski published a memoir in 1983 about his
White House years, “Power and Principle,” in which he recalled a range
of policy objectives that went beyond containing the Soviets. “First,”
he wrote, “I thought it was important to try to increase America’s
ideological impact on the world” — to make it again the “carrier of
human hope, the wave of the future.”
He
also said that he had aimed to restore America’s appeal in the
developing world through better economic relations, but acknowledged
that he had concentrated too much of his attention on those countries
that he felt were threatened by Soviet or Cuban takeovers.
More
recently, in opposing the invasion of Iraq, he predicted that “an
America that decides to act essentially on its own” could “find itself
quite alone in having to cope with the costs and burdens of the war’s
aftermath, not to mention widespread and rising hostility abroad.”
In
“Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American
Superpower,” published in 2007, he assessed the consequences of that war
and criticized the successive administrations of George Bush, Bill
Clinton and George W. Bush for failing to take advantage of the
possibilities for American leadership from the time the Berlin Wall came
down in 1989. He considered George W. Bush’s record, especially,
“catastrophic.” And in the 2008 presidential campaign, he wholeheartedly
supported Barack Obama.
Four
years later, he once again assessed the United States’ global standing
in “Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power.” Here he
argued that continued American strength abroad was vital to global
stability, but that it would depend on the country’s ability to foster
“social consensus and democratic stability” at home.
Essential
to those goals, he wrote, would be a narrowing of the yawning income
gap between the wealthiest and the rest, a restructuring of the
financial system so that it no longer mainly benefited “greedy Wall
Street speculators” and a meaningful response to climate change.
A
United States in decline, he said — one “unwilling or unable to protect
states it once considered, for national interest and/or doctrinal
reasons, worthy of its engagement” — could lead to a “protracted phase
of rather inconclusive and somewhat chaotic realignments of both global
and regional power, with no grand winners and many more losers.”
Mr.
Brzezinski, who had homes in Washington and Northeast Harbor, Me., was
married to the Czech-American sculptor Emilie Benes, with whom he had
two children in addition to Ms. Brzezinski: Mark Brzezinski, a lawyer
and former ambassador to Sweden under President Barack Obama, and Ian
Brzezinski, whose career has included serving as a deputy assistant
secretary of defense. All survive him. He is also survived by a brother,
Lech, and five grandchildren.
Into
his 80s Mr. Brzezinski was still fully active as a teacher, author and
consultant: a professor of foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University’s
School of Advanced International Studies, a scholar at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, and a frequent expert commentator
on PBS and ABC News.
He
was, in short, a man who could be counted on to have strong opinions,
and a boundless eagerness to share them. Once, in 1994, he even put
forward a sort of disarmament program to solve the problem of breaking
ties in the final game of the soccer World Cup.
“In the event of a tie,” he wrote to the sports editor of The Times,
“the game should be resumed as a sudden-death overtime, but played with
only nine players on each side, with each team compelled to remove two
of its defensive players. That change increases the probability of a
score and places more emphasis on offensive play. If after 10 minutes of
play there is still no score, the game continues with four defenders
removed from each team.”
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