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Zbigniew Brzezinskisecurity adviser. He had not wanted to be secretary of state because he felt he could be more effective working at Carter’s side in the White House.

Brzezinski often found himself in clashes with colleagues like Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. For the White House, the differences between Vance and Brzezinski became a major head-ache, confusing the American public about the administration’s policy course and fueling a decline in confi -dence that Carter could keep his foreign policy team working in tandem.

The Iranian hostage crisis, which began in 1979, came to dramatize America’s waning global power and infl uence and to symbolize the failures and frustrations of the Carter administration.

Brzezinski, during the early months of 1980, became convinced that nego-tiations to free the kidnapped Ameri-cans were going nowhere. Supported by the Pentagon, he began to push for military action.

Carter was desperate to end the standoff and, over Vance’s objections, agreed to a long-shot plan to rescue the hostages. The mission, dubbed Desert One, was a complete military and political humiliation and precipitated Vance’s resignation. Carter lost his re-election bid against Ronald Reagan that November.

Brzezinski went on to ruffl e the feath-ers of Washington’s power elite with his 1983 book, “Power and Principle,” which was hailed and reviled as a kiss-and-tell memoir.

“I have never believed in fl attery or lying as a way of making it,” he told

The Washington Post that year. “I have made it on my own terms.”

Carter described Brzezinski as bril-liant, dedicated and loyal.

“He was an important part of our lives for more than four decades and was a superb public servant,” Carter said in a statement.

In 1981, Brzezinski was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in the normalization of U.S.-China relations and his contributions to the country’s national security policies.

Brzezinski was one of three high-profi le Central Europeans who helped shape U.S. foreign policy

in the fi nal third of the 20th century. Henry Kissinger was a German, Mad-eleine Albright was by birth Czech, while Brzezinski was Polish.

The three overlapped intriguingly. Each made their name in academia. Like Kissinger, Brzezinski came to the United States as a young man but never lost his foreign accent. Like Albright, he could be categorized as a hawk on com-munism. Of Kissinger he was a rival, both academically and politically; of Albright he was an early intellectual patron.

For much of his career, in academia and in government, Brzezinski had lived in the shadow of Kissinger. It was said that on one of his visits to Beijing in 1978, Brzezinski was taken for the traditional trek along the Great Wall. “How high did Kissinger get?” Brzezin-ski asked, according to one witness. His hosts point to the spot. “OK,” Brzezinski replied. “we’ll go higher.”

Carter’s Cold War strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski dies

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, the hawkish Polish-born Cold War strategist and former top aide to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, has died. He was 89.

Born in Warsaw to a diplomat father, Brzezinski moved with his family to Canada in the late 1930s. He went on to attend McGill University in Montreal then earned a doctorate from Harvard, later becoming a U.S. citizen.

After serving under President Lyndon Johnson, he went on to become Carter’s national security adviser during the Ira-nian hostage crisis.

He was a driving force behind the failed U.S. commando mission to rescue the hostages, after which he resigned. He believed Soviet infl uence would sweep through Iran if U.S. strength did not prevail in the drama.

Nominally a Democrat, he leaned conservative on security matters. A tough critic of the Soviet Union, he also helped broker the Camp David accords and worked on normalizing relations with China.

He held that U.S. interests around the world should be addressed in terms of strategy and practicality, not ideology.

The oldest son of Polish diplomat Tadeus Brzezinski, Zbigniew was born March 28, 1928, and

attended Catholic schools during the time his father was posted in France and Germany.

The family went to Montreal in 1938 when the elder Brzezinski was appointed Polish consul general. He retired six years later and moved his family to a farm in the Canadian countryside.

At his new home, the young Brzezinski began learning Russian from a nearby farmer and was soon bitten by the for-eign policy bug.

Brzezinski’s climb to the top of the foreign policy community began at Canada’s McGill University, where he earned degrees in economics and politi-cal science. Later at Harvard, he received a doctorate in government, a fellowship and a publishing contract — for his thesis on Soviet purges as a permanent feature of totalitarianism.

Frequent trips to Eastern Europe and several books and articles in the 1950s established Brzezinski as an expert on communism, and by the 1960s he’d begun to attract the interest of policy-makers. In the 1960s he was an adviser to John F. Kennedy and served in the Johnson administration.

Carter asked Brzezinski to join his team during his fi rst presidential campaign after he studied Brzezinski’s “impressive background and his schol-arly and political writings.”

“I liked him immediately, and we developed an excellent personal rela-tionship. He was inquisitive, innovative and a natural choice as my national secu-rity advisor when I became president,” Carter said.

Brzezinski helped Carter set “vital foreign policy goals” and became a “source of stimulation” for the depart-ments of defense and state, the former president said.

In December 1976, Carter offered Brzezinski the position of national

Brzezinski was a legendarily demand-ing teacher. At Columbia, where he was the Ph.D. adviser of the future Secretary of State Albright, he could famously skewer an unprepared student in sec-onds. He gave out so few A grades that he wrote personal notes to accompany them. Albright was said to be a favorite of his as she learned she had to be better prepared than the boys to be taken seri-ously.

Always ready to do battle with bureau-cratic and ideological opponents, Brzez-inski placed equally strong emphasis on developing warm personal relationships with world fi gures he respected.

“The two greatest foreign leaders I dealt with were China’s Deng Xiaoping and Pope John Paul II,” he said in 2014. He had been in touch with then-Cardinal Karol Wojtyla since 1976 and used that contact with the Polish-born pope to help mobilize European opposition to counter the risks of a Soviet invasion of Poland in 1980.

Into his 80s, Brzezinski, the author of more than 30 crisply argued books, was still fully active as a teacher, author and consultant: a professor of foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a frequent expert commentator on PBS and ABC News.

He did not support President Donald Trump’s election and criticized his foreign policy as vague.

“Does America have a foreign policy right now?” he tweeted in February.

“The President should outline why America is important to the world, but also why the world needs America.”

Brzezinski is survived by his wife, the sculptor Emilie Benes, and by their two sons, Mark and Ian, and daughter, Mika, and fi ve grandchildren. (SD-Agencies)

Brzezinski (L) with Henry Kissinger at the Nobel peace prize forum in Oslo, Norway, last year. SD-Agencies

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter (R) presents Brzezinski (C) with the Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony in Washington in January 1981.

Brzezinski (L) and late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in this fi le photo.