Zbigniew Brzezinski: Overlooked Nobel Peace Prize Laureate?

Even though he his past achievements made him a worthy nominee – even a laureate – why is it that Zbigniew Brzezinski was never considered for the Nobel Peace Prize? 

By: Ringo Bones 

For as long as I lived, I’ve yet to hear on a major news program “Zbigniew Brzezinski” and “Nobel Peace Prize” uttered on the same sentence. And this day and age, it seems like former US President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor can’t get ahead of the line of both Malala Yousafzai and Rebiya Kadeer for the Nobel Peace Prize. Sadly, it seems that no one of very powerful political influence these days have ever raised the idea of giving Brzezinski the Nobel Peace Prize even though he genuinely deserves it based on his accomplishments during the last 40 years. 

The highlight of Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski’s statesmanship was when he served as the 10^th US National Security Adviser under then US President Jimmy Carter from January 20, 1977 to January 20, 1981. If you ask me, the 1978 Camp David Accords between the then Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (that eventually made Sadat and Begin Nobel Peace Prize Laureates back in 1978) would not have happened without the “guidance” of Brzezinski. 

Now one of President Barack Obama’s main advisors on foreign politics and currently 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, Brzezinski also appears frequently as an expert on the PBS program The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, ABC News’ This Week with Christiane Amanpour, MSNBC’s Morning Joe where his daughter Mika Brzezinski is co anchor and on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS. 

Born in Warsaw, Poland back in March 28, 1928, Zbigniew Brzezinski mainly grew up traveling wherever his father’s job, Tadeusz Brzezinski a Polish diplomat who was posted in Germany from 1931 to 1935, takes him. Zbigniew Brzezinski thus spent some of his earliest years witnessing the rise of the NAZIs. From 1936 to 1938 Tadeusz Brzezinski was posted to the then Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge. In 1938, Tadeusz Brzezinski was posted to Canada. World War II had a profound effect on the young, impressionable Zbigniew Brzezinski 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 ideal of world politics is a fundamental struggle.” 

As a statesman and political critic during his service as a National Security Advisor with the then US President Jimmy Carter and even on an advisory capacity during the Reagan years, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “hawkish” East-West focus is tempered by his pragmatism to work with the preexisting geopolitical situation at the time by using the preexisting geopolitical climate to his advantage in establishing peace treaties.  Zbigniew Brzezinski also has a knack for “peacefully” defeating an enemy by providing much needed human rights to an oppressed and marginalized citizenry of a typical despotic nation-state of the time. Even though Sadat and Begin won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 and Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 “for his decades of uniting efforts to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights and to promote economic and social development”. It seems that Zbigniew Brzezinski got left out of the Nobel Peace Prize that his colleagues who worked hard to make the 1980s relatively peaceful geopolitically eventually won.