Mark Brzezinski, son of former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, has been sworn in as US ambassador to Poland. Vice President Kamala Harris conducted the ceremony on Wednesday, which was attended by Brzezinski’s sister Mika and brother-in-law Joe Scarborough, both hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
Brzezinski, who previously served as US ambassador to Sweden from 2011 to 2015, was nominated for the position in August and confirmed by the Senate last month.
His father, Zbigniew, served as the national security advisor under former president Jimmy Carter and was well known as the architect of the Grand Chessboard theory of geostrategic power. The elder Brzezinski viewed the Eurasian continent as the fulcrum of world power and believed it was in the best interests of the US to control it, given its richness in natural resources, physical wealth, and population.
His efforts to wrest control of Eurasia from the Soviet Union included funding and supporting the Mujahideen, the Islamic fundamentalist faction in Afghanistan which later became the Taliban. He openly spoke in interviews of seizing the opportunity to “giv[e] to the USSR its Vietnam war.”
However, the consequences of that project later led to the 9/11 attacks and America’s own war in Afghanistan. It became the longest in US history and eventually culminated in disaster for the Biden administration, whose pullout from Afghanistan last August was widely criticized and has contributed to his spiraling approval ratings.
Brzezinski the younger heads to Warsaw as tensions between the US and Russia mount, with the US attempting to frame troop movements within Russian borders as a plot to attack Ukraine despite no evidence of such a plan and NATO members threatening to further amass their own troops along Russia’s borders.