Carter security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski dies at 89


Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, died Friday in Virginia. He was 89.
The son of a Polish diplomat whose background was in academia, Brzezinski advised Carter throughout his presidency, guiding the White House during the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis as well as the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. Though a hard-line Cold War hawk — he implicitly encouraged, for example, Chinese support of the totalitarian Pol Pot regime to limit Soviet influence in Vietnam — in his later years, Brzezinski opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
His death was announced by his daughter, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski, on social media. "He was known to his friends as Zbig, to his grandchildren as Chief, and to his wife as the enduring love of her life," she wrote. "I just knew him as the most inspiring, loving, and devoted father any girl could ever have."
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Former President Carter in a statement remembered Brzezinski as "a superb public servant" and a "brilliant, dedicated, and loyal" man.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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