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.

Who Was Biden's Audience?

As a onetime instructor in rhetoric, I was inevitably brought to look at Joe Biden's State of the Union address from that perspective, in paraticular two of rhetoric's main components:

Audience: The intended readers or listeners of a message.

Purpose: What the writer or speaker wants the message to accomplish, such as influencing an audience’s actions, thoughts or feelings on a subject.

So first, to whom was Joe really speaking? Well, he made some inchoate threats, among others to justices of the US Supreme Court seated right in front of him, but from their facial expressions, it appears they were all offended regardless of their political alignment. He wasn't trying to persuade them of anything. Nor was he trying to persuade the roughly half the country to whom he indirectly referred in his opening passage:

Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today.

In other words, Donald Trump and his supporters are Jeff Davis and the KKK. Nobody on that side is going to come over, and that wasn't Joe's intent. So whom was Joe in fact trying to convince, influence, bring over to his side if not his political oppenents? I think the answer is he was speaking to Democrat doubters, or maybe more accurately, that's whom Joe's handler-speechwriters were trying to influence. Joe himself is emperor, this stuff is all beneath him, but his handlers can at least hand him a script that he'll sorta-kinda follow as it suits him.

Via CNN, this was Democrat conventional wisdom leading up to Thursday night:

A handful of Democratic governors made their way through a gaggle of their colleagues last month to tell President Joe Biden directly what they’ve been stressing behind the scenes: He needs to be fighting harder.

The Democrats told Biden that he needed to show more of the fire that was on display in a closed-door meeting with governors when Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte handed him a letter demanding more action on the southern border. Biden flashed a smile, according to two of the governors standing there.

“State of the Union,” Biden said, teasingly.

. . . Two dozen top Democratic officials and operatives who spoke to CNN said they’re tired of reading that the president is cursing about Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu behind the closed doors of the Oval Office, or hearing reports that he told donors that Vladimir Putin is “a crazy SOB” and that MAGA Republicans are worse than segregationists. They want to see that passion and fire out in public as assurances that the president’s behind-the-scenes demeanor doesn’t match the public perception of the 81-year-old commander-in-chief are wearing thin.

Well, be careful what you wish for. His handlers told him the lizard people want passion and fire. At some level, Joe may have abosrbed this, especially in the context of a potential move to dump him from the ticket, but he likely understands this probably won't happen under any circumstance. Nevertheless, his handlers gave him a script and a schedule, the big speech Thursday, a Pennsylvania rally on Friday, an interview with Jonathan Capehart of MSNBC and something called a national organizing call on Saturday. His response to any perceived urgency was at best passive-aggressive.

On Friday,

Joe Biden’s handlers decided to send him out on the road for a rally on Friday following his disastrous State of the Union Address Thursday night.

. . . The speech obviously took its toll. On Friday night Joe Biden traveled to Pennsylvania for a small rally of supporters. Joe was shot.

. . . Joe Biden: “Pennsylvania, I have a message for you: Send me to Congress.”

. . . Biden then told the crowd that our freedoms came under attack on July the 6th? Huh?

. . . And Joe Biden admitted that almost every world leader has grabbed his arm, pulled him aside, and said, “You can’t win again.”

In the Capehart interview:

He apologized for calling Laken Riley's accused killer "illegal," saying he should not have done that and that illegal aliens "built the country."

. . . On top of that, he was all over the place on Israel, saying he didn't have a "red line" but then saying that Israel can't go too far. He was delusional about how much the left hates him on Israel. He claimed it wasn't a "widely shared sentiment" that he was assisting in genocide by helping the Jewish state.

At the virtual rally the same day:

He was doing a virtual campaign event on Saturday, but even with his handler wife by his side, he was clearly struggling not only to read the teleprompter but to have any kind of coherence and to understand what he was trying to say.

. . . He not only seemed unable to read the words, but then once that threw him, he had a problem with tenses, saying, "We have to start off by vaccinating America," when he should have said past tense. It was clear that he was talking about the past, but he still got the tenses messed up.

Biden was REALLY struggling to read his teleprompter during his virtual "national organizing call" 😳 pic.twitter.com/NbcxnLo0xW

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 10, 2024

He doesn't want to do this, he's humoring his handlers, and his heart isn't in it. On top of the first two events on Saturday, he had a rally in Atlanta last night. I don't see how he can maintain this kind of schedule, but the people behind it are his handlers, who want to keep their jobs, and Dr Jill, who also wants to keep the First Lady gig. The purpose, the second part of rhetoric that I listed above, is for Dr Jill and his handlers at leaat to keep their jobs past the convention and wait for some miracle to pull things out after that. They mean to do this by convincing the lizard people they're at least going through the motions.

The problem is that the more you get Joe out in front of the public, the more you just get Joe, and Joe doesn't have the stamina to keep this up. But the lizard people don't really have any options. The question is how long until Joe balks and goes back to the beach.

Good Sense On Space Aliens

Via ABC News:

A new Pentagon study that examined reported sightings of UFOs over nearly the last century has found no evidence of aliens or extraterrestrial intelligence, a conclusion consistent with past U.S. government efforts to assess the accuracy of claims that have captivated public attention for decades.

. . . The issue received fresh attention last summer when a retired Air Force intelligence officer testified to Congress that the U.S. was concealing a longstanding program that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects. The Pentagon has denied his claims, and said in late 2022 that a new Pentagon office set up to track reports of unidentified flying objects — the same one that released Friday's report — had received “several hundreds” of new reports but had found no evidence so far of alien life.

The authors of Friday's report said the purpose was to apply a rigorous scientific analysis to a subject that has long captured the American public's imagination.

Over the past ten years or so, I've begun to think we can approach this question from the rear. Let's say that in fact, whether they've visited us or not, there are creatures out there with advanced technology that can circumvent the laws of physics with warp drives and such and zip from galaxy to galaxy in hours or days. The inevitable conclusion must be that they're not just technologically advanced, but that they got there via skills that must closely resemble what we would call the scientific method involving math, physics, and reason.

But here we run up against contemporary neo-Aristotelian or neo-Thomist arguments for the existence of God from figures like the philosopher Edward Feser and Bp Robert Barron. Bp Barron asks, for instance, why nature can be interrogated using math, and why it can give us consistent answers. And if we can study nature using reason as a tool, why is there reason? Where does it come from? Neither reason nor math is part of the physical world, they can't have "evolved" as part of a physical process of natural selection.

(I was thrown out of an economist's blog comment section when, after an abstruse mathematical discussion, I asked how all that could have evolved from pond scum. I still say there's no good answer to that question.)

But if the putative space aliens can study and manipulate nature well enough to master warp drives, they must have reason, however advanced, except that reason itself isn't susceptible to physical processes like natural selection. It had to have come from somewhere else. The religious answer is that creatures capable of reason are made in God's image, and reason is something that comes from God. Materialists might answer that this path of inquiry is irrelevant, but it has to acknowledge that reason exists, and it has to acknowledge that it must have a cause.

Thus it's hard to avoid thinking putative space aliens, who must be capable of reason, are creatures made in God's image. A materialist might answer that postulating God as the cause is irrelevant, but he must still acknowledge there must be a cause, which we would have to label something like C, and the reason exercised by space aliens comes from C, whatever it is -- but it's definitely non-material and non-contingent.

But this brings me to the problem one of our archdiocese's vocation directors posed several years ago -- he said that, in a classs discussion with seminarians, he posed the question whether, if a contingent of space aliens were to arrive, we should offer them baptism. My original answer would have been "yes, because they're made in the image of God," but I've thought more on this, and my answer would now be more like, "Well, Satan's Fall was an event that took place before Adam": the serpent and the theological apple were there before Eden.

Satan’s fall from heaven is symbolically described in Isaiah 14:12–14 and Ezekiel 28:12–18. While these two passages are referring specifically to the kings of Babylon and Tyre, we believe they also reference the spiritual power behind those kings, namely, Satan. These passages describe why Satan fell, but they do not say when the fall occurred. Jesus, the eternal Son of God, witnessed Satan’s fall, and He mentions it in Luke 10:18: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” We know that the angels were created before the earth (Job 38:4–7). Satan fell before he tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden (Genesis 3:1–14). Satan’s fall, therefore, must have occurred somewhere after the time the angels were created and before he tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Otherwordly creatures made in the image of God must have had a salvation history equivalent to humans on this planet, so it's hard to say, but the Fall that led to the state of nature we have precedes creation of either people or space aliens.

But if we're bringing up salvation history in that context, reason suggests we might cancel out the zeroes; if there was a single Fall before Adam, there must basically be a single salvation history, and to postulate a first mxtymmni on the planet grrfygrt who ate a vbrt5sw, we're multiplying entities without necessity. Were there two Kpstrycxs who were sacrificed on a cross? We're veering into absurdity.

This strongly suggests to me that there was just one salvation history of one set of creatures in God's image. No duplcates are out there.

But that's just me. On the other hand, the laws of physics are just one part of natural law. Natural law -- partly expressed in the laws of physics, which can be interrogated via reason, the scientific method, and mathematics, has a cause. When we start to reason from the cause, it's hard to avoid the rest.

About As Expected

One big thing I noticed from still photos of last night's speech was the continuing problem of his eyes: he's frequently squinting through a slit-eyed but otherwise expressionless mask, or, if his eyes are open, his pupils are unusually dilated. It's not a good look. The clenched fist in the lower photo is plainly rehearsed, but the pouty mouth contradicts it. Give 'em hell, Harry! He basiclly can't put together a public persona, much less a likeable one.

The big episode that stood out, apparently for most commentators, was the exchange with Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Joe Biden just confused Laken Riley, a college student killed by an illegal immigrant, with USC football coach Lincoln Riley. This just happened. The man’s brain is mush. Incredibly disrespectful. pic.twitter.com/SxYP3k174X

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) March 8, 2024

He then went off script and veered into incoherence:

“Laken [Lincoln] Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal. That’s right,” Biden said. “But how many thousands of people being killed by illegals? To her parents I say, my heart goes out to you having lost children myself.”

“But look, if we change the dynamic at the border, people pay these smugglers,” he added.

Nobody can really figure out what he meant by " how many thousands of people being killed by illegals?" or how, "if we change the dynamic at the border, people pay these smugglers." The takeaway is that he can never be allowed to leave the teleprompter, but he routinely does. This is just the latest example.

And the corollary is that he can't debate. His surprise performance in the 2020 debates with Trump took place four years ago. Then, he was focused enough to recite a canned reply about Hunter's laptop: "These 51 former intelligence officers declared that it was disinformation and phony." I very much doubt he could do that now, much less even get the number right or pronounce "disinformation and phony" without slurring. This will go as it goes, but even his boosters acknowledge that any public appearance carries the risk of gaffes.

The final point for me was his remarks on Ukraine:

If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not.

But 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.

He then wanders into NATO, which is off the subject -- Ukraine isn't in NATO and under current conditions, it's unlikely ever to join, since there would need to be a settlement of the current conflict that would require Russian agreement, when Russia has consistently opposed Ukraine joining NATO. But Biden concludes,

I say this to Congress: we must stand up to Putin. Send me the Bipartisan National Security Bill.

History is watching.

If the United States walks away now, it will put Ukraine at risk.

Biden's own record has been delaying decisions over weapons like F16s and Abrams tanks beyond the point where they could have been effective, but as the story has developed, it appears that a big proportion of US aid has been lost through Ukrainian corruption. Reports I've cited here suggest that Secretary Blinken and the CIA have lost confidence in Ukraine's ability to achieve Zelensky's objectives, which continue to be driving Russia back to pre-2014 borders.

In that context, Victoria Nuland, the architect of current Ukraine policy, announced her retirement earlier this week, suggesting the need for serious re-evaluation -- but Biden seems oblivious. As Tucker Carlson commented,

This is crazy talk. There's no explanation of what the goal is here. There's lie after lie. Ukraine can stop Russia. No it can't. This has gone on for over two years.

Even when I supported Ukraine's fight based on optimistic projections from the retired general talking heads, I was always uncomfortable that there was no plan for an end state, just an assertion that we'd support Ukraine for "as long as it takes" to do whatever it was. This has turned out not to be viable, but even if Secretary Blinken and the CIA have lost confidence, so far, there's no attempt to recalibrate.

Apparently Biden's handlers still hope Murphy's Law doesn't apply.

How Will The Big Guy Do Tonight?

This piece notes,

The speech’s March 7 delivery date is the latest one for a State of the Union address in history, Fox News noted.

This is only the second occasion in history that the president has chosen not to speak in person to a joint session of Congress in January or February. On March 1, 2022, Biden made his first speech to Congress.

This must certaintly reflect discomfort among Joe's handlers over his ability to stand up and read coherently from a teleprompter for an hour or more. Whatever ails him -- and I'm still hesitant about any answer that requires a medical diagnosis -- there's a general consensus that it's gotten worse.

Former aides who worked directly with then-Vice President Joe Biden in the Obama administration have called current fears over his age “a very real issue” — with some alarmed at how he has become more “frail” and “mumbly.”

“If you watch Joe Biden speak, oftentimes he sounds frail and he sounds more frail than he used to, even in 2019 and 2020,” Jon Favreau, the chief speechwriter for Obama when Biden was vice president, said in a recent episode of the “Pod Save America” podcast.

“The voice sounds frail, and he shuffles more because of the arthritis in his back,” Favreau said, adding that the oldest-ever president also appears “mumbly.”

. . . Podcast co-host Jon Lovett, another ex-Obama speechwriter, agreed and argued that the Biden campaign should get the president out in public to demonstrate his mental and physical abilities — even if they are concerned that he will make more gaffes.

“I’m sure that going out there means more missteps … more gaffes that start circulating, but if you don’t view Biden being out there as a net positive, then the argument he shouldn’t be running is right.”

The problem is that he was out in public earlier this week, and there were gaffes.

FULL VIDEO:

REPORTER: "What's your message to Democrats who are concerned about your poll numbers?"

BIDEN: "My poll numbers? The last five polls you guys don't report. I'm winning — five! Five in a row!" pic.twitter.com/Mz5gWQMRSA

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 5, 2024

About ten seconds into the video, he leans over and breathes right in the reporter's face, "I'm winning [huuuuh] Five [huuuuh] Five in a row!" Frankly, if I'd been there, I would have averted my face to avoid the hot, heavy reek of alcohol on his breath, but that's just me. Another reaction to another episode on Tuesday:

Oh my Lord. This man is not well. pic.twitter.com/5UoEW90FD6

— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) March 6, 2024

This post affirms the view I've had ever since the 2020 debates:

Unpopular opinion: Joe typically exceeds expectations at these major speeches and there's no reason to expect anything different this time.

However the only way he does this is by shutting off everything else and getting on a modified sleep (and perhaps medication) cycle.

— Brick Suit (@Brick_Suit) March 5, 2024

They either have to change up his meds or keep him off the sauce for a day or more before a major event, and those chances seem to be less and less frequent. But he was out and about as recently as Tuesday and not looking good. On one hand, Trump has repeatedly said he doesn't think Biden can make it through to the election, although now he's challenging Joe to debates. So far, this isn't a subject the White House likes:

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre sparred with a reporter on Wednesday over questions about whether President Joe Biden will debate GOP front-runner and former President Donald Trump ahead of November’s election.

“Is President Biden going to commit to a debate with President Donald Trump?” Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked.

Jean Pierre responded, “That’s something for the campaign to speak to.”

“Well, we know when the debates are going to be. We know where they are going to be. Is he going to go?” Doocy pressed again.

“You should speak to the campaign,” she said.

But leaving debates aside, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of confidence in Joe's ability to stand up and read coherently for an hour on national TV. Yes, he's done it before, and yes, he's exceeded expectations, but I'm just not sure how much of that he still has in him.

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.

McConnell's Turnaround

I've been noting here that Trump is moving to take over the Republican apparatus in light of his status as presumptive nominee, which he's achieved much earlier than he did in 2016. Not as much has been said, though it should be, about his role in pushing Mitch McConnell to announce his retirement as Senate Republican leader. A month ago, I noted that McConnell had been forced to reverse his support for the Senate border "compromise", citing a source, "McConnell said the political mood in the country has changed since negotiations began months ago."

The change was Mike Johnson's election as Speaker and Trump's surge in the polls.

Two weeks ago, having made it plain to RNC chair Ronna McDaniel that her resignation was expected, he sent the same message to McConnell:

. . . I don’t know that I can work with him,” Trump said during a town hall on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" on Tuesday. “He gave away trillions of dollars that he didn’t have to, trillions of dollars. He made it very easy for the Democrats.”

This wasn't the language of Trump's first term -- he had no real choice but to work with McConnell at the time. All of a sudden, he's sending McConnell an unambiguous message that his time's about up. Something's happened.

[A]ny serious attempt to understand history’s longest-serving Senate leader needs to focus on the age in which he rose to power: those eight years of Republican rule in the early 2000s. . . . More than anything, Mitch McConnell was a Bush Republican.

. . . Few Americans of either party hold much nostalgia about the George W. Bush presidency, and former Rep. Liz Cheney’s headlong charge into obscurity doesn’t quite inspire imitators. Better to draw your authority from a deeper well.

. . . Mitch McConnell won leadership of the Senate GOP in 2006 — just off three years of controlling the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, which they used to tinker on business-friendly reforms, while failing to achieve a lasting effect.

The defining issues of the day were bailouts for Wall Street, the president’s promised amnesty for illegal immigrants, and the increasingly unpopular Iraq War. McConnell supported all three.

. . . His legacy epitomizes the Republican Party of the 2000s: corporate tax cuts, unfettered spending on defense and liberal programs, and the abandonment of any serious legislative efforts on cultural issues, from abortion to marriage to immigration.

It’s fitting that after four decades in the Senate, he hopes funding the war in Ukraine will cement his legacy. It’s priorities like these — and men like him and other Bush Republicans — who opened the door for the new right’s rebellion within the ranks.

Nevertheless, McConnell appears willing to acknowledge circumstances:

Senate leader Mitch McConnell is the highest-ranking Republican in Congress who has yet to endorse Donald Trump's bid to return to the White House — having once called the defeated president "morally responsible" for the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack.

. . . McConnell's political team and Trump's campaign have been in talks over not only a possible endorsement of the former president but a strategy to unite Republicans up and down the party's ticket ahead of the November election, according to a person familiar with the situation and granted anonymity to discuss it.

. . . In the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, key Republicans, including McConnell, signaled unequivocally they were done with Trump.

In a scathing speech during the Senate impeachment trial on charges Trump incited the insurrection at the Capitol, McConnell decried Trump's intemperate language and the "entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe" and "wild myths" about a stolen election.

What's increasingly clear is that Trump now appears to be in a stronger political position, certainly within his own party, than he's ever been, especially during his first term. Exactly why this is needs to be examined, but the failure of consensus Bush-era policies, including neoconservative foreign policy and softness on illegal immigration, is certainly one factor. The controlling metaphor of the "stolen" election is another, which I'll take up again soon.