Polish-born American national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter from 1977. He arrived in New York from central Europe in 1938, fleeing fascism, just six weeks after Henry Kissinger. In the 1950s both men sought tenured professorships at Harvard.
Brzezinski's central insight was that the Soviet Union was the Russian empire dressed up in a commissar's uniform. Many American Kremlinologists focused exclusively on Moscow and theorised the Soviet Union had become a monolith. Brzezinski's devastating retort—"So do they speak Soviet?"—captured a conviction that dated back to his master's thesis: Russia's colonial possessions yearned for freedom, and they always would. Where others saw Moscow's domination of the Soviet space and the Warsaw Pact as a strength, Brzezinski grasped it as a fatal weakness.
He cultivated anti-Soviet forces, especially in Poland, the country of his birth. He was greatly helped by his friendship with Karol Wojtyla, a Pole who became Pope John Paul II in 1978. Carter, a deeply religious man, allowed Brzezinski to attend John Paul's inauguration; Brzezinski sometimes felt as if Carter were the priest and the pope the president. He played a central role in ensuring that the Polish nationalist movement eroded Soviet hegemony without provoking an armed crackdown, as had happened in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. He counselled restraint within the freedom movement but also informed the Kremlin that Carter, unlike previous presidents, would not turn a blind eye to an invasion.
Brzezinski further tightened the screws by picking up where Kissinger left off, persuading Carter to normalise relations with China. After Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he financed the mujahideen insurgency which, over the next decade, weakened the Kremlin.
As the Soviet Union declined, Brzezinski was treated in Poland as a national hero. In 1989 he visited Moscow and addressed the foreign service's Diplomatic Academy, laying out the need for a market economy, democracy and a loose federation of republics. He was met with raucous applause; to the Americans in the room, that moment marked the cold war's end.
Brzezinski's accomplishments remain under-recognised. Where Kissinger was deceitful and charming, Brzezinski was honest and too often rude. Kissinger was a brilliant self-publicist; Brzezinski had no time for Washington games. The WASP establishment suspected him of putting Poland first, and whenever Carter was critical of Israel—tensions were high in the lead-up to the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978—Brzezinski was accused of antisemitism, a charge Edward Luce's biography "Zbig" refutes. The main drag on his legacy, however, was that Carter's presidency was overshadowed by the mishandling of the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the hostage crisis that blighted his last year in office. The Iranians delayed the release of the hostages until five minutes after Ronald Reagan took office, ensuring Reagan got the credit—just as he did for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Brzezinski died in 2017. He never served in government again after Carter.
When smashing monuments, save the pedestals -- they always come in handy.