Quote

The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border of Afghanistan, I wrote to President Jimmy Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Zbigniew Brzezinski
Age: 89 †
Born: 1928
Born: March 28
Died: 2017
Died: May 26
Author
Critic
Former National Security Advisor
Geopolitician
Pedagogue
Political Scientist
Strategist
University Teacher
Warszawa
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński
Zbig
War
Carter
Giving
Jimmy
Border
Vietnam
Afghanistan
Ussr
Wrote
Soviets
Opportunity
Officially
President
Crossed

More quotes by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Image
The dynamic character of China's nonstatist economic transformation, including its social openness to the rest of the world, is not mutually compatible in the long run with a relatively closed and bureaucratically rigid Communist dictatorship.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
I was confident about America and the idea that in America people can become American without masking their ethnic identity.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
Russia can be either an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both. . . . Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
For people of different faiths to coexist, it's going to take maturity, wisdom, and patience. All of which come, eventually, with tolerance. And it's a process of time.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
The legitimacy of the leadership depends on what that country thinks of its leaders.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
Not to mention the fact that of course terrorists hate freedom. I think they do hate. But believe me, I don't think they sit there abstractly hating freedom.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
No matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
With its declining population, with people moving out of the Far East, with an enormously powerful China in the east, I think the real destiny of Russia is to become closer to the West.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
But if Russia is to be part of this larger zone of peace it cannot bring into it its imperial baggage. It cannot bring into it a policy of genocide against the Chechens, and cannot kill journalists, and it cannot repress the mass media.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
Speaking of a future at most only decades away, an experimenter in intelligence control asserted, “I foresee a time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behavior and intellectual functioning of all the people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
I can't believe that the Russians really think they're more insecure because Estonia is in NATO. And we don't have forces poised in Estonia to attack Russia.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
The Eastern Europeans invested too many of their hopes in the notion that somehow or other the missile shield, even if directed at Iran, would reinforce their security links with the U.S. vis-à-vis Russia.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
Global stability - economic as well as political - is at risk.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
The United States can certainly defeat North Vietnam, but the United States cannot defeat a guerrilla war which is being raged from a sanctuary through a pattern of penetration, intervention, evasion, which is very difficult for a technologically advanced country like the United States to combat.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
Like so many empires before it, the Soviet Union eventually imploded and fragmented, falling victim not so much to a direct military defeat as to disintegration accelerated by economic and social strains.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
Yes, ISIS is a threat. It's more than a nuisance. It's also in many respects criminal violence. But it isn't, in my view, a central strategic issue facing humanity.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
We shouldn't overdramatize the current disagreements with the Russians. They are real, but they're not really all that threatening. And the notion that we're moving back to some Cold War I think is really an exaggerated judgment.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Image
The American people have to think hard about their definition of the meaning of the good life, that hedonistic, materialistic society of high levels of consumption, increasing social inequality is not a society that can be part of the solution of the world's problems.
Zbigniew Brzezinski