The Honorable Mark Brzezinski, Former U.S. Ambassador to Sweden
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Zbigniew Brzezinski, Mark’s father, to be his National Security Advisor. In a visit to the People’s Republic of China in May 1978, Zbigniew Brzezinski stated to Chinese Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping that the U.S. was eager to move forward with the full normalization of relations with Beijing. On December 15, 1978, an agreement was officially announced. In pushing for normalization, Brzezinski envisioned a new approach for U.S. and China relations, which previously had been driven by a shared antagonism toward the Soviet Union. He attached great strategic importance to China and viewed China as an important piece in his “geo-strategic puzzle.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski was also laying the foundation for a new approach to U.S. foreign policy where nations would be mutually and economically interdependent in a globalized society. After the two countries exchanged ambassadors, they negotiated their first trade agreement.
While the Carter administration sought to build an alliance with China, the Trump administration under its “America first” approach has assumed the role of a disrupter of previous U.S. foreign policy initiatives and alliances. President Xi will not be bullied by President Trump’s confrontational language, tariffs, and other activities. Trump has moved the China-U.S. relationship
from one of “skeptical cooperation to one of distrust and antagonism.” The U.S. is in competition with a modern socialist country, and thus far it has not been able to deter China. The question is: What is the most effective strategy for the U.S. today to meet the challenges presented by China?
Our speaker for the annual joint CCFR-Fulbright Association meeting is the Honorable Mark Brzezinski. He brings to the topic both his experiences and the knowledge he gained from discussions with his father. He was appointed in 2011 by President Obama as the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden and served until 2015. He served in 2015 as the first Executive Director of the White House’s Arctic Executive Steering Committee. From 1999-2001, he served on President Clinton’s National Security Council staff, first as Director for Russia and Eurasia, and then as a Director for the Balkans.
Brzezinski was a Fulbright Scholar in Poland from 1991-93. In 2010, he was named by Obama to the U.S. State Department’s Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
Mark Brzezinski received a B.A. in government from Dartmouth College, J.D. from the University of Virginia, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Oxford University. He is the founder and principal of Brzezinski Strategies LLC. He was also a partner in a Washington law firm.