Zbigniew Brzezinski
© Terje Bendiksbi / AFP Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski
Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to former President Jimmy Carter, has died, according to an announcement from his daughter, MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski.

There was no word of the cause of death.

"He was known to his friends as Zbig, to his grandchildren as Chief and to his wife as the enduring love of her life," Mika wrote on Instagram.

Brzezinski served as President Carter's national security advisor from 1977 to 1981 and continued to hold influence in foreign policy issues. A registered Democrat once considered to be the answer to Republicans' favored Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski also served on former President Ronald Reagan's Chemical Warfare Commission and held other roles in the administration until 1989.

He was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1928. He became a naturalized US citizen in 1958.

Brzezinski was involved in the normalization of US-China relations, the signing of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), and the brokering of the Camp David Accords.

Brzezinski was an advocate of arming Mujahideen fighters against the Afghan government, convincing Carter that it was going to "induce a Soviet military intervention" in Afghanistan.

"We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would," he said in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur. "The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: 'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.'"

"That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it?" he told the interviewer. "What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"

Less than four years later, those "agitated Moslems" would destroy the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon, setting off the endless "war on terror" that continues to this day.


Brzezinski was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1928, according to official biography. Other sources speculate that he was actually born in a Polish Consulate in the Ukrainian town of Kharkov, which at the time was part of the USSR, but his parents registered him as having been born in Poland and not the Soviet Union.

His later actions was as if an anti-Soviet agenda was part of his genetic code from the the day he was born. He graduated from Harvard with a PhD in political science with a thesis on the formation of a totalitarian system in the USSR - and became author of a global strategy on anti-Communism and the concept of a new form of American hegemony.


"The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power," Brzezinski wrote in his 1998 book The Grand Chessboard.

However, in one of his latest articles in the American Interest journal the Polish-born diplomat asserted the US is "no longer the globally imperial power" and "can only be effective in dealing with the current Middle Eastern violence if it forges a coalition that involves, in varying degrees, also Russia and China."

In the sixties, he served as an advisor to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and his tough stance towards the Soviet Union never waned. In the Carter years, Brzezinski became National Security advisor and was considered the president's right-hand man. During the Clinton administration, the hawkish statesman was the main voice pushing for NATO's eastward expansion.