Victoria Nuland, the foreign policy “expert” with nothing to say

Nuland's the name, obfuscation is the game

Over at Politico, Nahal Toosi has an interview with Victoria Nuland, former undersecretary of state for political affairs at the U.S. State Department, and, for several months, acting deputy secretary of state, an interview consisting of Nahal lobbing soft ball questions over the net and Vicky responding with equally soft ball—soft ball when not squishy—returns. Asks Nahal, “Can Ukraine win this war against Russia?” and Nuland replies:

Let’s start with the fact that Putin has already failed in his objective. He wanted to flatten Ukraine. He wanted to ensure that they had no sovereignty, independence, agency, no democratic future — because a democratic Ukraine, a European Ukraine, is a threat to his model for Russia, among other things, and because it’s the first building block for his larger territorial ambitions.

Can Ukraine succeed? Absolutely. Can Ukraine come out of this more sovereign, more economically independent, stronger, more European than it is now? Absolutely. And I think it will. But we’ve got to stay with it. We’ve got to make sure our allies stay with it.

The first paragraph is half-true. Putin didn’t get the easy, big win he clearly was counting on. Nor did he intimidate the West into accepting his power grab. Which was, in fact, a big win for the West. As for Putin’s “larger territorial ambitions”, I find that questionable. Ukraine was part of the Czarist empire for several centuries; whether Putin really wants to claim that any other territory in eastern Europe should be incorporated into Russia is a very different question. Certainly he wishes for significantly increased influence for Russia in eastern Europe, but actual expansion is a very different thing. I think Putin is quite capable of realizing that he doesn’t want to seriously antagonize Germany, which is, in fact, a much more powerful nation than Russia. An angry Germany is the very last thing he would want to see.

As for Nuland’s second paragraph, it’s nonsense, pure and simple. Ukraine is reeling, and everyone knows it. “Russian Forces Push Deeper Into Northern Ukraine,” the New York Times tells us. “With Ukrainian troops outnumbered, exhausted and now in retreat near Kharkiv, many Ukrainians wonder if the war has taken a significant turn for the worse.” Putin didn’t get the easy win he wanted, but he’s going to get enough of a win to allow him to put on a show of strength and triumph with a straight face.

Nuland, on the other hand, is in pure denial, in public, at least, and Toosi doesn’t push her. Instead, she keeps the floaters coming: “But can it [Ukraine] get all its territory back, including Crimea?” she asks. Nuland responds with what one can only call studied vagueness, aka “hypocrisy”:

It can definitely get to a place where it’s strong enough, I believe, and where Putin is stymied enough to go to the negotiating table from a position of strength. It’ll be up to the Ukrainian people what their territorial ambitions should be. But there are certain things that are existential.

Can the Ukrainian people really get Crimea back just because they want it? Of course not. Nuland’s implicit claim—that if Ukraine doesn’t get Crimea back—and everyone knows they won’t—it’s their own decision, and their own “fault”.  And what does “But there are certain things that are existential” mean? That there are some territories currently under Russian control that Ukraine “must” get back? If so, what are they, and what will happen if Ukraine doesn’t get them back?

Toosi doesn’t even bother to attempt a return. Instead, she just sets up another easy lob: “What is the lesson we should learn about foreign policy in general when it comes to the experiences we’ve had in Russia and China?”

We should always try to talk both to leaders and to people, to the extent that we’re allowed. We should always offer an opportunity to work together in common interest.

But if the ideology is inherently expansionist, is inherently illiberal, is inherently trying to change the system that benefits us, we’ve got to build protections and resilience for ourselves, for our friends and allies, and particularly for those neighbors of those countries who are likely to be on the front line of that first push.

But neither Russia nor China has an ideological agenda. Both are pursuing nationalist agendas. Both are, largely, seeking to avenge past humiliations and “return” to an imagined glorious past. Putin has no interest in establishing a workers’ paradise anywhere, even in Russia, and China has no interest in making the East Red. They just want to be the big shots in their neighborhood. Furthermore, they are still the two nations that almost went to war back in 1969 over territory taken from the Chinese Empire by the Russian Empire back in the 19^th century. Henry Kissinger, far from my favorite rave, but not always wrong, said that it is important for the U.S. to have better relations with Russia and China than they have with each other. But Nuland and her ilk are desperately pushing them together, ready to do anything to guarantee a return to the glorious days of the Cold War, when the nuclear holocaust was an actual possibility, so they can still have careers.

Afterwords

The more one listens to Nuland, the more one realizes how stupid she is. She rose to positions of power in the aftermath of the Cold War, when Russia was in ruins and China barely an economic power. As Russia recovers and China expands, the world of American “omnipotence”—in itself an illusion—has vanished. We are, in fact, moving to a multi-power world, with Russia constituting a minor, and China a major, competing voice in world affairs, very likely to be joined by the oil-rich Arab nations of the Middle East.¹ But Nuland and her supposedly “tough minded” friends can’t get over the notion that the whole world still constitutes their own private playground, and they would rather reinvent the Cold War than abandon their absurd—and incredibly dangerous—little fantasy.

Naturally, Nuland says nothing about U.S. culpability in the wholescale collapse of U.S./Russian relations, starting, unfortunately, in the Clinton years and following (even worse) in the ghastly Bush years and continuing in the not so great either Obama years. Back in 2015, William Perry, secretary of defense under Bill Clinton, told The Hill “It’s as much our fault as it is the fault of the Russians, at least originally, and it began when I was secretary”—the big bad decisions of the U.S. being the expansion of NATO to include former members of the Soviet bloc and NATO’s intervention in the Kosovo War in 1999, pushed forward by the U.S. despite the opposition of both China and Russia, an undertaking far more “controversial”—that is to say, morally incoherent—than the “good guys versus bad guys” spin given it by much of the U.S. media at the time.

I have railed against such evils as the American foreign policy establishment, aka “the Blob”, any number of times—and our failures in Eastern Europe/Ukraine in particular—as well as the “military intellectual complex”, of which “the Blob” is a conspicuous subset, along with the MIC’s main source of fuel, military spending.

1. See, for example, this recent article in the Washington Post, How the authoritarian Middle East became the capital of Silicon Valley.