Zbigniew Brzezinski could be called the Maurice Strong of Foreign Policy. While Strong used the UN and Global Organizations to advocate the need to redistribute wealth in the name of Global Warming/Climate Change, Brzezinski seeks to redistribute power to global organizations, or Global Governance. In all my reports I try to stick to mainstream or credible sources and focus on using the subjects own words to define them, and this one is no exception.
As Discover The Networks did not have a bio on him I had to get another source.
Here is his Bio according to Answers.com
Zbigniew Brzezinski was born in Warsaw, Poland, on March 28, 1928. After obtaining his B.A. and M.A. degrees from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, he came to the United States in 1953. He was awarded the Ph.D. at Harvard the same year and remained there, first as a research fellow at the Russian Research Center and then as assistant professor of government, until 1960. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1958.
In 1960 Brzezinski moved to Columbia where he continued his rapid climb up the academic ladder. He was promoted to full professor in 1962 and directed the Research Institute in Communist Affairs (later the Research Institute on International Change) from 1962 to 1977. From 1966 to 1968 he had gained valuable experience as a member of the Department of State’s Policy Planning Council during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. Identified as a Democrat and a rival of , Brzezinski saw little action during Richard Nixon’s presidency. In 1973 he became director of the and had the to recruit a young and generally unknown governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter. For Brzezinski, the early contact with Carter brought handsome rewards.
Carter declared his candidacy for president in 1974, and Brzezinski quickly approached him with an offer of advice. Of the potential candidates, Henry Jackson of Washington had views on foreign policy that appealed to Brzezinski more than those of Carter, but Jackson did not look like a winner. To most other Democratic presidential aspirants, Brzezinski’s reputation as a “hard-liner” was . By 1975 Brzezinski emerged as Carter’s principal adviser on foreign policy issues.
National Security Adviser
Brzezinski was openly eager to be appointed assistant to the president for national security affairs and when President-elect Carter offered him the position in December 1976. He had not wanted to be secretary of state, confident that he would be more effective in the White House, at the president’s side. From the he was about the president’s idealism and the absence of other appointees likely to give Carter the “realistic and hard-nosed” advice needed in world affairs.
Carter had campaigned against the Ford administration’s “Lone Ranger” diplomacy, the activities of Henry Kissinger. He intended to have a more balanced organization reporting to the president, who would decide policy questions. A triumvirate composed of the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the national security adviser, such as had existed in the Kennedy years, seemed ideal. , Harold Brown, and Brzezinski would do the job.
Brzezinski agreed with Carter’s ideas on organizational structure, but never doubted that his presence in the White House and his daily briefing of the president gave him the upper hand. He moved quickly to assert himself, and neither nor Brown was equal to the challenge. What balance existed – and it was considerable – was provided, as it had to be, by Carter.
Brzezinski’s differences with Vance were often as well, especially on policy toward what was then the Soviet Union. Although Vance had few illusions about the Soviet leadership, he believed that improvement of Soviet-American relations was both necessary and possible. Further arms limitation agreements and cooperation in crisis areas such as the Middle East were essential to avoid nuclear war. He was not willing to progress toward a sounder Soviet-American detente by disregarding Soviet interests in the Middle East or fears of Chinese-American rapprochement. Brzezinski shared Vance’s conception of the Soviet Union and the United States as permanent competitors, but perceived little hope for significant improvement in the relationship. The United States had to be firm, seek every advantage it could garner at Soviet expense, and play on Soviet fears by “playing the China card.” Although Carter initially leaned toward Vance’s view, by the end of 1978 Brzezinski appeared to have prevailed. The handling of the decision to normalize relations with China marked the ascendency of Brzezinski and the increasing alienation of the secretary of state from the policies of the administration.
Another arena in which Brzezinski succeeded in establishing his was in the public presentation of Carter administration policy. Initially, all concerned had agreed that other than the president, the secretary of state would be the sole spokesman on foreign policy. Brzezinski quickly concluded, however, that Vance was not adequate to the task and took it upon himself. The result, given the policy differences that emerged between Vance and Brzezinski, was increased public confusion about America’s course and a decline in confidence in the president’s ability to keep his team running in tandem.
Hostage Crisis in Iran
Although disagreement over the handling of the hostage crisis in Iran finally drove Vance from the administration, Brzezinski had been unhappy with the original course Vance had plotted and Carter had approved during the last days of the Shah’s rule. Brzezinski was a advocate of a foreign policy that stressed concern for human rights, but when he perceived a need to choose between enhancing human rights or projecting American power, power came first. As the Shah’s regime disintegrated in late 1978, Brzezinski wanted the United States to urge the Shah to act aggressively, to use force against his opponents, to carry out a military coup. Carter refused, sharing the within the administration, generally for the means the Shah had already undertaken. After the Shah’s , the return of Khomeini, and the of the American hostages, a desperate president accepted a rescue plan that Brzezinski supported and Vance opposed. Vance resigned. The plan failed.
Brzezinski saw Iran as Carter’s “only” fatal error. Probably more than any other single issue, the prolongation of the hostage crisis cost Carter the election of 1980 (to Ronald Reagan) and resulted in Brzezinski’s return to private life in 1981. Of the accomplishments of the Carter administration, Brzezinski was proudest of its success in the Middle East (the Camp David accords), the normalization of relations with the People’s Republic of China, the Panama Canal treaties, SALT II, the commitment to majority rule in Africa, the identification of American policy with the human rights issue, and the plan to strengthen the military and strategic position of the United States by building the MX missile.
Adviser, Author, and Observer
Brzezinski remained a prominent during the Reagan administration. During this time he conceived and advocated a form of detente which he called “Mutual Strategic Security.” This proposal involved both space-based Strategically Deployed Interballistic missiles (SDI) and ground-based systems to be maintained by the United States. The United States, in turn, would limit its nuclear arsenal to a level well below “first-strike” capability. His conservative politics were notoriously in with right-wing Republican views, with regard to virtually every aspect of foreign affairs. His highly academic approach to foreign policy led some to see him as and . In his various writings he occasionally criticized other politicians for petty idiosyncrasies.
After leaving government service, Brzezinski, still a young man, wrote a memoir, joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University, served as a consultant to Dean, Witter, Reynolds, Inc., and waited for another opportunity to exercise power.
Brzezinski was widely interviewed in 1989 with respect to the Solidarity movement which arose in Poland, as well as the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He expressed guarded optimism for the success of the Solidarity movement in his native Poland, and he avowed support for the demise of Communism. He further advocated some degree of laissez-faire policy by the United States in dealing with Eastern Europe at such a fragile moment in history. He published his thoughts on these matters in a book, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century. Brzezinski then took a into the 21st century, based on a retrospective of the past 100 years, in his publication, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century.
Throughout his career Brzezinski has utilized his aggressive to foster his policies, keeping him in the as a respected political advisor and critic. He has established himself as a deep thinker, as well as a philosopher through his many writings. His published opinions range from cold war politics to human rights to genetic engineering. His ideas are at once and moralistic, especially with respect to the culture of the United States. In a 1993 interview he stated that the “self-indulgent, , consumption-oriented society cannot project a moral onto the world … Our moral consciousness has been corrupted by … the equal we assign to all values as if they were competing products on the supermarket shelf.”
Here is in 1989 discussing the TriLateral Commission
And here in 2007 again
The Washington Post posted that Zbigniew Brzezinski backed Obama’s Presidential Campaign
Washinton Post: August 2007
Barack Obama, combating the perception that he is too young and inexperienced to handle a dangerous world, got a boost yesterday from a paragon of foreign policy eminence, Zbigniew Brzezinski. The former national security adviser announced on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt” that he is supporting the junior senator from Illinois for president.
Obama “recognizes that the challenge is a new face, a new sense of direction, a new definition of America’s role in the world,” said Brzezinski, who keeps an office at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Obama is clearly more effective and has the upper hand. He has a sense of what is historically relevant and what is needed from the United States in relationship to the world.”
Brzezinski, who had a relatively hawkish reputation in the Carter administration but has been an outspoken critic of President Bush and the Iraq war, rejected the notion that Obama’s Senate colleague Hillary Clinton is more experienced in foreign affairs. “Being a former first lady doesn’t prepare you to be president,” he said. “Clinton’s foreign policy approach is “very conventional,” he added. “I don’t think the country needs to go back to what we had eight years ago.”
He also defended Obama’s position in his recent foreign policy tiff with Clinton, in which she called him “naive” for saying he would be willing to meet with the leaders of U.S. antagonists such as Iran and Venezuela. “What’s the hang-up about negotiating with the Syrians or with the Iranians?” Brzezinski said. “What it in effect means,” he said, is “that you only talk to people who agree with you.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski became a campaign issue for Obama when he called Brzezinski, “One of our most outstanding thinkers.”
From New York’s The Sun: September 2007
WASHINGTON — Senator Obama is standing by one of his top foreign policy advisers, Zbigniew Brzezinski, despite concerns that aligning with the former aide to President Carter will undermine Mr. Obama’s support with the pro-Israel community.
Mr. Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser in the Carter administration, introduced Mr. Obama before a major policy speech on Iraq yesterday in Iowa, where the Illinois senator praised his work on the Camp David Accords and called him “one of our most outstanding thinkers.”
Mr. Obama’s embrace of Mr. Brzezinski has angered some supporters of Israel put off by Mr. Brzezinski’s criticism of the Jewish state in recent years and his praise for the authors of a book that condemns the influence of the “Israel lobby.” Mr. Obama’s campaign has disavowed the book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.
A Harvard law professor and supporter of Senator Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, said Tuesday that Mr. Obama had “made a terrible mistake” by aligning with Mr. Brzezinski.
A spokeswoman for the Obama campaign, Jennifer Psaki, yesterday pointed to the fact that Messrs. Brzezinski and Obama both opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, unlike Mrs. Clinton, and she suggested the Clinton camp was trying to smear Mr. Brzezinski.
Given Mr. Brzezinski’s opposition to the war, she said, “It’s not terribly surprising that those who embraced the war would try to discredit him now.” Ms. Psaki added: “Barack Obama has a strong record in support of a secure Israel and he will continue to foster a strong U.S.-Israel relationship when he is in the White House.”
The Clinton campaign declined comment.
This audio from 2008 shows how much he believes in Global Governance, “The distribution of Global Power” and that the ends justify the means, “Today it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people.”
Here in 2008 on MSNBC his arrogance is on full display.
In September of 2009 he stated that the US should shoot down any Israeli planes that fly over Iraq in a pre-emptive strike on Iran.
From ABC:
The national security adviser for former President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, gave an interview to The Daily Beast in which he suggested President Obama should make it clear to Israel that if they attempt to attack Iran’s nuclear weapons sites the U.S. Air Force will stop them.
“We are not exactly impotent little babies,” Brzezinski said. “They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch? … We have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a ‘Liberty’ in reverse.”
The USS Liberty was a U.S. Navy technical research ship that the Israeli Air Force mistakenly attacked during the Six Day War in 1967.
Brzezinski endorsed then-Sen. Obama’s presidential campaign in August 2007, which at the time was portrayed in the media as a boost to Obama’s foreign policy cred. The Washington Post reported: “Barack Obama, combating the perception that he is too young and inexperienced to handle a dangerous world, got a boost yesterday from a paragon of foreign policy eminence, Zbigniew Brzezinski.”
Brzezinski was never an official campaign adviser, but Republicans jumped on the endorsement to push the meme that Obama wouldn’t be a friend to Israel, as Brzezinski’s views of Israel attracted criticism from some quarters in the American Jewish community.
“Brzezinski is not an adviser to the campaign,” former Ambassador Dennis Ross, then a senior adviser on Middle East affairs to the Obama campaign, said at the time. “There is a lot of disinformation that is being pushed, but he is not an adviser to the campaign. Brzezinski came out and supported Obama early because of the war in Iraq. A year or so ago they talked a couple of times. That’s the extent of it, and Sen. Obama has made it clear that on other Middle Eastern issues, Brzezinski is not who he looks to. They don’t have the same views.”
Brzezinski plays no role in the Obama administration; the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Brzezinski’s comments come within the same week that the White House distanced itself from comments made by former President Carter, who said he thinks “an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.”
For the September Issue of Foreign Affairs he wrote an article titled: An agenda for NATO, Toward a Global Security Web:
NATO’s 60th anniversary, celebrated in April with pomp and circumstance by the leaders of nearly 30 allied states, generated little public interest. NATO’s historical role was treated as a bore. In the opinion-shaping media, there were frequent derisive dismissals and even calls for the termination of the alliance as a dysfunctional geostrategic irrelevance. Russian spokespeople mocked it as a Cold War relic.
Even France’s decision to return to full participation in NATO’s integrated military structures — after more than 40 years of abstention — aroused relatively little positive commentary. Yet France’s actions spoke louder than words. A state with a proud sense of its universal vocation sensed something about NATO — not the NATO of the Cold War but the NATO of the twenty-first century — that made it rejoin the world’s most important military alliance at a time of far-reaching changes in the world’s security dynamics. France’s action underlined NATO’s vital political role as a regional alliance with growing global potential.
In assessing NATO’s evolving role, one has to take into account the historical fact that in the course of its 60 years the alliance has institutionalized three truly monumental transformations in world affairs: first, the end of the centuries-long “civil war” within the West for transoceanic and European supremacy; second, the United States’ post-World War II commitment to the defense of Europe against Soviet domination (resulting from either a political upheaval or even World War III); and third, the peaceful termination of the Cold War, which ended the geopolitical division of Europe and created the preconditions for a larger democratic European Union.
This article generated alot of buzz so the magazine conducted this interview with Brzezinski
Within it he discusses Nato governing and acting on decisions, not through Unanimious Consent, but through majority vote. He also talks about kicking out Members of the UN for bad performance, that he is against Israel acting on Iran, and Afganistan.
Here is in a CNN interview praising Obama’s Foreign Policy to the Middle East
Here he is addressing the Council On Foreign Relations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDBlABD01U0
He discusses that people are “Politically awakened” and the difficulties that presents, and Global Governance.
However, lately his tune on Obama has changed a little.
January 2010 he wrote an article on Obama’s Foreign Policy for Foreign Affairs:
From Hope to Audacity, Appraising Obama’s Foreign Policy
The foreign policy of U.S. President Barack Obama can be assessed most usefully in two parts: first, his goals and decision-making system and, second, his policies and their implementation. Although one can speak with some confidence about the former, the latter is still an unfolding process.
To his credit, Obama has undertaken a truly ambitious effort to redefine the United States’ view of the world and to reconnect the United States with the emerging historical context of the twenty-first century. He has done this remarkably well. In less than a year, he has comprehensively reconceptualized U.S. foreign policy with respect to several centrally important geopolitical issues:
• Islam is not an enemy, and the “global war on terror” does not define the United States’ current role in the world;
• the United States will be a fair-minded and assertive mediator when it comes to attaining lasting peace between Israel and Palestine;
• the United States ought to pursue serious negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, as well as other issues;
• the counterinsurgency campaign in the Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan should be part of a larger political undertaking, rather than a predominantly military one;
• the United States should respect Latin America’s cultural and historical sensitivities and expand its contacts with Cuba;
• the United States ought to energize its commitment to significantly reducing its nuclear arsenal and embrace the eventual goal of a world free of nuclear weapons;
• in coping with global problems, China should be treated not only as an economic partner but also as a geopolitical one;
• improving U.S.-Russian relations is in the obvious interest of both sides, although this must be done in a manner that accepts, rather than seeks to undo, post-Cold War geopolitical realities; and
• a truly collegial transatlantic partnership should be given deeper meaning, particularly in order to heal the rifts caused by the destructive controversies of the past few years.
Here he is still praising Obama for his efforts into Global Governance but critices him basically, for not implementing them (fast enough?).
In July of 2010 Zbigniew Brzezinki brought back the word that doomed Jimmy carter to describe Obama. From NewsBusters:
Can you hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth emanating from 1600 Pennslyvania Avenue? It’s Pres. Obama & Co. reacting to Zbigniew Brzezinki pinning on Barack Obama the word that doomed Jimmy Carter: “malaise.”On Morning Joe, Carter’s former national security adviser said there “is a sense of pervasive malaise” in America. What’s worse, suggested Zbig, Pres. Obama hasn’t been able to figure out how to deal with the malaise. Ruh-roh!
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I think we’re now going through a phase in which there is a sense of pervasive malaise, which affects different groups in society in different ways. So people are dissatisfied; they’re slightly worried; they don’t see a good certain future for themselves or for the country, but in their own narrow sphere. There’s no grand mobilizing idea. And I have a sense that Obama, who started so well, and who really captivated people—he captivated me!—has not been able yet to generate some sort of organizing idea for an age which combines a malaise that’s pervasive and percolating, and complexity.. . .
PAT BUCHANAN: We need a new paradigm!
BREZINSKI: And the President hasn’t articulated it.
BUCHANAN: No he hasn’t.BREZINSKI: There goes any further invitation to the White House!
Brzezinski clearly understood the personal implications of his downer of a diagnosis: “there goes any further invitation to the White House!” The panel all enjoyed a good chuckle, but could anything be much worse for PBO than to be seen as the reincarnation of Jimmy Carter?
So, is Zbigniew Brzezinski working for the Obama Administration? No, however he does hold influence through the organizations of which he is a member, but nothing direct.
He and Obama have similar goals and policies on Israel and Global Governance. What you can see is that Brzezinski backed Obama before, during the campaign and after, but now openly criticizes him, not for what his policies are, but because he hasn’t implemented them yet. And those policies are the ones where the USA would give up soverignty to Global bodies, like the UN.
