Former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who established himself in the Carter administration as a hard-liner on foreign policy, died on Friday, his family said. He was 89.
Brzezinski’s daughter Mika said on social media that her father died peacefully, but did not give the cause of his death.
Brzezinski, the son of a Polish diplomat, was national security adviser for all four years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. He helped Carter contend with several international issues including the Iranian revolution that overthrew the Shah, the taking of 52 Americans as hostages in Tehran and a failed rescue mission, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
As national security adviser, Brzezinski, who Carter plucked from the academic world, saw many of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy moves as evidence it could not be trusted.
That placed him at odds with two of Carter’s most trusted advisers: Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who pushed for a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT-2) with Moscow, and Defense Secretary Harold Brown, who urged a U.S.-Soviet accord to curb conventional forces in Europe.
When Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, Brzezinski strongly backed the arming of Afghan rebels in response to the invasion.
His hardline stance on U.S.-Soviet relations led Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party newspaper, to denounce him as a “foe of detente”.
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