Zbigniew Brzezinski
Jimmy Carter’s powerful national security adviser who was driven by a visceral hatred of Russia
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, who has died aged 89, was the hawkish national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter whose well-publicised disagreements with the secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, lay behind many of the foreign policy failures of the Carter years.
The Soviet newspaper Pravda once described Brzezinski as a “calculating political careerist and intriguer, and a militant anti-sovieteer”. Vance would probably have agreed with them. While the two men shared a common interest in combating the influence of the Soviet Union, to Vance, foreign policy was an exercise in diplomacy; to Brzezinski, a Polish-born academic, it was an exercise in power.
Brzezinski was highly articulate, aggressive and controversial, and almost every issue provoked a fight. A colleague of Vance’s at the State Department described Brzezinski as a “rat terrier”, forever nipping at Vance’s heels and refusing to give in. In this Babel of voices, Carter wavered indecisively between “Zbig’s Big Think” and Vance’s quiet diplomacy, with the result that America’s foreign policy displayed an almost wilful inconsistency, which baffled even her closest allies.
Vance often found himself squeezed out of foreign policy deliberations – on normalising relations with China for example (Brzezinski always supported the idea of providing Beijing with defence technology and even arms as a bulwark against Russian power, in spite of the country’s appalling human rights record) – and was reduced to begging Brzezinski not to undermine him by seeing ambassadors on his own at the White House.
To Brzezinski, Vance personified the genteel decline of the “Wasp” elite, but in describing him in these terms he revealed more about the importance of his own ethnicity as a well-born Polish Catholic. This background played a central part in his conception of foreign policy, which was based on a visceral hatred of Russia and was always more concerned with the geopolitical consequences of American foreign policy than with Carter’s avowed commitment to human rights. One of the high points of Brzezinski’s time at the White House was a telephone call to Pope John Paul II to brief him on American efforts to dissuade the Soviet Union from military intervention in Poland in December 1981.
Brzezinski was too egotistical ever to accept his own advice to Carter that he should seek a balanced foreign policy team and avoid the precedent set by Kissinger under Nixon. His constant disagreements with Vance came to a head in 1978 when the Shah’s hold on Iran began to weaken. In a personal effort to keep the Shah in power, Brzezinski ignored the advice of the CIA and the American embassy in Tehran that the Shah should try to reach an accommodation with his opponents. Instead he established his own parallel embassy in Tehran by asking Ardeshir Zahidi, the Iranian ambassador to Washington, to return to the country and advise the Shah to use force against the revolution.
Thus, the official American embassy’s warnings about the precariousness of the Shah’s position were ignored until it was too late, and after the Shah fled into exile, when it became apparent that an attack on the American embassy was on the cards, Carter and Brzezinski put their faith in the provisional government of Mehdi Bazargan. The embassy was duly stormed and its occupants taken hostage.
Vance resigned after failing to persuade Carter to ignore Brzezinksi’s advice that America should mount an attempt to rescue the hostages. When the operation ended in failure and humiliation, Brzezinski was all in favour of another try. Later, in 1981, William Sullivan, America’s ambassador in Iran at the time, blamed the fiasco on the constant battle for influence between Vance and Brzezinski. “There you have the history of the Carter administration and that’s why… it is no longer in power,” he wrote.
The son of a diplomat, Zbigniew Kasimierz Brzezinski was born in Warsaw on March 28 1928. During most of his childhood he lived with his parents in France and Germany and, in 1938, accompanied them to Canada where his father, Tadeusz, served as consul general in Montreal throughout the Second World War. In 1945 when the Communists gained control in Poland, Tadeusz Brzezinski retired from his position and the family settled permanently in Canada.
Privately educated in Europe, Brzezinski completed his education at Catholic schools in Canada and, in 1945, entered Mcgill University in Montreal where he took Firsts in Economics and Political Science. After Mcgill, he entered Harvard where he took a doctorate and was appointed research fellow and instructor in government. His doctoral thesis, dealing with Soviet purges as an inevitable part of a totalitarian political system, was published in 1956.
During the Fifties Brzezinski travelled widely in eastern Europe and began to establish a reputation for his studies of Communism. With Carl J Friedrich, he was the co-author of Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1957). The following year he became an American citizen. In 1961 he moved to Columbia University to head a new Institute of Communist Affairs, and he became a professor the following year.
During the Sixties Brzezinski acted as an adviser to Kennedy and Johnson administration officials and was an influential force behind the Johnson administration’s “bridge-building” ideas on Eastern Europe. He also became a staunch defender of America’s continuing involvement in Vietnam, arguing that unless America put up an effective resistance, Communist China and the Soviet Union would conclude that the best strategy against the West was to foment trouble throughout the world. During the final years of the Johnson administration, he was a foreign policy adviser to vice-president Hubert Humphrey and his presidential campaign.
In 1973 Brzezinski became the first director of the Trilateral Commission, a group of prominent political and business leaders and academics from America, Western Europe and Japan. The future president, Jimmy Carter, was a member. When he declared his candidacy for the White House in 1974, Brzezinski, a critic of the Nixon-kissinger foreign policy style, became his adviser on foreign affairs and, after Carter’s victory in 1976, his national security adviser.
Brzezinski aimed to replace Henry Kissinger’s “acrobatics” in foreign policymaking with a more structured policy “architecture”. He was instrumental in negotiating the normalisation of relations between America and China and was one of key players in Nato’s decision to modernise its medium-range nuclear arsenal by the deployment of Cruise and Pershing II missiles.
However, his relations with Cyrus Vance were never easy and hit a low point in 1978, when Vance successfully persuaded Carter not to agree to Brzezinski’s proposal that America send a carrier task force to the Horn of Africa in response to the Soviet deployment of Cuban troops in Ethiopia. Brzezinski never satisfactorily explained how such a show of force would have made a difference; nevertheless, he maintained that this was the point when things began to go wrong in the American-soviet relationship. Russia, he claimed, had been emboldened by American weakness to mount an invasion of Afghanistan.
In fact, as Brzezinski admitted in an interview after the publication of the memoirs of the former CIA director Robert Gates in 1998, the background to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was not American passivity, rather the reverse. Gates had revealed that American intelligence began to aid the Mujahideen in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention, and not afterwards, as had been claimed.
Brzezinski confirmed Gates’s account, adding that the covert operation had been an “excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap. The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War’” – a war which had hastened the break-up of the Soviet Union.
He had no regrets about supporting Islamic fundamentalism, insisting in the same interview: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” In the wake of the September 11 attacks, his words had an unfortunate ring.
In his memoirs, Brzezinski said of Vance: “Cy would have made an extraordinarily successful secretary of state in a more tranquil age.” It could be said that he would have made a successful secretary of state in a more tranquil administration. In 1981, Edmund Muskie, Vance’s successor as Secretary of State, pointedly warned that he would not tolerate any rivalry, to which Brzezinski responded by joking that he would allow the new secretary of state “a decent interval before I speak up again on foreign affairs”. By then, however, the Carter administration was on its way out.
In the early Eighties Brzezinski was highly critical of attempts by the new Reagan administration to improve relations with the Russians. When the agriculture secretary John Block signed a new five-year agreement on grain supplies to the Soviet Union, breaking an embargo imposed after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he accused the administration of “crawling on its knees to Moscow”.
But his hawkish views moved him in the direction of Republicanism and in 1988 he supported the presidential candidacy of George Bush Snr against the Democrat Michael Dukakis, although he remained a registered Democrat. In the late Eighties, he served as a member of the President’s Chemical Warfare Commission; on the Nscdefense Department Commission on Integrated Long-term Strategy; and as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
He became a counsellor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Professor of American Foreign Policy at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He also served on many charitable and public bodies, mostly concerned with the promotion of freedom and democracy.
His books included Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power (2012); The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997); The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the 20th Century (1990); and Power and Principle: The Memoirs of the National Security Adviser 1977-1981 (1983).
In 1981 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in the normalisation of Sino-american relations and for his contribution to American human rights and national security policies. In 1995 he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest civilian decoration, for his contributions to recovery by Poland of its independence.
Brzezinski married Emilie Benes, a sculptor and great-niece of the precommunist Czechoslovakian president Eduard Benes. She survives him with their two sons and a daughter.