Victoria Nuland resigns: what can this mean for U.S. policy on Ukraine?

In this business of geopolitical analysis, there is no room for stubborn insistence on consistency of message or false pride.  Indeed, when the inputs change in a cardinal manner, I have no hesitation whatsoever to turn away from what I said yesterday.

The latest news is that Victoria Nuland has resigned from the State Department where her official rank was number 3 but where she was very influential in the most damaging way for formulation of U.S. policy on the country’s idée fixe of the past decade:  Russia, Russia, Russia. Let us remember that Nuland was the guiding spirit of the Maidan who distributed donuts on Independence Square in Kiev to the idealistic youths who sought the overthrow of the legitimately elected sitting president Yanukovich.   As we know from leaked telephone conversations, in February 2014, Nuland conspired with U.S. ambassador in Kiev Geoffrey Pyatt for selection of the new government in Kiev from among Opposition leaders following the U.S. backed coup d’etat.

Though out of office during the Trump years, she stormed back following Biden’s inauguration. There is no question that as an intellectual force she was head and shoulders over her nominal boss, Antony Blinken, and that she stood behind every escalation in U.S. and Allied participation in the proxy war being fought in Ukraine. The idea of sending long-range cruise missiles to Kiev in order to strike far into the Russian heartland, now being debated both in the USA and in Germany, was something Nuland was promoting tooth and nail nearly a year ago.

For these reasons, her departure at this very moment prompts me to revise by 180 degrees  (no, Annalena, not by 360 degrees) what I said yesterday about the possible U.S. role in the Bundeswehr plot to embarrass Scholz over his reluctance to ship Germany’s Taurus missiles to Ukraine. 

In point of fact, one reader contacted me yesterday to suggest that the very same facts that I laid out as pointing to U.S. efforts to replace the cautious chancellor Scholz by the all-in Russia-hater Pistorius could just as easily point to U.S. efforts to get rid of Pistorius and his war crazy generals lest Europe and the world head straight to nuclear confrontation with Russia.

We still have to wait and see whether Scholz will fire Pistorious or at least fire the rogue generals.  But the departure of Nuland at just this minute gives us reason to hope that the Biden administration is drawing back from its reckless adventurism in Ukraine.

A touching note and possibly a straw in the wind is the last paragraph in the Associated Press article on the departure of Nuland which tells us: “Nuland will be replaced temporarily as under secretary by another career diplomat, John Bass, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, who oversaw the U.S. withdrawal from the country.”  Indeed, let us hope that Bass will also be the fellow who oversees the U.S. withdrawal from Ukraine.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024