Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish strategic theorist who was national security adviser to former US 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 aged 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, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski was a foreign-born academic, he in Poland, Kissinger in Germany, with considerable influence on global affairs, both before and long after his official tour of duty in the White House.
Photo: EPA
In essays, interviews and TV appearances, he cast a sharp eye on six successive administrations, including that of US President Donald Trump, whose election he did not support and whose foreign policy he said lacked coherence.
Brzezinski was nominally a Democrat, with views that led him to speak out, for example, against the “greed,” as he put it, of a US system that compounded inequality. He was one of the few foreign policy experts to warn against the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
However, in at least one respect — his rigid hatred of the former Soviet Union — he had stood to the right of many Republicans, including Kissinger and former US president Richard Nixon. During his four years under Carter, beginning in 1977, thwarting Soviet expansionism at any cost guided much of US foreign policy.
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 Adolf 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.
Zbigniew 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.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was married to Czech-American sculptor Emilie Benes, with whom he had two children in addition to Mika: Mark Brzezinski, a lawyer and former ambassador to Sweden under former US president Barack Obama, and Ian Brzezinski, whose career has included serving as a deputy US assistant secretary of defense.
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