Victoria Nuland Announces Retirement; No Plan B

Yesterday's AP headline completely misses the point:

Victoria Nuland, the third-highest ranking U.S. diplomat and frequent target of criticism for her hawkish views on Russia and its actions in Ukraine, will retire and leave her post this month, the State Department said Tuesday.

Nuland, a career foreign service officer who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Europe during the Obama administration but retired after Donald Trump was elected president, returned to government as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Biden administration.

She had been a candidate to succeed Wendy Sherman as deputy Secretary of State and had served as acting deputy since Sherman’s retirement seven months ago but lost an internal administration personnel battle when President Joe Biden nominated Kurt Campbell to the no. 2 spot. Campbell took office last month.

Nuland had served at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the tumultuous 1990s and was in the city during the attempted coup against former Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

I posted in some detail on her actual career last August. There, I linked to her Wikipedia entry:

From 2003 to 2005, Nuland served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, exercising an influential role during the Iraq War. From 2005 to 2008, during President George W. Bush's second term, Nuland served as U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels, where she concentrated on mobilizing European support for the NATO intervention in Afghanistan.

. . . During the Maidan Uprising in Ukraine, Nuland made appearances supporting the Maidan protesters. In December 2013, she said in a speech to the US–Ukraine Foundation that the U.S. had spent about $5 billion on democracy-building programs in Ukraine since 1991. The Russian government seized on this statement, claiming it was evidence the U.S. was orchestrating a color revolution.

. . . Nuland was the lead U.S. point person for Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, establishing loan guarantees to Ukraine, including a $1 billion loan guarantee in 2014, and the provisions of non-lethal assistance to the Ukrainian military and border guard. Along with Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, she is seen as a leading supporter of defensive weapons delivery to Ukraine. In 2016, Nuland urged Ukraine to start prosecuting corrupt officials: "It's time to start locking up people who have ripped off the Ukrainian population for too long and it is time to eradicate the cancer of corruption". While serving as the Department of State's lead diplomat on the Ukraine crisis, Nuland pushed European allies to take a harder line on Russian expansionism.

Her husband, Robert Kagan, is a prominent neoconservative academic, while her brother-in-law, Frederick Kagan, has been a major contributor at the Institute for the Study of War, a major cheerleader for the US interventionist strategy in Ukraine, which suggests the incestuous nature of neoconservative policymaking overall.

She was a prime mover in the US proxy interventions in Ukraine, which led to the 2014 Donbas annexation followed by the 2022 invasion, and her star in the Biden administration rose until, by reports, Secretary Blinken and the CIA began to become disillusioned with the 2023 counteroffensive that July. At that point, Biden appointed her Acting Deputy Secretary of State following the retirement of Wendy Sherman. According to a story at Gateway Pundit citing reports from Seymour Hersh behind a paywall,

At the same time, “ultra-hawkish” Victoria Nuland was promoted by Biden from Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs to Acting Deputy Secretary of State ”over the heated objections of many in the State Department,” Hersh writes. “She has not been formally nominated as the deputy for fear that her nomination would lead to a hellish fight in the Senate. “

“Tony Blinken, who publicly vowed just a few months ago that there would be no immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, is still in office and, if asked, would certainly dispute any notion of discontent with Zelensky or the administration’s murderous and failing war policy in Ukraine,” Hersh writes. The White House’s “wishful approach to the war, when it comes to realistic talk to the American people, will continue apace,” Hersh said. “But the end is nearing, even if the assessments supplied by Biden to the public are out of a comic strip.”

So with the end nearing, it appears that saner heads among Biden's handlers nominated Kurt Campbell to fill the Acting Deputy spot, which then led to Nuland's decision to retire. But according to the AP story at the top link, she'd already retired once, when Trump was elected in 2016, which suggests she anticipated then that Trump wouldn't favor the Ukraine policies of covert Western intervention with which she'd been identified through much of the Obama administration. Now, with a Trump return in the realm of possibility, it looks like she's made an equivalent decision.

Says something about Trump, doesn't it? This also suggests the Biden administration is quietly backing off its whole Ukraine policy, something that it has been telegraphing since last summer, but without adjusting its legislative priorities. The current "bipartisan" border security bill, now stalled in the House, contains $60 billion in additional Ukraine funding in an apparent attempt to maintain appearances while doing nothing to change the actual military balance.

Nuland's retirement, following a tacit acknowledgement that her appointment as Deputy Secretary would never get Senate confirmation, suggests that the administration has dropped its post-2022 Ukraine policy without annuncing a Plan B. This seems like it's par for the course lately, as there's no plan B for Biden, either.