Zbigniew Brzezinski

National security adviser in the Carter administration who played chess with Menachem Begin, but was caught napping by Iran

May 29 2017, 12:01am, The Times

Zbigniew Brzezinski, right, with Menachim Begin during the Camp David peace talks between Israel and Egypt in 1978  ALAMY

Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the world as a global chess board and himself as one of its grandmasters. He was always planning three, four or five moves ahead. China, he said recently, is doing the same, patiently thinking ten years or more into the future.
Known to his friends as Zbig and his grandchildren as Chief, Brzezinski was arguably the leading hawk in Jimmy Carter’s administration, yet this was a long-ago era of fence-mending and bridge-building. He helped to broker the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel, normalise US relations with China and negotiate the treaties that ceded control of the Pamana Canal to Panama.
On the Soviet Union’s brand of communism Brzezinski took a tougher line, born of his personal experience in prewar Poland. With his piercing gaze, iron handshake and staccato voice he did as much as anyone to convince Americans that the Cold War was a simple binary of good versus evil. “We will not accept détente where the Soviets set the rules and define the priorities,” he told The New York Times in 1976.
On Brzezinski’s watch China received support for backing Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia to ensure that Soviet-backed Vietnam did not muscle in, while the mujahidin in Afghanistan received millions of dollars of funding after the Soviet invasion of 1979 — a policy that would return to haunt America more than two decades later.
The Cold War impasse nearly brought Brzezinski — and much of the world — to an early end in November 1979 when he was awoken by an aide at 3am to be told that 250 incoming Soviet nuclear missiles had been detected. He had seven minutes to call the president and prepare a retaliation. While he contemplated the matter another call came saying that the number was 2,200. He was about to alert Carter when a third call came saying that it was a false alarm. As Robert Gates, US defence secretary from 2006 to 2011, wrote: “Brzezinski had not awakened his wife, reckoning that everyone would be dead in half an hour.”

Carter had turned to Brzezinski for foreign policy advice during his 1976 presidential election campaign. Brzezinski in turn urged Carter to choose Cyrus Vance, a Wall Street lawyer, as his secretary of state. Yet one of the worst-kept secrets of the Carter administration was the conflict between the two men. Vance was a liberal and an optimist who tended to believe that problems were negotiable; Brzezinski had retained from childhood a profound scepticism about communism and its manifestations. Although he theoretically placed America’s good relations with western Europe high on his agenda, he often found the Europeans irritating, and at a summit in Venice in 1980 he got into a furious row with Helmut Schmidt, the West German chancellor.
Brzezinski was admired for the continuous fertility with which he produced new concepts and ideas. Yet his principal limitation as a foreign policy adviser was his tendency to concentrate on the central east-west relationship and on that with the developed industrial powers of Europe and Japan, at the expense of relations with other, less powerful countries. He was not at home in the Middle East, and it was his misfortune that the climactic foreign crisis of the Carter years involved one of those countries that he had always instinctively neglected: Iran.

Zbigniew Brzezinski took a tough line on communism REUTERS

It culminated in the hostage crisis of 1979. Brzezinski was convinced that negotiations to free the 52 Americans being held in Tehran were going nowhere and was pushing for military action, while Vance felt that such a move would be futile. Carter, caught in the middle, was desperate to end the stand-off and in April 1980 agreed to a rescue mission. It failed, resulting in the deaths of eight commandos before they even reached Tehran. Vance, who had not been informed of the plan, resigned. It was a humiliation for the US and six months later Carter lost the presidential election to Ronald Reagan.
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski was born in Warsaw in March 1928, the elder of two sons of Tadeusz Brzezinski, a Polish aristocrat and diplomat, and his wife Leonia (née Roman). At the age of eight Zbigniew wrote a long letter to Winston Churchill pointing out that the Soviet Union would eventually break up the whole of Europe. During the 1930s his father was posted to Lille and later Berlin, where he secretly issued Polish passports to Jews desperate to flee Germany.
Zbigniew was educated at Catholic schools in France, Germany and, after his father was appointed Polish consul-general to Canada in 1938, Montreal. The family soon decided not to return to their homeland, moving instead to a farm in Canada, where Zbigniew learnt Russian from a neighbour.
During the war he attended a British prep school in Montreal, recalling later how the British still referred to Canada as BNA — British North America. He studied at Loyola High School and McGill University before moving to the US to take his PhD at Harvard, his dissertation being on Soviet purges. As a young man he was a good athlete, skied regularly and played a mean game of tennis. James Fallows, a former colleague, recalled that Brzezinski’s style of play symbolised his approach to life. “He tried to put away practically every shot,” Fallows said. He was still playing in his eighties.
He was appointed research fellow at the Harvard Russian Research Centre in 1953, which launched him on a fruitful study of the nature of political power in the Soviet Union and the publication of a series of works, including The Permanent Purge: politics in Soviet totalitarianism (1956); Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1957); and Ideology and Power in Soviet Politics (1962).
Meanwhile, in 1954 he married Emilie Benes (known as Muska), a Swiss-born sculptor and the great-niece of Edvard Benes, the second president of Czechoslovakia. She survives him with their three children: Ian, a US foreign policy expert under George W Bush; Mark, a lawyer who served as US ambassador to Sweden under Barack Obama; and Mika, a news presenter for Morning Joe, the MSNBC breakfast programme.

He had seven minutes to prepare for a nuclear attack. It was a false alarm

He became a US citizen in 1958 and in 1960, after being beaten by Henry Kissinger for a tenured position at Harvard, moved to Columbia University, New York. Yet Brzezinski was already heading towards government. In 1966 he played a part in the formulation of a speech by President Johnson on “bridge-building” and the following year joined the State Department’s policy planning staff. He returned to academic life after President Nixon’s victory in 1968 and by 1973 had conceived the notion of “trilateralism”, a three-cornered relationship between the US, western Europe and Japan. Soon the Trilateral Commission was born, which he chaired until 1976.
Carter, a member of the commission, had long been impressed by Brzezinski’s views. “He was inquisitive, innovative and natural choice as my national security adviser,” the former president said. He kept a huge globe in his office, just along the corridor from Carter, occasionally spinning it in exasperation. While his level of influence was undoubtedly high, it was sometimes exaggerated. When Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, from Poland, was elected pope in 1978, the Soviet leadership was convinced that Brzezinski bore some responsibility for organising American and German cardinals to back him.
In later years Brzezinski was dubious about whether the US had become a safer place, criticising the “self-generated atmosphere of fear” in the country. He rejected the secret service detail that swirled around Kissinger, a Republican national security adviser, although like his long-serving rival he continued to be a prolific commentator.
Interviewed recently about President Trump, he criticised the lack of coherence in Trump’s foreign policy and on social media. Three weeks before he died Brzezinski, in his final tweet, wrote: “Sophisticated US leadership is the sine qua non of a stable world order. However, we lack the former while the latter is getting worse.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski, US national security adviser, 1977-81, was born on March 28, 1928. He died on May 26, 2017, aged 89

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2017/05/28/zbigniewbrzezinski-jimmy-carters-national-security-adviser/

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser – obituary

Jimmy Carter surrounded by his advisors, including Cyrus Vance and, right, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Washington, 1979 Credit: Rex

28 May 2017 • 6:00pm

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. 

President Jimmy Carter presents his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, with the Medal of Freedom, 1981 Credit: AP

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 1950s 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 1960s 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 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 his rival Cyrus 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 1980s 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 1980s, he served as a member of the President’s Chemical Warfare Commission; on the NSC-Defence 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 pre-Communist Czechoslovakian president Eduard Benes. She survives him with their two sons and a daughter.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, born March 28 1928, died May 26 2017