(Victoria Nuland announced her retirement last week as the Assistant Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Her temporary relief is the fellow to her right, ambassador John Bass).
This is a morning for messaging, and the stakes are high. There was some news last week we did not appreciate at the time, but it may mean we are on a variable path in the direction of national obliteration.
You may have heard some recent insights shared about Ms.Victoria Nuland’s career at the State Department. In her thirty-plus years service, she has demonstrated a serious animosity to an old foe. That would be Mr. Vladimir Putin. Recent estimates of the nuclear inventory he controls is around 6,000 atomic devices. They are left over from the Cold War arsenal. We have several as well, along with the ballistic missiles to make their use a terrifying possibility when dealing with Russian resurgence.
We appear to have traveled down a road containing the ppnational horror. The Chairman decided to relocate from The Farm in placid Culpeper back to the bustle of urban Arlington. Up north in the Commonwealth there is much better access to medical services and recovery capabilities. We want him to stay healthy, and decided to accompany him to the new corporate HQ on the Left Side of the big brown River we used to cross every day. Or, better said, for the decade we were not laboring in the Pentagon.
OK, OK, we know that is a little hysterical in reaction, but many of us lived under the shadow of the Soviet Union’s nuclear capability. We have been retired from government service for over two decades, which gives us some insight into the beginning of a Foggy Bottom career path. Ms Victoria Nuland was just hitting her stride, career wise, and would have been one of the functionaries from State who attended the occasional joint meetings between State and Defense in trying to sort out the mechanics of a new world at something called “peace.”
The Secretary of State, the cabinet official responsible for America’s foreign policy, is a man named Antony Blinken. We have had a lot of fun with his name and rhyming games as you are probably aware. Our favorite was “Winken, Blinken and Nod,” which allegedly described his performance in gatherings on the world stage. Last week he informed us that Torie Nuland was departing her final position at Foggy Bottom. She had been the number three official on that side of the River. Her official title had been Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. In her portfolio was Europe, a somewhat ungainly item recently ravaged by conflict.
Blinken said Torie had told him she was done, like it was her decision. We don’t know about that, since it seems more an opportunity for the Administration to try to set the war in Ukraine as something that would no result in nuclear horror. The Secretary had some good words about her career, noting that she “personified the President’s commitment to put diplomacy back at the center of our foreign policy,” while revitalizing America’s leadership in the world.”
We have always been in favor of that, so her departure comes at a time when atomic tensions have not been this high since John Kennedy’s Administration. Her time at State does not go back quite that far. She served thirty-five years or so, which puts her arrival at State around the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse. That was a little before we cashed in our retirement, so we are “colleagues” of a sort. But we were done with conflicts with the Soviets and frankly relieved that it was finally over.
Apparently it wasn’t, and Victoria “Toria” Nuland was part of it. Mr. Putin was a KGB officer back then, and appears to have crafted a career in reestablishing Russia’s power. He recently has been talking about the use of nuclear weapons as a sort of logical development in the reassertion of Mother Russia’s influence across two or three continents.
Toria served both ends of America’s veering policy community. She held most of the logical jobs as she rose in Foggy Bottom’s soggy infrastructure. Those included time as a Political and economic officer. In addition she had time as Spokesperson, Chief of Staff, Deputy and Assistant Secretary. Special Envoy and Ambassador. If she is someone you have only occasionally been aware of, we should note that regardless of which party she served, she was a committed opponent to Mr. Putin.
So, that is one way to look at her remarkable career. The other point to recall is that she was directly responsible for the adversarial policies that have accompanied Mr. Putin’s rise in the Kremlin.
So, the above account has been sworn to by the Senior Diplomat. There is another case to be made on Toria’s retirement. Her drive and energy have helped bring us to the brink of a war that could turn us into ashes after melting down Socotra HQ. Whichever of these versions is closer to the truth is open to some question, as are all government utterances these days. Having experienced some of them, we suspect that there is a matter of “convenience” in these events. It would enable a significant change in policy regarding Ukraine simply by telling Toria to head home and cease being a catalyst for change..
There are several stories about endemic corruption in Kiev. Russia’s seizure of lovely Crimea in 2014 . Some of them involve diversion of foreign aid to direct payments to the people who orchestrated it. We have n idea if that is true, but we are confident that Ms Nuland knows where those bodies are buried. Since we no longer are sure about what constitutes “lies” or “truth” these days, we can only presume the current version of the story would enable all parties to policy to leave the State stage quietly and collect their pensions. Like all of us!
What is interesting about this retirement is what Mr. Blinken called Toria’s “truly exceptional is the fierce passion she brings to fighting for what she believes in most: freedom, democracy, human rights, and America’s enduring capacity to inspire and promote those values around the world. If those sound like vaguely Reaganesque or Bush policies, we would be paddling in the same ship of state. She also may have had a hand in the aggressive response to the most recent Russian invasion.
Frankly, we don’t know. We have a natural bias about Russian policy since we brandished our own nuclear capability against theirs in more straightforward diplomatic times. Press reporting suggests our former comrades up in Langley- on this side of the Potomac- considered the notoriously hawkish Nuland was a liability at a moment NATO and Russia are inching closer to direct nuclear-armed confrontation.
We have heard some stories about a new branch of government not mentioned in the founding documents. In this one, Langley, the Pentagon and the Folks at Fort Meade determined that Ms Nuland had her own agenda which may have had some conflicts with theirs.
You may recall Senate Majority Leader Schumer mentioned the capabilities of the three-letter agencies to work independent from their Commander in Chief. In 2017, he made remarks following the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. In a disinterred clip, the top Senate Democrat warned about the Intelligence Community and their ability to enact vengeance on those who oppose it.
“Let me tell you,” he said gravely to MSNBC’s resident Progressive Rachel Maddow, “if you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” That was from the days of the Russian Collusion controversy that marred the first two years of what is now called only as “the Previous Administration.”
In response, Maddow furrowed her brow at the camera and posed a rhetorical question for her audience. “What do you think the intelligence community will do if they were motivated to?”
The best guess from former officials around town has been interesting. A retired Langley officer named Ray McGovern put it this way: “My best guess here is that the CIA and the Defense Department and the NSA got this message around saying, ‘look, Victoria’s got her own agenda here,’”
He continued his speculation- not shared here- that “‘The president doesn’t really want to strike ammo depots in Russia or knock down the [Crimean] Bridge. So we got to rein her in, I guess it’s time for her to go to early retirement.” Other sources have advanced the theory that Toria is “a staunch anti-Putinist who fervently wanted to continue to utilize Ukraine as a platform in which to continue to weaken and/or slight Russia on the global stage — and perhaps even up the ante in that conflict with her support of sending ballistic missiles into Ukraine.”
We have a pal who does a daily summary of events in the conflict, and our reading of his tea leaves is that Ukraine is not winning. We are opposed to nuclear war, just for the record, and remind our Gentle Readers that the views of independent commentators thrown into this bubbling cauldron is that the Ukrainian side is losing.
So, Assistant Secretary Nuland and her policies may be in for dismissal, though if she goes quietly there will be no repercussions. We will see about that. We have a bunch of weapons of mass destruction left over as well. Our position is that we prefer peace, and wish Toria a pleasant and speedy retirement. She may recall the embarrassing departure from Afghanistan. We also recall the unease we felt on our entry into that conflict after watching the Russian retreat after their decade-long war there.
We will see how this one goes. But like we said, as aging warriors, we prefer the peace pipe. With two wars in progress and another inching toward conflict with China over Taiwan, you can see we are not going to intimate anything that is personally unpleasant. We would prefer to reduce the chances of an atomic holocaust that would turn both sides of the big River into vaguely green-brown glass.
Mr. Socotra may have been wrong in his estimate, thinking that it would be useful for someone to be left alive to negotiate a surrender. We are not certain anyone wishes to talk just yet.
Victoria Nuland’s temporary replacement is career diplomat John Bass, who served as Ambassador in Kabul. You can see we have our misgivings about that track record, you know? He is currently serving as Undersecretary of State for Management. He oversaw the construction of a billion dollar Embassy in Kabul as well as Mr. Biden’s botched withdrawal. Accordingly, it is somewhat ironic that he’ll also oversee Ukraine policy at this critical juncture where Kiev is clearly against the ropes.
The stakes are pretty high or this one, too.
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com