Zbigniew Brzezinski
Zbigniew Brzezinski was National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter and one of the two dominant American strategic thinkers of the Cold War's later decades. Born in Warsaw in 1928 to a Polish diplomat, he spent his childhood in Germany and the Soviet Union as his father was posted, and was in Canada when Germany and the USSR invaded Poland in 1939. The family did not return. He took degrees at McGill and a doctorate at Harvard, taught there and at Columbia, and wrote extensively on Soviet politics, arguing early that the bloc was not monolithic and that nationalism within it could be exploited. Appointed National Security Adviser in 1977, he took a harder line than Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and their conflict shaped the administration. He supported the normalisation of relations with China in 1979, was central to the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978, and pressed human rights as a lever against Moscow, particularly in Poland. He signed the first directive on covert aid to Afghan mujahideen in July 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, and later said the intention had been to increase the probability that the Soviets would intervene — a claim he made proudly and which has been read very differently since. The Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis dominated the final year; he advocated the rescue attempt that failed at Desert One in April 1980. He remained influential in retirement, opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a strategic error. The Grand Chessboard in 1997 argued that American primacy depended on preventing any single power from dominating Eurasia. He died in 2017.
- Lived: 1928 CE – 2017 CE
- Nationality: Polish-American
- Roles: national_security_advisor
