Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski (born March 28, 1928) is a Polish-American political scientist, geostrategist, and statesman. In Polish his name is written Brzeziński and pronounced ['zbigɲɛv bʒɛ'ʑiɲski] (ZBEEG-nyev bzheh-ZHEEN-ski). He is currently a professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins SAIS and a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Career

He was born in Warsaw, Poland, the son of a diplomat, and lived in France and Germany before being raised in Canada after his father was posted there in 1938. He received a BA and MA from McGill University (1949 and 1950 respectively) and a PhD. in political science from Harvard University in 1953. In 1958, he became a United States citizen.

From 1966 to 1968, Brzezinski served as a member of the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State.

For the 1968 presidential campaign, Brzezinski was chairman of the Hubert H. Humphrey Foreign Policy Task Force.

In 1973 he helped to found the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller, serving as Director from 1973 to 1976. The Trilateral Commission is a group of prominent political and business leaders and academics primarily from the United States, Western Europe and Japan. Its purpose is to strengthen relations among the three most industrially advanced regions of the free world.

Future President Jimmy Carter was a member of the Trilateral Commission, and when he announced his candidacy for the 1976 presidential campaign Brzezinski, a critic of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy style, became his principal foreign policy advisor. After his victory in 1976, Carter made Brzezinski National Security Adviser.

From 1977 to 1981, Brzezinski served as National Security Advisor to U.S. President Jimmy Carter. In 1981, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom “for his role in the normalization of U.S.-Chinese relations and for his contributions to the human rights and national security policies of the United States.”

In 1985, under the Reagan administration, Brzezinski served as a member of the President’s Chemical Warfare Commission. From 1987 to 1988, he worked on the NSC-Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy. From 1987 to 1989 he also served on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

In 1988, Brzezinski was co-chairman of the Bush National Security Advisory Task Force.

Brzezinski lives in the Washington D.C. area. He is married to an internationally recognized sculptress, and has three children: one is Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Europe and NATO; another is a partner, McGuire Woods LLP, Washington, DC, and was foreign policy advisor to the Kerry campaign; and the third is a reporter and occasional anchor for CBS-TV “Evening News.”

National Security Advisor

Main article: History of the United States National Security Council 1977-1981

President Carter chose Zbigniew Brzezinski for the position of National Security Adviser because he wanted an assertive intellectual at his side to provide him with day-to-day advice and guidance on foreign policy decisions. Brzezinski would preside over a reorganized NSC structure, fashioned to ensure that the NSC Adviser would be only one of many players in the foreign policy process.

Aiming to replace Kissinger's "acrobatics" in foreign policy-making with a foreign policy "architecture," Brzezinski was as eager for power as his rival. However, his task was complicated by his focus on East-West relations, and in a hawkish way – in an administration where many cared a great deal about North-South relations and human rights. On the whole, Brzezinski was a team player.

Initially, Carter reduced the NSC staff by one-half and decreased the number of standing NSC committees from eight to two. All issues referred to the NSC were reviewed by one of the two new committees, either the Policy Review Committee (PRC) or the Special Coordinating Committee (SCC). The PRC focused on specific issues and its chairmanship rotated. The SCC was always chaired by Brzezinski, a circumstance he had to negotiate with Carter to achieve. Carter believed that by making the NSC Adviser chairman of only one of the two committees, he would prevent the NSC from being the overwhelming influence on foreign policy decisions (a situation he felt occurred under Kissinger's chairmanship during the Nixon administration). The SCC was charged with considering issues that cut across several departments, including oversight of intelligence activities, arms control evaluation, and crisis management. Much of the SCC's time during the Carter years was spent on SALT issues.

The Council held few formal meetings, convening only 10 times, compared with 125 meetings during the 8 years of the Nixon and Ford administrations. Instead, Carter used frequent, informal meetings as a decision-making device, typically his Friday breakfasts, usually attended by the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, Brzezinski, and the chief domestic adviser. No agendas were prepared and no formal records were kept of these meetings, sometimes resulting in differing interpretations of the decisions actually agreed upon. Brzezinski was careful, in managing his own weekly luncheons with Secretaries Vance and Brown in preparation for NSC discussions, to maintain a complete set of careful notes. Brzezinski also sent weekly reports to the President on major foreign policy undertakings and problems, with recommendations for courses of action. President Carter enjoyed these reports and frequently annotated them with his own views. Brzezinski and the NSC used these Presidential notes (159 of them) as the basis for NSC actions.

From the beginning, Brzezinski made sure that the new NSC institutional relationships would assure him a major voice in the shaping of foreign policy. While he knew that Carter would not want him to be another Kissinger, Brzezenski also felt confident that the President did not want Secretary of State Vance to become another Dulles and would want his own input on key foreign policy decisions.

Brzezinski's power gradually expanded into the operational area during the Carter Presidency. He increasingly assumed the role of a Presidential emissary. In 1978, for example, Brzezinski traveled to Beijing to normalize U.S.-China relations. Like Kissinger before him, Brzezinski maintained his own personal relationship with Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin. Brzezinski had NSC staffers monitor State Department cable traffic through the Situation Room and call back to the Department if the President preferred to revise or take issue with outgoing Department instructions. He also appointed his own press spokesman, and his frequent press briefings and appearances on television interview shows made him a prominent public figure although perhaps not nearly as much as Kissinger had been under Nixon.

The Soviet military invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 significantly damaged the already tenuous relationship between Vance and Brzezinski. Vance felt that Brzezinski's linkage of SALT to other Soviet activities and the MX, together with the growing domestic criticisms in the United States of the SALT II Accord, convinced Brezhnev to decide on military intervention in Afghanistan. Brzezinski, however, later recounted that he advanced proposals to maintain Afghanistan's "independence" but was frustrated by the Department of State's opposition. An NSC working group on Afghanistan wrote several reports on the deteriorating situation in 1979, but President Carter ignored them until the Soviet intervention destroyed his illusions. Only then did he decide to abandon SALT II ratification and pursue the anti-Soviet policies that Brzezinski proposed.

The Iranian revolution was the last straw for disintegrating relationship between Vance and Brzezinski. As the upheaval developed, the two advanced fundamentally different positions. Brzezinski wanted to control the revolution and increasingly suggested military action to prevent Khomeini from coming to power, while Vance wanted to come to terms with the new Khomeini regime. As a consequence Carter failed to develop a coherent approach to the Iranian situation. In the growing crisis atmosphere of 1979 and 1980 due to the Iranian hostage situation, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and a deepening economic crisis, Brzezinski's anti-Soviet views gained influence but could not end the Carter administration's malaise. Vance's resignation following the unsuccessful mission undertaken over his objections to rescue the American hostages in March 1980 was the final result of the deep disagreement between Brzezinki and Vance.

Cabinet Conflicts

Policies

During the 1960's Brzezinski articulated the strategy of peaceful engagement for undermining the Soviet bloc and persuaded President Johnson, while serving on the State Department Policy Planning Council, to adopt in October 1966 peaceful engagement as U.S. strategy, placing détente ahead of German reunification and thus reversing prior U.S. priorities.

During the 1970’s and 1980’s, at the height of his political involvement, Brzezinski participated in the formation of the Trilateral Commission in order to more closely cement U.S.-Japanese-European relations. As the three most economically advanced sectors of the world, the people of the three regions could be brought together in cooperation that would give them a more cohesive stance against the communist threat.

While serving in The White House, he emphasized the centrality of human rights as a means of placing the Soviet Union on the ideological defensive. With Jimmy Carter in Camp David I, he assisted in the attainment of the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty. He actively supported Polish Solidarity and the Afghan resistance to Soviet invasion, and provided covert support for national independence movements in the Soviet Union. He played a leading role in normalization of U.S.-Chinese relations and in the development of joint strategic cooperation, cultivating a relationship with Deng Xiaoping, for which he is thought very highly of in China to this day.

In the 1990’s he formulated the strategic case for buttressing the independent statehood of Ukraine, partially as a means to ending a resurgence of the Russian Empire, and to drive Russia toward integration with the West, promoting instead “geopolitical pluralism” in the space of the former Soviet Union. He developed “a plan for Europe” urging the expansion of NATO, making the case for the expansion of NATO to the Baltic Republics. He also served as U.S. Presidential emissary to Azerbaijan in order to promote the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline. Further, he led, together with Lane Kirkland, the effort to increase the endowment for the U.S.-sponsored Polish-American Freedom Foundation (info) from the proposed $112 million to an eventual total of well over $200 million.

He has consistently urged a U.S. leadership role in the world, based on established alliances, and warned against unilateralist policies that could destroy U.S. global credibility and precipitate U.S. global isolation.

Afghanistan

Brzezinski, known for his hardline policies on the Soviet Union, initiated a campaign supporting mujaheddin in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which were run by Pakistani security services with financial support from the CIA and Britain's MI6. This policy had the explicit aim of promoting radical Islamist and anti-Communist forces to overthrow the secular communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan government in Afghanistan, which had been destabilized by coup attempts against Hafizullah Amin, the power struggle within the Soviet-supported Khalq faction of the PDPA and a subsequent Soviet military intervention.

June 13, 1997, in a CNN/National Security Archive interview, Brzezinski detailed the strategy taken by the Carter administration against the Soviets:
:We immediately launched a twofold process when we heard that the Soviets had entered Afghanistan. The first involved direct reactions and sanctions focused on the Soviet Union, and both the State Department and the National Security Council prepared long lists of sanctions to be adopted, of steps to be taken to increase the international costs to the Soviet Union of their actions. And the second course of action led to my going to Pakistan a month or so after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for the purpose of coordinating with the Pakistanis a joint response, the purpose of which would be to make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible; and we engaged in that effort in a collaborative sense with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the British, the Chinese, and we started providing weapons to the Mujaheddin, from various sources again - for example, some Soviet arms from the Egyptians and the Chinese. We even got Soviet arms from the Czechoslovak communist government, since it was obviously susceptible to material incentives; and at some point we started buying arms for the Mujaheddin from the Soviet army in Afghanistan, because that army was increasingly corrupt. Full Text of Interview

January 18, 1998, Brzezinski was interviewed by the French newspaper, Nouvel Observateur on the topic of Afghanistan. He revealed that CIA support for the mujaheddin started before the Soviet invasion, and was indeed designed to prompt a Soviet invasion, leading them into a bloody conflict on par with America's experience in Vietnam. This was referred to as the "Afghan Trap." Brzezinski viewed the end of the Soviet empire as worth the cost of strengthening militant islamic groups.
Full Text of Interview

In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski says that assistance to the Afghan resistance was a tactic designed to bog down the Soviet army, while the United States built up a deterrent military force in the Persian Gulf to prevent Soviet political or military penetration further south (see: the Carter Doctrine).

In a footnote in his 2000 book, The Geostrategic Triad, Brzezinski notes:
:The full story of the productive U.S.-China cooperation directed against the Soviet Union (especially in regard to Afghanistan), initiated by the Carter Administration and continued under Reagan, still remains to be told.

Memo from Zbigniew Brzezinski to President Carter, on December 26, 1979. Discusses implications of Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on U.S. foreign policy, especially regarding Iran.

Iran

Facing a revolution, the Shah of Iran sought help from the United States. Iran occupied a strategic place in U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East, acting as an island of stability, and a buffer against Soviet penetration into the region. He was pro-American, but domestically oppressive. The U.S. ambassador to Iran, William H. Sullivan, recalls that Brzezinski “repeatedly assured Pahlavi that the U.S. backed him fully," however these reassurances would not amount to substantive action on the part of the United States. On November 4th, 1978, Brzezinski called the Shah to tell him that the United States would "back him to the hilt." At the same time, certain high-level officials in the State Department decided that the Shah had to go, regardless of who replaced him. Brzezinski, and Energy Secretary James Schlesinger (former Secretary of Defense under Ford), continued to advocate that the U.S. support the Shah militarily. Even in the final days of the revolution, when the Shah was considered doomed no matter what the outcome of the revolution came to be, Brzezinski still advocated a U.S. invasion to stabilize the Iran. President Carter could not decide how to appropriately use force, opposed a U.S. coup, ordered the Constellation aircraft carrier to the Indian Ocean, but soon countermanded his order. A deal was worked out with the Iranian generals to shift support to a moderate government, but this plan fell apart when Khomeini and his followers swept the country, taking power 12 February 1979.

In July 1980, Brzezinksi would meet Jordan's King Hussein in Amman to discuss detailed plans for Saddam Hussein to sponsor a coup in Iran against Khomeini. King Hussein was Saddam's closest confidant in the Arab world, and served as an intermediary during the planning. The Iraqi invasion of Iran would be launched under the pretext of a call for aid from Iranian loyalist officers plotting their own uprising. The Iranian officers were organized by Shapour Bakhtiar, who had fled to France when Khomeini seized power, but was operating from Baghdad and Sulimaniyah at the time of Brzezinski's meeting with Hussein. However, Khomeini learned of the coup plan from Soviet agents in France and Latin America. Shortly after Brzezinski's meeting with Hussein, the President of Iran, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr quietly rounded up six hundred of the loyalist plotters within Iran, putting an effective end to the coup. Saddam would decide to invade without the Iranian officer's assistance, beginning the Iran-Iraq war on 22 September 1980.

China

Main Articles: Sino-American relations and Sino-Soviet Split

The most important strategic aspect of the invigorated U.S.-Chinese relationship was in its effect on the Cold War. China was no longer considered part of a larger Sino-Soviet bloc, but instead a third pole of power, helping the United States to balance against Russia. A notable example, discussed above, is Chinese assistance in Brzezinski's efforts to draw Russia into a Vietnam-style conflict in Afghanistan. This strategy, initiated under Nixon and Kissinger, and consolidated under Carter and Brzezinski, is really the first instance of statesmen altering the world's polarity by design.

In the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations dated January 1, 1979, the United States transferred diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. The U.S. reiterated the Shanghai Communiqué's acknowledgment of the Chinese position that there is only one China and that Taiwan is a part of China; Beijing acknowledged that the American people would continue to carry on commercial, cultural, and other unofficial contacts with the people of Taiwan. The Taiwan Relations Act made the necessary changes in U.S. domestic law to permit such unofficial relations with Taiwan to flourish.

Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping's January 1979 visit to Washington, DC initiated a series of important, high-level exchanges, which continued until the spring of 1989. This resulted in many bilateral agreements - especially in the fields of scientific, technological, and cultural interchange and trade relations. Since early 1979, the United States and China have initiated hundreds of joint research projects and cooperative programs under the Agreement on Cooperation in Science and Technology, the largest bilateral program.

On March 1, 1979, the United States and People's Republic of China formally established embassies in Beijing and Washington, DC. During 1979, outstanding private claims were resolved, and a bilateral trade agreement was concluded. Vice President Walter Mondale reciprocated Vice Premier Deng's visit with an August 1979 trip to China. This visit led to agreements in September 1980 on maritime affairs, civil aviation links, and textile matters, as well as a bilateral consular convention.

As a consequence of high-level and working-level contacts initiated in 1980, U.S. dialogue with the PRC broadened to cover a wide range of issues, including global and regional strategic problems, political-military questions, including arms control, UN and other multilateral organization affairs, and international narcotics matters.

Arms Control

See also: Arms Control

Israeli-Palestinian Peace

Main Article: Camp David Accords (1978)

NPR interview with Brzezinski on Camp David

Poland, the Pope, and Solidarity

To be written...

Academia

Brzezinski was on the faculty of Harvard University from 1953 to 1960, and of Columbia University from 1960 to 1989, where he headed up the Institute on Communist Affairs. He is currently a professor of foreign policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington D.C.

As a scholar he has developed his thoughts over the years, fashioning fundamental theories on international relations and geostrategy. During the 1950’s he worked on the theory of totalitarianism. His thought in the 1960’s focused on wider Western understanding of disunity in the Soviet Bloc, as well as developing the thesis of intensified degeneration of the Soviet Union. During the 1970’s he propounded the proposition that the Soviet system was incapable of evolving beyond the industrial phase into the “technetronic” age.

By the 1980’s, Brzezinksi argued that the general crisis of the Soviet Union foreshadowed communism’s end. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he spent the 1990’s warning that global discord may get out of control, and formulated a geostrategy for U.S. global preponderance.

Geostrategy

Brzezinski laid out his most significant contribution to post-Cold War geostrategy in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard. He defined four regions of Eurasia, and in which ways the United States ought to design its policy toward each region in order to maintain its global primacy. The four regions are: