Back To Victoria Nuland

I noted in last Wednesday's post that Victoria Nuland's retirement from the State Department must represent some change, but so far not one that's been announced, in US policy over the Ukraine war, since she had been both the chief advocate and often an implementer of US support for a pro-Western alignment there since betore the 2014 Maidan Revolution, which was engineered by the CIA with her collaboration. This story at Zero Hedge, while it contains speculation, offers some possible insight into the potential policy change:

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern in a new interview has speculated over the reasons behind Victoria Nuland stepping down from her high-ranking position as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the number three top official in the State Department.

. . . While there have been rumors that maybe she could be in poor or declining health, McGovern has told Russia's Sputnik that the notoriously hawkish Nuland was a liability at a moment NATO and Russia are inching closer to direct nuclear-armed confrontation.

"My best guess here is that the CIA and the Defense Department and the NSA got this message around saying, 'look, Victoria's got her own agenda here,’" said McGovern.

The former CIA official continued to speculate: "‘The president doesn't really want to strike these ammo depots in Russia or knock down the [Crimean] Bridge. So we got to rein her in, I guess it's time for her to go to early retirement.’"

The piece also notes an alternate theory put forth by Matthew Crosston, a professor of national security at Maryland's Bowie State University, who thinks Nuland had simply come to recognize that Ukraine was losing, and she didn't want to be tied to the failed policy. The piece goes on,

[B]oth McGovern and Crosston would agree that with Nuland as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (in this capacity she basically ran all of US foreign policy in Europe), ceasefire talks between Kiev and Moscow remained an extremely distant prospect or even an impossibility.

"One thing is certain: as long as Nuland remained in that chair, there was literally no chance such talk could even be theorized. Now it can," Crosston concluded.

But isn't it curious that Biden in his State of the Union address hinted at no such change? Here's what he said:

. . . Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons it needs to defend itself. That is all Ukraine is asking. They are not asking for American soldiers.

In fact, there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine. And I am determined to keep it that way.

But now assistance for Ukraine is being blocked by those who want us to walk away from our leadership in the world.

What's actually happening is that some Republicans are beginning to ask if the continued commitment to Ukraine is cost-effective, especially if it's draining US supplies of ammunition and there's no exit plan, so out of general dissatisfaction with military policy vis-a-vis border policy, they've stalled Ukraine aid in the House. But indications seem to be that both the State Department and the intelligence establishment -- which is to say the deep state -- is also losing confidence in the Biden-Nuland policy.

Glenn Greenwald summarizes Nuland's career:

I spoke to @robbysoave and @briebriejoy today about the singular monstrousness of Victoria Nuland and her bipartisan, blood-stained, ghoulish career:https://t.co/pyHXEIn1iv

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 6, 2024

At about 5:30:

A consensus emerged among liberals then [2005] that neocons were the single worst faction inAmerican political life, Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz and all these people that brought in Guantanimo and torture and the invasion of Iraq and, you know, the attempt to move that to Iran, and she was not only counseling that, but she was also the UN Ambasdsador to NATO that led the way with Condoleeza Rice under Bush and trying to expand NATO, you know, up to the Russian border to include Ukraine, which was again probably the initial act that led us to where we are in Ukraine, so if I had said, you know, 15 or 10 years ago that Victoria Nuland who again is married into the Kagan family, probably the largest and most important dynastic neocon family in the United States, the brother, the father, her husband -- if you had said, Nikki, Victoria Nuland was this sort of symbol of American evil, every liberal would applaud you, because she was a well-known, recognized neocon. . . now, 15 years later, you won't see a single mainstream Democrat or liberal agreeing with you that Victoria Nuland is that, and that's because, like most neocons, she has aligned herself with the Democratic Party. . .

One question nobody has asked is why, once Nuland was well established in the post-2014 Ukraine political realignment, this was also the Biden father-son team's heyday in collecting payments from Ukraine players there. It's hard not to suspect there was, and continues to be, some level of coordination between Nuland's maneuvering and the Biden family interests, which may explain the current Biden as-long-as-it-takes policy.

But Biden seems actually less and less to be the one in charge, and Ukraine policy seems to be changing on its own without Biden's input.