Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski (born March 28, 1928, Warsaw, Poland—died May 26, 2017, Falls Church, Virginia) U.S. international relations scholar and national security adviser in the administration of President Jimmy Carter who played key roles in negotiating the SALT II nuclear weapons treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union and in U.S. efforts to sustain the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the shah of Iran.

(Read Britannica’s interview with Jimmy Carter.)

Brzezinski’s father was a prominent member of the Polish government who was appointed ambassador to Canada in 1938. When Soviet-backed communists took over the Polish government in 1945, the Brzezinski family was stranded in Canada. After this event Brzezinski harboured a deep opposition to communism and the Soviet Union.

Brzezinski studied economics and political science at McGill University in Montreal (B.A., 1948) and political science at McGill (M.A., 1950) and at Harvard University (Ph.D., 1953). He was later (1953–60) an instructor and assistant professor of government at Harvard and a research fellow and research associate of Harvard’s Russian Research Center (later the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies) and its Center for International Affairs (later the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs). He was an associate professor of public law and government at Columbia University from 1960 to 1962, when he became the first director of Columbia’s Research Institute on Communist Affairs (later the Research Institute on International Change), a position he held until 1977. During the 1960s he was also a foreign affairs adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. While serving as the first director (1973–76) of the Trilateral Commission, Brzezinski met Jimmy Carter, who was then the Democratic governor of Georgia, and acted as Carter’s foreign affairs adviser during his successful presidential campaign. Brzezinski served as national security adviser in the Carter administration (1977–81). Afterward he resumed teaching at Columbia (1981–89) and then served (from 1989) as senior research professor of international relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

The Carter foreign policy team achieved several major successes. In addition to playing a role in negotiating the SALT II treaty (which Carter withdrew from U.S. Senate consideration following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979), Brzezinski helped Carter renegotiate the Panama Canal Treaty (ratified 1978) and prepare for the eventual transfer of authority over the canal to Panama. In addition, Brzezinski worked assiduously on improving U.S. relations with China. Under his guidance, the United States opened its first official embassy in the Chinese capital since the communists assumed power in 1949.

Brzezinski’s tenure as national security adviser was marked by his public disputes with the State Department. Friction between Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance began during the negotiations over the SALT II treaty. Both Carter and Brzezinski sought to radically expand the scope of the treaty by proposing that the Soviet Union drastically limit the number of its intercontinental ballistic missiles in exchange for limits on U.S. cruise missiles. However, Vance was not informed of this offer until he joined the negotiations. When the Soviets initially refused, Vance was publicly embarrassed.

In 1979 Brzezinski made his greatest mistake when he advocated steadfast U.S. support for the shah of Iran. Although American intelligence had questioned whether the shah could retain power during the Iranian Revolution (1978–79), Brzezinski persuaded Carter to reject the revolutionaries’ demands. Consequently, when the revolution succeeded, the United States had no contact with Iran’s new religious leaders—a situation that severely limited the diplomatic options available to the United States during the Iran hostage crisis (1979–81). The perception that Carter had mishandled the crisis strongly contributed to his defeat in the 1980 presidential election.

Brzezinski’s many books include Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (1970), in which he predicted that the United States and the Soviet Union would eventually confront each other in the developing world in a battle over natural resources; The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1989); The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership (2004); and Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power (2012).