April 12, 2023
The Curious Reign of the New Queen Victoria (Nuland)
Despite
differences in style and rhetoric, recent US presidents (with one
exception), once in the Oval Office, have understood where foreign
policy would be hammered out. Not in their own minds. Rather, in the
depths of Foggy Bottom and its appendages. Consider the example of
Victoria Nuland.
16-May-2015 Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the United States Department of State giving a speech at the new patrol police base in Kyiv, Ukraine ©Flash-ka/ shutterstock.com
In February, Elon Musk dared to complain on Twitter that “Nobody is pushing this war more than Nuland.” He was referring to Victoria Nuland, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs, who has served four administrations as a pillar of the Department of State. The only administration that didn’t request her services was Donald Trump’s. He may have judged Nuland’s personality as incompatible with his “America First” philosophy. Trump was well aware of the fact that Nuland was the wife of neoconservative thinker, Robert Kagan, one of the most visible instigators of George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
Trump based his primary campaign on breaking with fellow Republican Bush’s disastrous foreign policy that had produced unending chaos in the Middle East. The Donald felt perfectly capable of independently crafting his own disastrous policies. He demonstrated his capacity when he pulled the US out of the Iran deal, the Paris climate accord and wiggled out of various nuclear disarmament agreements (the INF Treaty, Open Skies and START).
In the 20th century presidential campaign, Trump had established himself as the anti-Republican establishment candidate. He scored his first major victory in 2016 when, waging an assault on the folly of George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, he quickly eliminated from the primary race the favored Republican candidate, Jeb Bush, George’s brother.
What may seem more surprising is the trust Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, placed in Nuland when she appointed a symbol of neo-con ideology her State Department Spokesperson. Was Clinton’s intention to show the world that, on her watch, despite President Barack Obama’s image as a peacemaker, foreign policy would not deviate from the outrageous belligerence of the Bush era? Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, in 2013 appointed Nuland Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. He promptly sent her to Ukraine to prod on a movement that, under her guidance, would produce a spectacular coup d’état.
Musk was obviously aware of Nuland past when he accused her of being the principal promoter of a tragically uncontrollable war in Ukraine. Shortly after Musk’s tweet, journalist David Ignatius mentioned the tweet in an interview with Nuland. Her response reads as an astonishing but not surprising non sequitur. “Well, I would start with a basic fact here, which I’m confident is well known, which is if this war is to end, it could end tomorrow if Vladimir Putin chose to end it and to withdraw his troops. So this is not about us.”
Nuland’s denial of agency has become the standard truism used in the West to close the debate on how the war in Ukraine should be settled. Even anti-establishment Jeremy Scahill of the Intercept recently insisted that “there’s one person who could end this tomorrow, and that’s Vladimir Putin.” He had been criticizing Biden’s risky escalation in Ukraine and his duplicity concerning the Nord Stream attack. Scahill probably felt it necessary to use the facile disclaimer to deflect the suspicion that he was pro-Russian. In contrast, Nuland utters the cliché to counter Musk’s accusation of being a warmonger. By adding “this is not about us,” she wants the public to believe that she is just an innocent bystander with no influence over events.
Nuland’s notorious intercepted phone call with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in February 2014 tells a different story. She appears as a kind of behind-the-scenes revolutionary leader. Revolutionary that is, if stepping in to manage the political side of a popular protest movement whose success ultimately led to the installation of a corrupt oligarch supported by neo-Nazis can be called “revolutionary.” The ultimate irony, rarely mentioned by the media, is that the pretext for the people’s protests was Ukraine’s candidacy to become a member of the European Union. In her phone call, what did Nuland have to say about that issue? “Fuck the EU!”
The US coup provoked a revolt in the eastern Donbas region that began to take the form of a nascent civil war. France and Germany, in the name of EU interests, launched a process that led to the drafting of the Minsk agreements that ultimately aimed at permitting the autonomy of the Russian-speaking eastern regions. In her interview this year with David Ignatius, Nuland gave this account of her actions:
“I personally played a role in trying to help implement the Minsk agreement during the Obama administration in addition to the diplomacy that the French and Germans were doing. We had a U.S. channel between Moscow and Kyiv, and we were hopeful that we would make some progress there, but we, frankly, you know, ran out of time.”