Victoria Nuland

Victoria Nuland in 2021

Victoria Jane Nuland (born July 1, 1961) also known as Toria Nulandis an American diplomat currently serving as under secretary of state for political affairs. Nuland, a former member of the foreign service, served as the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs at the United States Department of State from 2013 to 2017 and U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO from 2005 to 2008. She held the rank of career ambassador, the highest diplomatic rank in the United States Foreign Service. She is the former CEO of the Center for a New American Security, (CNAS), serving from January 2018 until early 2019, and is also the Brady-Johnson Distinguished Practitioner in Grand Strategy at Yale University, and a member of the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. She served as a nonresident fellow in the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution and senior counselor at the Albright Stonebridge Group.

Quotes

• Few nations elicit such fatalism among American policymakers and analysts as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. For some, the country is an irredeemable pariah state, responsive only to harsh punishment and containment. Others see a wronged and resurgent great power that deserves more accommodation. Perspectives vary by the day, the issue, and the political party. Across the board, however, resignation has set in about the state of U.S.-Russian relations, and Americans have lost confidence in their own ability to change the game. But today’s Russia is neither monolithic nor immutable.
  • Pinning Down Putin, How a Confident America Should Deal With Russia By Victoria Nuland, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2020

• I would say it starts with showing up, which is what we’re doing today – coming to Africa, engaging here with our partners both in government and the NGO sector and in the business sector to talk about what more we can do together. But it is also, as I said at the – during the opening, about embedding our Africa strategy in our larger strategy to strengthen the democracies, strengthen our partnerships, strengthen our multilateral approach to common challenges, whether they are health challenges, economic challenges, or security challenges, and to do them together; and also, to encourage and support African-led efforts to solve African problems, again, whether they’re in the security realm or whether they’re working to integrate economies, build infrastructure, recover from COVID, all of those kinds of things. So that’s how – those are the – that’s the main difference. I think you will likely see President Biden invite African leaders to convene sometime in 2022. You’ll see a lot more travel. I am the appetizer – let’s put it that way – and hopefully folk who are even – who are more senior than I am, we are laying the table here.
  • As quoted Regarding Her Travel to South Africa, Botswana, Tanzania, and Niger, U.S. Department of State Press Briefing, August 5, 2021

• While our diplomats have returned from Kabul, as you know and we’ve officially suspended our presence there, our ongoing intensive diplomatic work with partners and allies in Afghanistan continues. First of all, as you know, it is this department and the Secretary’s top priority to continue to evacuate any American citizen who wishes to leave Afghanistan. We believe there are between 100 and 200 Americans who remain in Afghanistan who may have some interest in leaving, and the Secretary is leading our diplomatic efforts to ensure safe passage for them and for any Afghan partners and foreign nationals who still want to leave Afghanistan. And as the President said, there is no deadline on the effort to ensure safe passage for those who want it. Within this building, the Afghan task force continues to work 24/7 on evacuation efforts. And since August of – August 14th, the task force has been engaging American citizens in Afghanistan. They’ve made more than 55,000 phone calls, sent more than 33,000 emails, and this outreach continues today and will in the days and weeks ahead as long as there is a need.
  • As quoted: State Department Press Briefing Afghanistan Evacuation – September 1, 2021

• I think that's most important is that we are listening to the Ukrainians as this war changes. Russia, as you know, is now planning to mass its forces from the east and come in heavy that way, which changes what they need. They need our -- heavy artillery. They need long range rocket systems. They need anti-ship missiles of the kind that they were able to use on the Russian ship in the Black Sea, the Moskva, their flagship, just a couple of days ago. And that's what we and our allies are assembling and continuing to get into Ukraine as these Ukrainians fight so bravely for their freedom, but also for the principle of freedom and sovereignty for all of us....
  What I would say is, as you -- as you made clear at the top of your story, the United States has provided more than $3 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine. Our allies have matched that. So, double that amount over the course of this year. We were also the first to warn that Russia would invade Ukraine, starting as far back as late October, November. I think even the Ukrainians couldn't imagine the horror of what is happening now. But I think it's a direct result, not only of their bravery and their courage and their skill on the battlefield, but the fact that we've been working with them and training them, as have other NATO allies, for some eight years that they are able to stand up to the onslaught of the Russian army.
  • As quoted, Victoria Nuland is Interviewed about Aiding Ukraine, CNN, April 20, 2022

• Because I had seen our best efforts to forestall a violent choice by Putin fail in ’14, I was more prepared than many... Everybody at the beginning was relatively skeptical — with the exception of the Canadians and the U.K., ...that he would actually take this step. The fact that we found the [Russian war] plans when we did — and they were as robust as they were... gave us the time that we needed to prepare. A lot of us were veterans of 2014, ’15 and ’16, and felt that if we had done more faster then to help Ukraine, we might have had a better result... The day of was this horrible, awful realization that he had not bluffed... We were preparing for many scenarios in which the Ukrainians essentially had to get Kyiv back...We didn’t know which scenario we were going to be looking at... There were many things we were expecting that actually didn’t happen... None of us expected the Ukrainians to be able to withstand as strongly as they did in those first four or five days... All of a sudden, we realized that Ukraine — and particularly the government, the leadership, the capital — might be able to resist... we began to become more optimistic that if we helped Ukraine as much as we possibly could, that the country might survive.
  • Something Was Badly Wrong’: When Washington Realized Russia Was Actually Invading Ukraine. Politico, (February 24, 2023)

• It has been an enormous interagency effort, but it’s also taught a whole new generation of American diplomats what it takes to rally global support in defense of democracy, what it feels like to be part of an endeavor that is absolutely existential for the world that they are going to live in going forward.
  • Something Was Badly Wrong’: When Washington Realized Russia Was Actually Invading Ukraine. Politico, (February 24, 2023)

• Ukraine has biological research facilities, which in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of, so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.
  • "Tucker: The Pentagon is lying about bio labs in Ukraine", Fox News (9 March 2022)

About

• The latest Foreign Affairs(magazine) features a piece by former Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, “Pinning Down Putin: How a Confidant America Should Deal With Russia.” A protege of former secretaries of state Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton, she is a notorious “liberal interventionist,”... perhaps best known for aiding the neofascist putsch in Ukraine in February 2014 that produced regime change, a revolt in Ukraine’s east, the Russian seizure of Crimea, and Hunter Biden getting offered a seat on the board of Ukraine’s largest gas company making $50,000 a month for three years....
  Nuland’s notion of “robust defense” is really one of world domination. She has not concluded from the U.S. experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere that all U.S. military action produces is mass hatred of the oppressor and general failure. She praises in her article Trump’s decision to retain U.S. forces illegally in Syria to prevent the Syrians from using their own oil. She’s still not given up on Hillary’s cherished dream of regime change, a la Libya. You’d think with her record on intervention she’d be shunned by thinking people. But no, Nuland’s on MSNBC as we speak, treated deferentially. Is she running for a cabinet post? Nuland’s Republican husband declined to endorse Trump in 2016, labeling him a “fascist” (as has Albright) and voting for Hillary. They both perhaps see futures in a Biden administration.
  • Gary Leupp, “Pinning Down Putin” Biden, the Democrats and the Next War, CounterPunch, July 9, 2020

• Most Americans have never heard of her, because the U.S. corporate media's foreign policy coverage is a wasteland. Most Americans have no idea that President-elect Biden's pick for deputy secretary of state for political affairs is stuck in the quicksand of 1950s U.S.-Russia Cold War politics and dreams of continued NATO expansion, an arms race on steroids and further encirclement of Russia.
  Nor do they know that from 2003 to 2005, during the hostile U.S. military occupation of Iraq, Nuland was a foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney, the Darth Vader of the Bush administration. You can bet, however, that the people of Ukraine have heard of neocon Nuland. Many have even heard the leaked four-minute audio of her saying "F--- the EU" during a February 2014 phone call with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt.
  • Who is Victoria Nuland? A really bad idea as a key player in Biden's foreign policy team, by Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies, Marcy Winograd, Salon], (19 January 2021)

• The "F--- 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.
  • Who is Victoria Nuland? A really bad idea as a key player in Biden's foreign policy team, by Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies, Marcy Winograd, Salon], (19 January 2021)

• More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, "Like you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea."
  • Seymour Hersh, How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline, February 8, 2023