Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew "Zbig" Kazimierz Brzeziński ( , Polish: [ˈzbiɡɲɛf kaˈʑimjɛʐ‿bʐɛˈʑij̃skʲi] ; March 28, 1928 – May 26, 2017) was a Polish-American diplomat and political scientist. He served as a counselor to Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981. As a scholar, Brzeziński belonged to the realist school of international relations, standing in the geopolitical tradition of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas J. Spykman, while elements of liberal idealism have also been identified in his outlook. Brzeziński was the primary organizer of The Trilateral Commission.

Major foreign policy events during his time in office included the normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China (and the severing of ties with the Republic of China on Taiwan); the signing of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union; the brokering of the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel; the overthrow of the US-friendly Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the start of the Iranian Revolution; the United States' encouragement of dissidents in Eastern Europe and championing of human rights in order to undermine the influence of the Soviet Union; supporting the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and, ultimately, Soviet troops during the Soviet–Afghan War; and the signing of the Torrijos–Carter Treaties relinquishing U.S. control of the Panama Canal after 1999.

Zbigniew Brzeziński's personal views have been described as "progressive", "international," politically liberal, and strongly anti-communist. He was an advocate for anti-Soviet containment, for human rights organizations, and for "cultivating a strong West." He has been praised for his ability to see "the big picture." Critics described him as hawkish or a "foreign policy hardliner" on some issues, such as Poland–Russia relations.

Zbigniew Brzeziński served as the Robert E. Osgood Professor of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a member of various boards and councils. He frequently appeared as an expert on the PBS program The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, ABC News' This Week with Christiane Amanpour, and MSNBC's Morning Joe, where his daughter, Mika Brzeziński, is co-anchor. He supported the Prague Process. His elder son, Ian, is a foreign policy expert, and his younger son, Mark, was the United States Ambassador to Poland from 2022 to 2025 and the United States Ambassador to Sweden from 2011 to 2015.

Zbigniew Brzeziński was born in Warsaw, Poland, on March 28, 1928 into a Roman Catholic szlachta family bearing the Trąby coat of arms, originally from Brzeżany, Tarnopol Voivodeship (then part of Poland, currently in Ukraine). The town of Brzeżany is thought to be the source of the family name. Brzeziński's parents were Leonia (née Roman) Brzeziński and Tadeusz Brzeziński, a Polish diplomat who was posted to Germany from 1931 to 1935; Zbigniew Brzeziński thus spent some of his earliest years witnessing the rise of the Nazis. From 1936 to 1938, Tadeusz Brzeziński was posted to the Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, and was later praised by Israel for his work helping Jews escape from the Nazis.

In 1938, Tadeusz Brzeziński was posted to Montreal as a consul general. The Brzeziński family lived near the Polish Consulate-General, on Stanley Street. In 1939, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was agreed to by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union; subsequently the two powers and Slovakia invaded Poland. The 1945 Yalta Conference among the Allies allotted Poland to the Soviet sphere of influence. The Second World War had a profound effect on Brzeziński, who stated in an interview: "The extraordinary violence that was perpetrated against Poland did affect my perception of the world, and made me much more sensitive to the fact that a great deal of world politics is a fundamental struggle."

After attending Loyola College in Montreal, Brzeziński entered McGill University in 1945 to obtain both his Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees (received in 1949 and 1950 respectively). His Master's thesis focused on the various nationalities within the Soviet Union. Brzeziński's plan for pursuing further studies in the United Kingdom in preparation for a diplomatic career in Canada fell through, principally because he was ruled ineligible for a scholarship he had won that was only open to British subjects. Brzeziński then attended Harvard University to work on a doctorate with Merle Fainsod, focusing on the Soviet Union and the relationship between the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin's state, and the actions of Joseph Stalin. He received his Ph.D. in 1953; the same year, he traveled to Munich and met Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, head of the Polish desk of Radio Free Europe. He later collaborated with Carl J. Friedrich to develop the concept of totalitarianism as a way to characterize more accurately and powerfully, and to criticize the Soviets in 1956.

Brzeziński was on the faculty of Harvard University from 1953 to 1960, and of Columbia University from 1960 to 1972 where he headed the Research Institute on Communist Affairs. He was Senior Research Professor of International Relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.

As a Harvard professor, he argued against Dwight Eisenhower's and John Foster Dulles's policy of rollback, saying that antagonism would push Eastern Europe further toward the Soviets. The Polish protests followed by the Polish October and the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 lent some support to Brzeziński's idea that the Eastern Europeans could gradually counter Soviet domination. In 1957, he visited Poland for the first time since he left as a child, and his visit reaffirmed his judgement that splits within the Eastern bloc were profound. He developed ideas that he called "peaceful engagement". Brzeziński became a naturalized American citizen in 1958.

Very soon after Harvard awarded an associate professorship in 1959 to Henry Kissinger instead of to him, Brzeziński moved to New York City to teach at Columbia University. There he wrote Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, which focused on Eastern Europe since the beginning of the Cold War. He also taught future Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who like Brzeziński's wife Emilie was of Czech descent, and whom he also mentored during her early years in Washington. He also became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and joined the Bilderberg Group.

During the 1960 U.S. presidential elections, Brzeziński was an advisor to the John F. Kennedy campaign, urging a non-antagonistic policy toward Eastern European governments. Seeing the Soviet Union as having entered a period of stagnation, both economic and political, Brzeziński predicted a future breakup of the Soviet Union along lines of nationality (expanding on his master's thesis).

In his 1970 piece Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era, Brzeziński argued that a coordinated policy among developed nations was necessary in order to counter global instability erupting from increasing economic inequality. Out of this thesis, Brzeziński co-founded the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller, serving as director from 1973 to 1976. The Trilateral Commission is a group of prominent political and business leaders and academics primarily from the United States, Western Europe and Japan. Its purpose was to strengthen relations among the three most industrially advanced regions of the capitalist world. In 1974, Brzeziński selected Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter as a member.

Carter announced his candidacy for the 1976 presidential campaign to a skeptical media and proclaimed himself an "eager student" of Brzeziński. Brzeziński became Carter's principal foreign policy advisor by late 1975. He became an outspoken critic of the Nixon-Kissinger over-reliance on détente, a situation preferred by the Soviet Union, favoring the Helsinki process instead, which focused on human rights, international law and peaceful engagement in Eastern Europe. Brzeziński was considered to be the Democrats' response to Republican Henry Kissinger. Carter engaged his incumbent opponent for the presidency, Gerald Ford, in foreign policy debates by contrasting the Trilateral vision with Ford's détente.

After his victory in 1976, Carter made Brzeziński National Security Advisor. Earlier that year, major labor riots broke out in Poland, laying the foundations for Solidarity. Brzeziński began by emphasizing the "Basket III" human rights in the Helsinki Final Act, which inspired Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia shortly thereafter.

Brzeziński assisted with writing parts of Carter's inaugural address, and this served his purpose of sending a positive message to Soviet dissidents. The Soviet Union and Western European leaders both complained that this kind of rhetoric ran against the "code of détente" that Nixon and Kissinger had established. Brzeziński ran up against members of his own Democratic Party who disagreed with this interpretation of détente, including Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Vance argued for less emphasis on human rights in order to gain Soviet agreement to Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), whereas Brzeziński favored doing both at the same time. Brzeziński then ordered Radio Free Europe transmitters to increase the power and area of their broadcasts, a provocative reversal of Nixon-Kissinger policies. West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt objected to Brzeziński's agenda, even calling for the removal of Radio Free Europe from German soil.

The State Department was alarmed by Brzeziński's support for dissidents in East Germany and objected to his suggestion that Carter's first overseas visit be to Poland. He visited Warsaw and met with Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński (against the objection of the U.S. Ambassador to Poland), recognizing the Catholic Church as the legitimate opposition to communist rule in Poland.

By 1978, Brzeziński and Vance were more and more at odds over the direction of Carter's foreign policy. Vance sought to continue the style of détente engineered by Nixon-Kissinger, with a focus on arms control. Brzeziński believed that détente emboldened the Soviets in Angola and the Middle East, and so he argued for increased military strength and an emphasis on human rights. Vance, the State Department, and the media criticized Brzeziński publicly as seeking to revive the Cold War. Brzeziński advised Carter in 1978 to engage the People's Republic of China and traveled to Beijing to lay the groundwork for the normalization of relations between the two countries. This also resulted in the severing of ties with the United States' longtime anti-Communist ally the Republic of China (Taiwan).

President Carter chose Brzeziński for the position of National Security Adviser (NSA) because he wanted an assertive intellectual at his side to provide him with day-to-day advice and guidance on foreign policy decisions. Brzeziński would preside over a reorganized National Security Council (NSC) structure, fashioned to ensure that the NSA would be only one of many players in the foreign policy process.

Initially, Carter reduced the NSC staff by one-half, and decreased the number of standing NSC committees from eight to two. All issues referred to the NSC were reviewed by one of the two new committees, either the Policy Review Committee (PRC) or the Special Coordinating Committee (SCC). The PRC focused on specific issues, and its chairmanship rotated. The SCC was always chaired by Brzeziński, a circumstance he had to negotiate with Carter to achieve. Carter believed that by making the NSA chairman of only one of the two committees, he would prevent the NSC from being the overwhelming influence on foreign policy decisions it had been under Kissinger's chairmanship during the Nixon administration.

The SCC was charged with considering issues that cut across several departments, including oversight of intelligence activities, arms control evaluation, and crisis management. Much of the SCC's time during the Carter years was spent on SALT issues. The Council held few formal meetings, convening only 10 times, compared with 125 meetings during the eight years of the Nixon and Ford administrations. Instead, Carter used frequent, informal meetings as a decision-making device—typically his Friday breakfasts—usually attended by the Vice President, the secretaries of State and Defense, Brzeziński, and the chief domestic adviser.

No agendas were prepared and no formal records were kept of these meetings, sometimes resulting in differing interpretations of the decisions actually agreed upon. Brzeziński was careful, in managing his own weekly luncheons with secretaries Vance and Brown in preparation for NSC discussions, to maintain a complete set of notes. Brzeziński also sent weekly reports to the President on major foreign policy undertakings and problems, with recommendations for courses of action. President Carter enjoyed these reports and frequently annotated them with his own views. Brzeziński and the NSC used these presidential notes (159 of them) as the basis for NSC actions.

From the beginning, Brzeziński made sure that the new NSC institutional relationships would assure him a major voice in the shaping of foreign policy. While he knew that Carter would not want him to be another Kissinger, Brzeziński also felt confident that the President did not want Secretary of State Vance to become another Dulles and would want his own input on key foreign policy decisions. Brzeziński's power gradually expanded into the operational area during the Carter Presidency. He increasingly assumed the role of a presidential emissary. In 1978, for example, Brzeziński traveled to Beijing to lay the groundwork for normalizing U.S.–PRC relations.

During the 1960s, Brzeziński articulated the strategy of peaceful engagement for undermining the Soviet bloc, and while serving on the State Department Policy Planning Council, persuaded President Lyndon B. Johnson to adopt (in October 1966) peaceful engagement as U.S. strategy, placing détente ahead of German reunification and thus reversing prior U.S. priorities.

During the 1970s and 1980s, at the height of his political involvement, Brzeziński participated in the formation of the Trilateral Commission in order to more closely cement U.S.–Japanese–European relations. As the three most economically advanced sectors of the world, the people of the three regions could be brought together in cooperation that would give them a more cohesive stance against the communist world.

While serving in the White House, Brzeziński emphasized the centrality of human rights as a means of placing the Soviet Union on the ideological defensive. With Jimmy Carter in Camp David, he assisted in the attainment of the Egypt–Israel peace treaty.

Communists under the leadership of Nur Muhammad Taraki seized power in Afghanistan on April 27, 1978. The new regime—divided between Taraki's extremist Khalq faction and the more moderate Parcham—signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union in December of that year. Taraki's efforts to improve secular education and redistribute land were accompanied by mass executions (including of many conservative religious leaders) and political oppression unprecedented in Afghan history, igniting a revolt by mujahideen rebels.

Following a general uprising in April 1979, Taraki was deposed by Khalq rival Hafizullah Amin in September. Amin was considered a "brutal psychopath" by foreign observers; even the Soviets were alarmed by the brutality of the Afghan communists, and suspected Amin of being an agent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), although that was not the case. By December, Amin's government had lost control of much of the country, prompting the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan, execute Amin, and install Parcham leader Babrak Karmal as president.

President Carter was surprised by the invasion, as the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community during 1978 and 1979—reiterated as late as September 29, 1979—was that "Moscow would not intervene in force even if it appeared likely that the Khalq government was about to collapse." Indeed, Carter's diary entries from November 1979 until the Soviet invasion in late December contain only two short references to Afghanistan, and are instead preoccupied with the ongoing hostage crisis in Iran. In the West, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was considered a threat to global security and the oil supplies of the Persian Gulf.

Moreover, the failure to accurately predict Soviet intentions caused American officials to reappraise the Soviet threat to both Iran and Pakistan, although it is now known that those fears were overblown. For example, U.S. intelligence closely followed Soviet exercises for an invasion of Iran throughout 1980, while an earlier warning from Brzeziński that "if the Soviets came to dominate Afghanistan, they could promote a separate Baluchistan ... [thus] dismembering Pakistan and Iran" took on new urgency.

These concerns were a major factor in the unrequited efforts of both the Carter and Reagan administrations to improve relations with Iran, and resulted in massive aid to Pakistan's Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Zia's ties with the U.S. had been strained during Carter's presidency due to Pakistan's nuclear program and the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in April 1979, but Carter told Brzeziński and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance as early as January 1979 that it was vital to "repair our relationships with Pakistan" in light of the unrest in Iran.

Following the September 11 attacks, a theory that Brzeziński intentionally provoked the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 was widely repeated. Some adherents of this theory thus blamed Brzeziński (and the Carter administration) for events subsequent to the Soviet invasion, including the decades-long Afghanistan conflict (1978–present) and the September 11 attacks. A 2020 review of declassified U.S. documents by Conor Tobin in the journal Diplomatic History contends that this theory—referred to as the "Afghan Trap" theory by the author—is a misrepresentation of the historical record based almost entirely on a "caricature" of Brzeziński as an anti-communist fanatic, a disputed statement attributed to Brzeziński by a Le Nouvel Observateur journalist in 1998 (which was "repeatedly den[ied]" by Brzeziński himself), "and the circumstantial fact that U.S. support antedated the invasion." In addition to Tobin, several academic or journalistic sources have questioned the veracity of aspects of the "Afghan Trap" theory, as have at least two former high-ranking Carter administration officials.

While it is true that the March 1979 Herat uprising in Afghanistan and a desire to rebuild strained U.S. relations with Pakistani leader Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in light of the Iranian Revolution prompted Carter to sign presidential findings in July 1979 permitting the CIA to spend $695,000 on non-military assistance (e.g., "cash, medical equipment, and radio transmitters") to Afghan mujahideen insurgents (and on a propaganda campaign targeting the Soviet-backed leadership of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan or DRA), internal deliberations show that "U.S. policies were almost wholly reactive ... to the Soviets' escalating military presence" with policymakers rejecting "a substantial covert aid program" (including lethal provisions) "to avoid provoking Moscow." (The Soviet military and political presence in Afghanistan steadily increased throughout 1979, including "tens of millions of dollars in military aid provided by Moscow to the DRA.")

According to Tobin, Brzeziński went to considerable lengths to dissuade the Soviets from invading Afghanistan, urging the Carter administration to publicize information regarding the growing Soviet military role in Afghanistan's nascent civil war and to explicitly warn the Soviets of severe sanctions in the event of an invasion; when his warnings were watered-down by the State Department under the leadership of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Brzeziński leaked information to a journalist, resulting in an August 1979 article in The New York Times headlined "U.S. Is Indirectly Pressing Russians to Halt Afghanistan Intervention." (Ironically, Soviet general Valentin Varennikov complained in 1995 that American officials had never made Afghanistan's strategic significance clear to their Soviet counterparts prior to December 1979, speculating—in line with the "Afghan Trap" theory—that this omission may have been deliberate as the U.S. "had an interest in us getting stuck in Afghanistan, and paying the greatest possible price for that.") Furthermore, Brzeziński attempted to discretely negotiate a withdrawal of Soviet troops with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin during 1980, privately conceding that the country would likely remain within the Soviet sphere of influence following a diplomatic settlement, as he had little confidence in the mujahideen's ability to inflict a military defeat on the Red Army.

Carter administration officials Robert Gates and Vice President Walter Mondale criticized the "Afghan Trap" theory between 2010 and 2012, the former stating that it had "no basis in fact" and the latter calling it "a huge, unwarranted leap". Tobin concludes: "The small-scale covert program that developed in response to the increasing Soviet influence was part of a contingency plan if the Soviets did intervene militarily, as Washington would be in a better position to make it difficult for them to consolidate their position, but not designed to induce an intervention." Historian Robert Rakove wrote, the notion of a U.S. effort to entrap the Soviet Union in Afghanistan has been "methodically and effectively refuted by Conor Tobin". Steve Coll had previously stated in 2004 that "[c]ontemporary memos—particularly those written in the first days after the Soviet invasion—make clear that while Brzeziński was determined to confront the Soviets in Afghanistan through covert action, he was also very worried the Soviets would prevail. ... Given this evidence and the enormous political and security costs that the invasion imposed on the Carter administration, any claim that Brzeziński lured the Soviets into Afghanistan warrants deep skepticism." Coll's "specific debunking of the Brzeziński Nouvel Observateur interview" was cited by the National Security Archive in 2019. In 2016, Justin Vaïsse referred to "[t]he thesis according to which a trap was set having been dismissed" as "[s]uch a position would not be compatible with the archives". Elisabeth Leake, writing in 2022, agreed that "the original provision was certainly inadequate to force a Soviet armed intervention. Instead it adhered to broader US practices of providing limited covert support to anti-communist forces worldwide."

In November 1979, revolutionary students stormed the Embassy of the United States, Tehran and took American diplomats hostage. Brzeziński argued against Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's proposed diplomatic solutions to the Iran hostage crisis, insisting they "would deliver Iran to the Soviets." Vance, struggling with gout, went to Florida on Thursday, April 10, 1980, for a long weekend.

On Friday, Brzeziński held a newly scheduled meeting of the National Security Council and authorized Operation Eagle Claw, a military expedition into Tehran to rescue the hostages. Deputy Secretary Warren Christopher, who attended the meeting in Vance's place, did not inform Vance. Furious, Vance handed in his resignation on principle, calling Brzeziński "evil".

President Carter aborted the operation after three of the eight helicopters he had sent into the Dasht-e Kavir desert crashed, and a fourth then collided with a transport plane, causing a fire that killed eight servicemen. The hostages were ultimately released on the day of the first inauguration of Ronald Reagan, after 444 days in captivity.

Along with Kissinger and David Rockefeller, Brzeziński played a role in convincing Carter to admit the exiled Shah into the U.S.

Brzeziński has compared complaints by US officials about Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions to similar statements made before the Iraq war began: "I think the administration, the President and the Vice President particularly, are trying to hype the atmosphere, and that is reminiscent of what preceded the war in Iraq."

Shortly after taking office in 1977, President Carter again reaffirmed the United States' position of upholding the Shanghai Communiqué. In May 1978, Brzeziński overcame concerns from the State Department and traveled to Beijing, where he began talks that seven months later led to full diplomatic relations. The United States and People's Republic of China announced on December 15, 1978, that the two governments would establish diplomatic relations on January 1, 1979. This required that the United States sever relations with the Republic of China on Taiwan. Consolidating U.S. gains in befriending Communist China was a major priority stressed by Brzeziński during his time as National Security Advisor.

Brzeziński "denied reports that he encouraged China to support the genocidal dictator Pol Pot in Cambodia, because Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge were the enemies of communist Vietnam." However, following the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia which toppled the Khmer Rouge, Brzeziński prevailed in having the administration refuse to recognize the new Cambodian government due to its support by the Soviet Union.

The most important strategic aspect of the new U.S.–Chinese relationship was in its effect on the Cold War. China was no longer considered part of a larger Sino-Soviet bloc but instead a third pole of power due to the Sino-Soviet Split, helping the United States against the Soviet Union.

In the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations dated January 1, 1979, the United States transferred diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. The United States reiterated the Shanghai Communiqué's acknowledgment of the PRC position that there is only one China and that Taiwan is a part of China; Beijing acknowledged that the United States would continue to carry on commercial, cultural, and other unofficial contacts with Taiwan. The Taiwan Relations Act made the necessary changes in U.S. law to permit unofficial relations with Taiwan to continue.

In addition the severing relations with the Republic of China, the Carter administration also agreed to unilaterally pull out of the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, withdraw U.S. military personnel from Taiwan, and gradually reduce arms sales to the Republic of China. There was widespread opposition in Congress, notably from Republicans, due to the Republic of China's status as an anti-Communist ally in the Cold War. In Goldwater v. Carter, Barry Goldwater made a failed attempt to stop Carter from terminating the mutual defense treaty.

On October 10, 2007, Brzeziński along with other influential signatories sent a letter to President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice titled "Failure Risks Devastating Consequences." The letter was partly an advice and a warning of the failure of an upcoming U.S.-sponsored Middle East conference scheduled for November 2007 between representatives of Israelis and Palestinians. The letter also suggested to engage in "a genuine dialogue with Hamas" rather than to isolate it further.

Presidential Directive 18 on U.S. National Security, signed early in Carter's term, signaled a fundamental reassessment of the value of détente, and set the United States on a course to quietly end Kissinger's strategy.

Zbigniew Brzeziński played a major role in organizing Jimmy Carter's policies on the Soviet Union as a grand strategy. Brzeziński was a liberal Democrat and a committed anti-communist, favoring social justice while seeing world events in substantially Cold War terms. Additionally, according to Foreign Policy, "Brzeziński's outlook was anti-Soviet, but he also insisted, like George Kennan before him, on the necessity of cultivating a strong West."

Brzeziński stated that human rights could be used to put the Soviet Union ideologically on the defensive:

I felt strongly that in the U.S.-Soviet competition the appeal of America as a free society could become an important asset, and I saw in human rights an opportunity to put the Soviet Union ideologically on the defensive....by actively pursuing this' commitment we could mobilize far greater global support and focus global attention on the glaring internal weaknesses of the Soviet system.

Brzeziński's policy on Iran was thoroughly connected to the Soviet Union, because it was observed that each coup and revolution in 1979 had advanced Soviet power towards the Persian Gulf. Brzeziński advised President Carter that the United States's "greatest vulnerability" lay on an arc "stretching from Chittagong through Islamabad to Aden." This played a role in the Carter Doctrine.

Presidential Directive 59, "Nuclear Employment Policy", dramatically changed U.S. targeting of nuclear weapons aimed at the Soviet Union. Implemented with the aid of Defense Secretary Harold Brown, this directive officially set the United States on a countervailing strategy.

Zbigniew Brzeziński utilized the United States' need to stability and progress in political relations with the Soviet Union to spur on the call for a new strategic arms treaty. On April 5, 1979, Brzeziński made a speech at the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations where he stated that competition between the two powers and the nuclear arms race would not simply end because of the accord. According to him, the projected strategic arms treaty that would intend to impose limits on power such as missiles and bombers through the year 1989, would be what contributes to the progress and confidence in Soviet-American relations.

He aimed to frame his arms control policy in a way that portrayed it as favorable to create, ensure, and maintain Soviet-American relations. Leading up to the presidential election in 1980, the Carter administration set sight on confronting Ronald Reagan on arms control agreements with Moscow. On this issue, Brzeziński believed that to continue moving safely ahead with talks to control atomic arms with Moscow, despite Soviet troops holding position in Afghanistan, the United States needed to remain firm in containing Soviet expansionism.

Overall, Zbigniew Brzeziński's arms control views leaned skeptical and mistrusting of Soviet motives in general and emphasized the central importance of the East–West competition. On the other hand, other officials such as the Secretary of State Cyrus Vance worked to pave a way for a wider US-Soviet relationship. Arms control in Brzeziński's terms would take any opportunity to halt or reduce the momentum of the Soviet buildup.

Brzeziński left office concerned about the internal division within the Democratic party, arguing that the dovish McGovernite wing would send the Democrats into permanent minority. Ronald Reagan invited him to stay on as his National Security Adviser, but Brzeziński declined, feeling that the new president needed a fresh perspective on which to build his foreign policy. He had mixed relations with the Reagan administration. On the one hand, he supported it as an alternative to the Democrats' pacifism. On the other hand, he also criticized it as seeing foreign policy in overly black-and-white terms.

By the 1980s, Brzeziński argued that the general crisis of the Soviet Union foreshadowed communism's end.

He remained involved in Polish affairs, critical of the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, and more so of the Western European acquiescence to its imposition in the name of stability. Brzeziński briefed U.S. vice president George H. W. Bush before his 1987 trip to Poland that aided in the revival of the Solidarity movement.

In 1985, under the Reagan administration, Brzeziński served as a member of the President's Chemical Warfare Commission. From 1987 to 1988, he worked on the U.S. National Security Council–Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy. From 1987 to 1989 he also served on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

In 1988, Brzeziński was co-chairman of the Bush National Security Advisory Task Force, endorsing Bush for president, and breaking with the Democratic party. Brzeziński published The Grand Failure the same year, predicting the failure of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in a few more decades. He said there were five possibilities for the Soviet Union: successful pluralization, protracted crisis, renewed stagnation, coup (by the KGB or Soviet military), or the explicit collapse of the Communist regime. He called collapse "at this stage a much more remote possibility" than protracted crisis.

After his role as National Security Adviser came to a close, Brzeziński returned to teaching, but remained an influential voice in international relations. Polish politician Radosław Sikorski wrote that to Poles, Brzeziński was considered "our statesman" and his was one of the most revered voices in Poland: "During the decades when Poland was stuck against her will behind the Iron Curtain, he and the Polish pope were the two most important voices for a free Poland abroad. After liberation, he acted as an adviser and champion of the new democracies on their way to rejoining Western institutions."

Though he rose to national prominence as a member of the Carter administration, Brzeziński avoided partisan politics and sometimes later voted Republican. In the 1988 election, he endorsed George H. W. Bush for president over Democrat Michael Dukakis.

Brzeziński argued against the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was outspoken in the then-unpopular opinion that the invasion would be a mistake. As recalled by David Ignatius, "Brzeziński paid a cost in the insular, self-reinforcing world of Washington foreign policy opinion, until it became clear to nearly everyone that he (joined in this Iraq War opposition by Scowcroft) had been right." He later called President George W. Bush's foreign policy "catastrophic."

Brzeziński was a leading critic of the George W. Bush administration's conduct of the war on terror. In 2004, Brzeziński wrote The Choice, which expanded upon his earlier work,The Grand Chessboard (1997), and sharply criticized George W. Bush's foreign policy. In 2007, in a column in The Washington Post, Brzeziński excoriated the Bush administration, arguing that their post-9/11 actions had damaged the reputation of the United States "infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks" and destroyed any chance of uniting the world to defeat extremism and terrorism. He later stated that he had "visceral contempt" for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who supported Bush's actions in Iraq. In 2006, he defended John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt after their arguments about the Israel lobby attracted intense criticism.

In August 2007, Brzeziński endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. He stated that Obama "recognizes that the challenge is a new face, a new sense of direction, a new definition of America's role in the world" and that "What makes Obama attractive to me is that he understands that we live in a very different world where we have to relate to a variety of cultures and people." In September 2007 during a speech on the Iraq war, Obama introduced Brzeziński as "one of our most outstanding thinkers", but some pro-Israel commentators questioned his criticism of the Israel lobby in the United States.