A campaign adviser to President-elect Barack Obama who helped President Jimmy Carter open full diplomatic ties with communist China said eventual normalization of relations with Iran would benefit the U.S.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, 80, a former national security adviser who traveled to Beijing 30 years ago to pave the way for the new relationship, said today that taking a similar path with Iran may help reshape its anti-American government.

"One of the reasons that I do favor a dialogue with the Iranians, and if it is feasible, the establishment of normal diplomatic relationships, is that I think that would help promote political change in a country which is far less centrally controlled, far less subject to effective state authority than was or is the case in the People's Republic of China," he said.

Brzezinski spoke at a forum at the Brookings Institution in Washington marking 30 years since the establishment of formal relations with mainland China, which the U.S. had refused to recognize after the communist takeover in 1949. The U.S. and China opened embassies in early 1979 to solidify their new diplomatic relationship.

Plans to set up a U.S. interests section in Tehran, a lower-level diplomatic post like the one the U.S. operated in Beijing before full recognition, never came to fruition under President George W. Bush. His administration has passed the decision on the outpost to Obama.

Talking to Adversaries

Obama, who was a teenager when Carter severed relations with Iran after the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in late 1979, said during the campaign that he would be willing to talk to adversaries that Bush shunned. Besides Iran, those countries include Cuba, Syria and Venezuela.

Brzezinski was in the White House while student revolutionaries held U.S. diplomats in Tehran hostage and "grossly abused all principles of international law" connected to diplomacy, he said.

"That is an unresolved legacy that may not be all that easy to overcome," Brzezinski said.

Also speaking at the Brookings panel was retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who was a military assistant to President Richard Nixon during his groundbreaking visit to China, and national security adviser to Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush.

Scowcroft called the opening of relations with China "an important lesson."

"Two decades of total estrangement" following the communist revolution "didn't produce much for either side," he said.