Victoria Nuland, key State Dept. leader, to exit Biden administration

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Source: Washington Post

One of the Biden administration’s toughest Russia hawks and the State Department’s third-ranking official, Victoria Nuland, plans to retire within weeks, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday, leaving a gap in the top ranks of U.S. diplomacy as crises in the Middle East and Ukraine threaten to become broader conflagrations.

Nuland, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, previously served as the department’s top Europe-focused diplomat during the Obama administration and was broadly popular among the agency’s rank and file. Inside a strait-laced bureaucracy that sometimes rewards blandness and caution, she stood out for her unvarnished opinions and tough approach to the Kremlin, which demonized her.

Nuland had served as the department’s No. 2 official, the acting deputy secretary of state, for seven months starting last year following the retirement of Wendy Sherman. But she lost an intra-administration fight to be named permanently to the job to Kurt Campbell, formerly the White House’s top Asia strategist, who was confirmed last month. President Biden’s decision was one of the factors in her departure. The personnel changes leave no women within the senior-most trio of State Department leaders.

Blinken said in a statement Tuesday that Nuland had held “most of the jobs” within the State Department, arming her “with an encyclopedic knowledge of a wide range of issues and regions, and an unmatched capacity to wield the full tool kit of American diplomacy to advance our interests and values.”

Read more: https://wapo.st/3uWxGHs

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Looks like the tinfoil hat crowd is going to have to find someone else to blame.

[Marcus IM]

1. Is this a good thing, or bad?

Can someone help me out?

From 2003 to 2005, Nuland served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, exercising an influential role during the Iraq War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Nuland#Bush_administration

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Pro-Russia trolls spent a lot of effort attacking her on DU from 2014 to 2016

so I tend to think she was doing a decent job, overall.

[blue-wave]

5. She has worked for

Administrations on both sides of the aisle. Overall, I believe she has America's best interests at heart. And the russiapublicans hate her......good enough for me to like her

[yorkster]

3. She of the charming " F*** the EU" phone call in 2014

Last edited Tue Mar 5, 2024, 09:22 PM - Edit history (1)

that was unfortunately picked up by the Russians. Handed out cookies in Maidan Square, spoke blithely in the intercepted phone call about "Klitsch", Vitaly Klitschko
Mayor of Kiev and "Yats", Arseniy Yatsenuk, former PM of Ukraine. Basically a here's who we should put in charge back and forth between Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, at that time U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine.
Not a fan.

[Marcus IM]

4. Yep. She was one of the Cheney gang regarding Iraq.

Got all p/o-ed at the UN vote that denied the UN backing Cheney/Bush's GWOT against a country that had not attacked and had been under excruciating sanctions that killed millions.

Another "hero" to some agreed to said murderous sanctions ...

[Caribbeans]

6. And this

The Chevron Logo is hard to miss...

So is her husband

Robert Kagan is an American neoconservative scholar. He is a critic of U.S. foreign policy and a leading advocate of liberal interventionism.

A co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, he is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kagan has been a foreign policy adviser to U.S. Republican presidential candidates as well as Democratic administrations via the Foreign Affairs Policy Board.
https://web.archive.org/web/20020604003105/http://www.newamericancentury.org/

"liberal interventionism" - Oxymoron #3,412

[Seeking Serenity]

7. (Deleted - Didn't read far enough)