Washington, May 27 (IANS): Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to former US President Jimmy Carter, has died. He was 89.
“My father passed away peacefully tonight (Friday night),” Xinhua news agency quoted Brzezinski’s daughter Mika as saying. “He was known to his friends as Zbig, to his grandchildren as chief and to his wife as the enduring love of her life.”
She called him “the most inspiring, loving and devoted father any girl could ever have”.
Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1928, Brzezinski moved to Canada with his family in 1938. He moved to the US and received a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1953.
Due to his books and articles on the Soviet Union in the 1950s, Brzezinski established his status as an expert on the Soviet Union and began to attract the attention of the White House.
He served as a counsellor to former US President Lyndon Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was the NSA from 1977 to 1981.
In an interview with Xinhua in 2009, Brzezinski said the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the US and China, of which he was a strong proponent, was “more than just normalising relations”.
“We gave it a strategic significance which I think contributed to greater international stability,” he said.
In 1978, Brzezinski helped Carter to attain the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty.
He was also a prime player behind the failed US mission in 1980 to rescue US hostages held in Iran after the overthrow of the Shah.
After the Carter presidency, Brzezinski became a professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, and a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
Despite his retirement from US politics into academia, Brzezinski remained a sharp-eyed observer of successive US administrations.
He was an outspoken critic of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq from the very beginning, and he was also a vocal critic of US President Donald Trump.
In an opinion piece written with Paul Wasserman for the New York Times in February, Brzezinski criticised the Trump administration for lacking coherence in its foreign policy.
“So far, Trump has failed to formulate any significant, relevant statements about the global condition. Instead, the world has been left to interpret the sometimes irresponsible, un-coordinated and ignorant statements of his team,” the opinion piece said.
