Carter’s national security adviser was a hardened anti-Soviet
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 age 89.
His death, in Falls Church, Va., was announced on Friday by his daughter, Mika Brzezinski, a co-host of the MSNBC program “Morning Joe.”
Like his predecessor Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski was a foreign-born scholar (he in Poland, 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.
“A vulnerable world needs an America characterized by clarity of thought and leadership that projects optimism and progress,” he wrote in an Op-Ed article with Paul Wasserman in The New York Times in February that took aim at the new administration. “‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘America First’ are all very well as bumper stickers, but the foreign policy of the United States needs to be more than a campaign slogan.”
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. But in at least one respect — his rigid hatred of the Soviet Union — he had stood to the right of many Republicans, including Kissinger and President Richard Nixon. And during his four years under Carter, beginning in 1977, thwarting Soviet expansionism at any cost guided much of American foreign policy,.
He supported billions in military aid for Islamic militants fighting invading Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
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.
Brzezinski was married to the Czech-American sculptor Emilie Benes, with whom he had two children in addition to Mika 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.