Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter, Dies at 89 -
By DANIEL LEWISMAY 26, 2017
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 a hospital in Virginia.
Where Mr. Vance had endorsed the Nixon-Kissinger policy of a “triangular” power balance among the United States, China
and the Soviet Union, Mr. Brzezinski scorned such “acrobatics,” as he called them.
But his strict adherence to ideas in which virtually every issue circled back to the threat of Soviet domination was remarkable even for those tense times, when many in the
foreign policy establishment had come to regard détente — a general easing of the geopolitical tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States — as the best course.
With the breakup of the Soviet Union, Mr. Brzezinski allowed
that it would make sense for the United States to engage with Russia, though cautiously, as well as China, “to support global stability.” And although he condemned Russian meddling in elections in the United States and elsewhere, he thought the effects were only marginal relative to the underlying problems shaking up Western societies.
Immediately after the trip, he appeared on “Meet the Press,” unleashing a slashing attack on the Soviet Union that Mr. Vance deplored as “loose talk.”
Mr. Brzezinski was also a prime mover behind the commando mission sent to rescue the American hostages held by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolutionary forces in Iran
after the overthrow of the shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi — a disastrous desert expedition in April 1980 that claimed eight lives and never reached Tehran.
A United States in decline, he said — one “unwilling or unable to protect states it once considered, for national interest and/or doctrinal reasons, worthy of its engagement” — could lead to a “protracted phase of rather inconclusive
and somewhat chaotic realignments of both global and regional power, with no grand winners and many more losers
