The State Department announced on Tuesday that Victoria Nuland, the third highest-ranking U.S. diplomat, would step down. Her career in U.S. diplomacy is a case study in Beltway bureaucrats failing upward over their decades in Washington.
Nuland’s “tenure caps three and a half decades of remarkable public service under six Presidents and ten Secretaries of State,” the department said in a press release. “These experiences have armed Toria with an encyclopedic knowledge of a wide range of issues and regions, and an unmatched capacity to wield the full toolkit of American diplomacy to advance our interests and values.”
But Nuland’s tenure also puts her at the center of foreign policy failures for decades. After a brief hiatus from the State Department under President Donald Trump, Nuland returned to the agency when President Joe Biden nominated her as Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s under-secretary of state for political affairs.
After working under Vice President Dick Cheney as a principal deputy foreign policy adviser, Nuland was U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) under President George W. Bush until 2008. She went on to join the Obama administration first as a spokeswoman for the State Department and then as assistant secretary of state of European and Eurasian Affairs until 2017. It was under President Barack Obama that Nuland spearheaded efforts to overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine and install a pro-EU regime, which prompted Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Independent Substack journalist Jordan Schachtel outlined “The Real Victoria Nuland” following the announcement of her resignation.
“From 2013 to 2015 Nuland’s portfolio was dominated by Eastern Europe and Russia,” Schachtel wrote. “She was the American point person for the infamous ‘Maidan uprising’ in Ukraine, which resulted in the ouster of the country’s elected president. Critics of the Nuland-led campaign have labeled her activities in Ukraine as a successful coup effort in a foreign country.”
Under President Biden, “Nuland appeared to telegraph the future bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline, declaring that it will ‘not move forward’ if Russia invades Ukraine,” Schachtel added.
The Nord Stream pipeline transported natural gas from Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea. In September 2022, a series of explosions disrupted the flow of Russian gas into central Europe months after the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. Swedish and Danish authorities closed their investigations into the pipeline explosions last month, concluding the disruptions were an act of deliberate “sabotage.” The New York Times reported last month that “intelligence agencies came to a general agreement” that the attack was conducted by “pro-Ukraine forces.” In his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
[READ: It’s Not Crazy To Think Biden Sabotaged Nord Stream To Deepen US Involvement In The Ukraine War]
“Nuland has since acted to disrupt peace talks and advance the maximalist position of fighting the Ukraine-Russia war to the very last Ukrainian, ensuring that there is more reasons for Congress to allocate untold billions to the war effort,” Schachtel reported.
Suffice it to say the world is far more dangerous than when Victoria Nuland entered the scene. Russia has forged closer relationships with China, Iran, and North Korea, threatening an outbreak of a third global conflict while the American dollar inches closer to losing its hegemony.
If fomenting World War III is a metric of success (and in Washington, it is), then Nuland will be on her way to a high-paid professorship at an American university, if not a fellowship at a Beltway think tank. Nuland’s career is a testament to career officials failing upward in the elite class of D.C. bureaucrats.
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