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3/20/2015, “A Family Business of Perpetual War:" “Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan have a great mom-and-pop business going. From the State Department, she generates wars and from op-ed pages he demands Congress buy more weapons....Grateful military contractors kick in money to think tanks where other Kagans work….She has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats. This extraordinary husband-and-wife duo makes quite a one-two punch for the Military-Industrial Complex, an inside-outside team that creates the need for more military spending, applies political pressure to ensure higher appropriations, and...thankful weapons manufacturers lavish grants on like-minded hawkish Washington think tanks.”
During the infamous call on which Nuland and Pyatt appeared to be plotting to replace or undermine elected Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, Nuland expressed her not-so-diplomatic disgust
with the European Union for favoring former heavyweight boxer and
austerity champ Vitali Klitschko to take over as prime minister, instead of the U.S. first choice, Artseniy Yatsenyuk, who indeed took power after Yanukovych was ousted about three weeks later.
The “Fuck the EU” call went viral, as an embarrassed State Department, never denying the call’s authenticity, blamed the Russians for tapping the phone, much as the NSA has tapped the phones of European allies.
Despite outrage from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, no one fired Nuland, but her potty mouth upstaged the more serious story: the U.S. plot to overthrow Ukraine’s elected government — and America’s responsibility for a civil war that has killed at least 13,000 people and left
Ukraine the poorest country in Europe.
In the process, Nuland, her husband Robert Kagan — co-founder of The Project for a New American Century — and their neocon cronies succeeded in sending U.S.-Russian relations into a dangerous downward spiral from which they have yet to recover.
Nuland accomplished this from a relatively junior position as
assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. How
much more trouble could she stir up as the No. 3 official at Biden’s
State Department? We’ll find out soon enough, if the Senate confirms her nomination.
Joe Biden should have learned from Barack Obama’s mistakes that appointments like this matter. In his first term, Obama allowed his hawkish Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Republican Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and military and CIA leaders held over from the Bush administration to ensure that endless war trumped his message of hope and change.
Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, ended up presiding over indefinite detentions without charges or trials at Guantánamo Bay, an escalation of drone strikes that killed innocent civilians, a deepening of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, a self-reinforcing cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism,
and disastrous new wars in Libya and Syria.
With [Mrs] Clinton out and new personnel in top spots in his second term, Obama began to take charge of his own foreign policy. He started working directly with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to resolve crises in Syria and other hotspots. Putin helped avert an escalation of the war in Syria in September 2013 by negotiating the removal and destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, and helped Obama negotiate an interim agreement with Iran that led to the JCPOA nuclear deal.
But the neocons were apoplectic that they failed to convince Obama to order a massive bombing campaign and escalate his covert proxy war in Syria and at the receding prospect of a war with Iran. Fearing their control of U.S. foreign policy was slipping,
the neocons launched a campaign
to brand Obama as “weak” on foreign policy
and remind him of their power.
With editorial help from Nuland, Kagan penned a 2014 New Republic article entitled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,“proclaiming that “there is no democratic superpower waiting in the wings to save the world if this democratic superpower falters.” Kagan called for an even more aggressive foreign policy to exorcise American fears of a multipolar world it can no longer dominate.
Obama invited Kagan to a private lunch at the White House, and the neocons’ muscle-flexing
pressured him to scale back his diplomacy with Russia, even as he quietly pushed ahead on Iran.
The neocons’ coup de grace against Obama’s better angels came with Nuland’s
2014 coup in debt-ridden Ukraine, a strategic candidate for NATO membership
right on Russia’s border.
When Ukrainian President Yanukovych spurned a U.S.-backed trade agreement with the European Union in favor of a $15 billion bailout from Russia,
the State Department threw a tantrum.
Hell hath no fury like a superpower scorned.
The EU trade agreement was to open Ukraine’s economy to European imports, but without a reciprocal opening of EU markets to Ukraine, it was a lopsided deal Yanukovich could not accept. The deal was approved by the post-coup government,
and has only added to Ukraine’s economic woes.
The muscle for Nuland’s $5 billion coup was Oleh Tyahnybok’s
and the shadowy new Right Sektor militia.
During her leaked phone call, Nuland referred to Tyahnybok as one of the “big three” opposition leaders on the outside who could help the U.S.-backed Prime Minister Yatsenyuk on the inside. This is the same Tyahnybok who once delivered a speech applauding Ukrainians for
fighting Jews and “other scum” during World War II.
After protests in Kyiv’s Maidan Square turned into battles with police in February 2014, Yanukovych and the Western-backed opposition signed an agreement brokered by France, Germany and Poland to form a national unity government and hold new elections by the end of the year.
But that was not good enough for the neo-Nazis and extreme right-wing forces the U.S. had helped to unleash. A violent mob led by the Right Sektor militia marched on and invaded the parliament building, a scene no longer difficult for Americans to imagine. Yanukovych and his members of parliament fled for their lives.
Facing the loss of its most vital strategic naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea,
Russia accepted the overwhelming result (a 97% majority, with an 83% turnout) of a referendum in which Crimea voted to leave [the US controlled colony of] Ukraine and rejoin Russia,
of which it had been a part from 1783 to 1954.
The majority Russian-speaking provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine, triggering a bloody civil war between U.S.-backed and Russian-backed forces that still rages in 2021.
U.S.-Russian relations have never recovered, even as the two nations’ nuclear arsenals still pose the greatest single threat to our existence. Whatever Americans believe about the civil war in Ukraine…we must not allow the neocons and the military-industrial complex they serve to deter Biden from conducting vital diplomacy with Russia to steer us off a suicidal path toward nuclear war.
Nuland and the neocons, however, remain committed to an ever-more debilitating and dangerous Cold War with Russia and China to justify a militarist foreign policy and record Pentagon budgets. In a July 2020 Foreign Affairs article entitled “Pinning Down Putin,"
Nuland absurdly claimed that
Russia presents a greater threat
than the Soviet Union posed during the old Cold War.
Nuland’s narrative rests on an utterly mythical and ahistorical narrative of Russian aggression and U.S. good intentions. She pretends that Russia’s military budget, which is one-tenth of America’s, is evidence of “Russian confrontation and militarization”
and calls on the U.S. and its allies to counter Russia by “maintaining robust defense budgets, continuing to modernize U.S. and allied nuclear weapons systems, and deploying new conventional missiles and missile defenses to protect against Russia’s new weapons systems.”
Nuland also wants to confront Russia with an aggressive NATO. Since her days
as U.S. ambassador to NATO during President George W. Bush’s second term,
she has been a supporter of NATO’s expansion all the way up to Russia’s border.
She calls for
We have pored over a map of Europe,
but we can’t find a country called NATO with any borders at all.
Nuland sees Russia’s commitment to defending itself after successive 20th-century Western invasions as an intolerable obstacle to NATO’s expansionist ambitions.
Nuland’s militaristic worldview represents exactly the folly the U.S. has been pursuing since the 1990s under the influence of the neocons and “liberal interventionists,” which has resulted in a systematic underinvestment in the American people while escalating tensions with Russia, China, Iran and other countries.
As Obama learned too late, the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time can, with a shove in the wrong direction, unleash years of intractable violence, chaos and international discord. Victoria Nuland would be a ticking time-bomb in Biden’s State Department,waiting to sabotage his better angels much as she undermined Obama’s second-term diplomacy.”
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