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Zbigniew Brzezinski

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Politician

The Resume

    (March 28, 1928-May 26, 2017)
    Born in Warsaw, Poland
    Naturalized US citizen (1958)
    National Security Advisor (1977-81)
    Wrote ‘Power and Principle’ (1983), ‘Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the 20th Century’ (1990), ‘Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century’ (1993), ‘The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives’ (1997), ‘The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership’ (2004) and ‘America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy’ (2008)
    Father ‘Morning Joe’ co-host Mika Brzezinski
    Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1981)

Why he might be annoying:

    His name is a bitch to spell or pronounce.
    He wrote that the leaders of protests against the Vietnam War should be imprisoned or expelled from the country (1968).
    He was a founding member of the Trilateral Commission (1973), inspiring endless conspiracy mongering.
    For good measure, he was also a member of two other organizations that loom large in ‘one world’ conspiracy theories, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group.
    He often clashed with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, culminating in Vance calling Brzezinski ‘evil’ after he took advantage of Vance’s absence (due to an attack of gout) from a National Security Council meeting to persuade President Jimmy Carter to launch Operation Eagle Claw, an ultimately unsuccessful military effort to rescue the hostages held in Iran.
    Asked if he regretted arming Islamic fundamentalists to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, he replied, ‘What was more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the end of the Cold War?’
    He compared the West’s response to Russia’s seizure of the Crimea (2014) to the appeasement of Hitler during the Sudeten crisis, even though his own recommendations stopped well short of military intervention.
    Indeed, he recommended assuring Russia that the US had no plans to admit Ukraine to NATO, which is about as wussy as any position Neville Chamberlain adopted.

Why he might not be annoying:

    He was married to Emilie Benes for 56 years.
    As early as 1960, he predicted that economic and political stagnation would cause the Soviet Union to break up.
    He encouraged an emphasis on human rights and support for dissidents in the Soviet bloc.
    Ronald Reagan respected him enough to ask him to stay on as National Security Advisor in his administration. (He declined, feeling the new President needed a fresh perspective.)
    He received a standing ovation from the Soviet Academy of Sciences when he demanded that the government acknowledge the 1940 Katyn Forest massacre, in which the USSR killed 22,000 Polish officers: ‘Only with the truth can the new Soviet leadership distance itself from the crimes of Stalin ‘ (1989)
    He was an early critic of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with journalist David Ignatius noting, ‘Brzezinski paid a cost in the insular, self-reinforcing world of Washington foreign policy opinion, until it became clear to nearly everyone that he had been right.’

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 7 Votes: 42.86% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 6 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 11 Votes: 90.91% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 2 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 224 Votes: 64.29% Annoying