Victoria Nuland Resigns: I Wonder What She Meant By That

Similar questions are being asked around Washington about the sudden resignation of Victoria Nuland as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

Nuland is the wife of “eminent” neocon “intellectual” and “strategist Robert Kagan. As my friend, former State Department diplomat James Carden has rightly pointed out, the immediate reasons for her sudden departure are clear: She had risen through her neocon mafiosi network and by her bull-in-a-china-shop personality to be No 3 at the State Department. But she had craved the No 2 job: And it went instead to the shrewd and always underrated veteran diplomat and consummate Washington operator and insider Kurt Campbell.

Skeptics maintain Campbell will be no different in his actual policies from Nuland. I do not agree with this assessment.

Nuland’s Raging Bull incompetence and bungling was in a class of its own. In 2014 she memorably told the major nations of the European Union to “Fuck Off!” in what she thought was a private confidential phone call (it wasn’t). Ironically enough because they were advocating less warmongering policies on Ukraine than she was.

Since Nuland, while assistant secretary of state for European affairs and therefore responsible for maintaining excellent diplomatic relations with America’s oldest and closest allies in the post 1945 world, used the obscenity so freely, she should not be protected from the record of history and accurate journalism in being quoted for doing so.

And it should be noted that neither President Barack Obama nor then-Secretary of State John Kerry raised any of their well-manicured fingernails to fire Nuland, or even publicly admonish her, for this unbelievable expression of open foul-mouthed contempt towards so many democratic nations and close allies. President Dwight D. Eisenhower would have consigned her to licking latrines clean with her tongue. Talleyrand and Metternich would have been incredulous.

The following year, no doubt emboldened by getting away with writing off Germany, France, Italy and Spain with a single four-letter word, Nuland roamed the streets of Kiev while the democratic, fairly elected, lawful constitutional government of Ukraine was being toppled in a violent revolution spearheaded by neo-Nazis supported by President Obama.

To show how much the United States Government approved of this bloody event in which many innocent Ukrainian policemen were burned alive in Odessa, Nuland handed out sweet biscuits on the streets of Kiev to the revolutionaries, thus earning the sobriquet “the cookie lady of Kiev.”

Two weeks ago, Nuland was still up to the same insane and inept, infernal childish tricks. She solemnly addressed a meeting of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the supposed College of Cardinals for putting any ultra-Orthodox Seal of Approval on US foreign policy about the disastrous war in Ukraine and expressed her conviction that the tide had turned Ukraine’s way and that it’s next military offensive this coming spring would Turn the Tide and roll back or even break Russia which she still – at least publicly – maintained was now at the point of collapse.

For icing on the cake, Nuland then capped this extraordinary performance in lies, mendacity and clinically insane fantasy with a touching story about how a little girl in Ukraine had given her a homemade doll, heartwarmingly called “Patriot,” and displayed it her audience of brain-castrated sheep (Washington think-tankers and journalists) who were suitably moved to the brink of tears.

Not once did Nuland mention the half a million Ukrainian young men and boys whom she, more than any other policy maker in the Biden administration had driven to their deaths in the frontal, unprepared, ill-armed, ammunition-starved and obvious frontal offensive against the Russian army last year.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, like his old predecessor and example Secretary of State Warren Christopher whom I covered so closely 30 years ago, is utterly inept at every policy he touches.

Like Christopher he hides behind a mask of fake kindness and olde worlde courtesy but approves policies of mayhem, slaughter, bombing, aggression and genocide that slaughter untold millions of innocents around the world.

However, Blinken has also emulated Christopher’s passive-aggressive, anal-cunning skills at bureaucratic infighting within inept administrations and inside the State Department. 

Blinken at least, well knew that if Nuland, who has all the tact, subtlety and diplomacy of the Incredible Hulk, got the deputy secretary of state job she craved, he would be next in her line of fire. So he dealt with her, the same way Christopher got rid of his own too-openly-ambitious-and-obvious-for-his-own-good assistant secretary of state for European affairs Richard Holbrooke.

Unlike the appalling Nuland, Holbrooke succeeded in ending a major war in Europe, the civil bloodbaths that followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. But his success of course ensured the undying hatred of his boss Secretary of State Christopher: For Christopher could only boast of his own uselessness in failing to raise any of his well-manicured fingernails to prevent the easily avoidable slaughter of a million Tutsis at the hands of their neighboring Hutus in Rwanda in the extraordinary genocide of 1994.

Dick Holbrooke’s genuine success meant He Had to Go.

As my late friend, former National Intelligence Council  Vice Chairman Herbert Meyer advised me nearly 40 years ago, being catastrophically wrong in Washington will never hurt your prospects for advancement. But being right too soon on a major policy will kill your career prospects stone dead every time. 

Herb predicted in detail the disintegration of the Soviet Union – and how and why it would happen – nearly a decade in advance. Therefore he was banished from within the Beltway for the rest of his life. Decades later, in milder but still clear form, I experienced the same treatment for the same reasons.

Now Nuland has gone – at least for the moment. But, obvious, hard-charging and blindly appallingly reckless as she is, even she finally saw the Writing on the Wall. After all, she visited Kiev only a couple of weeks ago to micromanage – as she has done obsessively to all the postage-stamp little semi-states of the Balkans on their internal policies – the crowning of a new army commander for Ukraine, the Soviet Army-trained General Oleksandr Syrskyi.

Syrskyi may indeed be slightly less catastrophic than Nuland’s previous favorite, fellow bull-brained hard-charger General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Napoleon behind the slaughter of a generation of young Ukrainians in the lands of the Dnieper only last summer. But I doubt it.

What is clear is that her words pledging eternal undying support to the last drop of blood – theirs not hers – to the Ukrainian people in Kiev a few weeks ago are now obviously exposed as another lie.

For suddenly Nuland is gone. And now even Syrskyi and his boss, the former comedian no longer getting any laughs, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy must realize they have been hung out to dry.

Total catastrophe – so easily avoidable for so long – for the Ukrainian dictatorship and the people they have enslaved – is coming to Zelenskyy and his regime – and it is coming soon.

However, Nuland, like all her ilk, is good at two things – maneuvering within the Washington Den of Rats and conning the brainless Washington press corps who even now unanimously and piously believe Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John Kennedy all by his own little self. (Just ask any of them). And the Great Stateswoman will surely be back.

When the final catastrophe sweeps Ukraine over the coming summer and fall, Nuland will be in the forefront of critics, eagerly stabbing her longtime bosses Biden, Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in the back assuring all her credulous media interlocutors, sitting open-mouthed, eager and obedient at her feet how she warned them in vain and would have single-handedly prevented it. 

Then, when Joe Biden’s next figurehead successor has been safely installed in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, back she will come – secretary of state at last; welcomed in the “thoughtful columns” of the Washington Post and the New York Times and pontificating on MSNBC, PBS NewsHour and the rest of the Usual Suspects on her plans to bring instant wisdom, peace, happiness, prosperity, compassion, free trade, open borders and democracy to the world.

If the thermonuclear warheads have not fallen on her – and the rest of us – first.