Deep State Spotlight: Victoria Nuland

Why the High Priestess of the Security State Transcends Partisan Politics

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Countless politicians in America today have experienced meteoric ascensions to the upper echelons of government for no real, discernible reason. It seems as though the requirements for becoming a deep state pawn are minimal beyond the prospective candidate's willingness to forsake their constituents to appease an international ruling class.

In this article, we are going to take a good, hard look at Neocon warhawk Victoria Nuland, somebody who’s managed to maintain substantial power regardless of which political party is in control of American politics. Her career serves to remind us that there is a class of deep-state assets that exist beyond the confines of party affiliation and that these consequential individuals who fly under the radar are often far more dangerous than the ones who receive constant partisan criticism.

We are told that we, the people, have control over our government through the sacred act of voting, a practice that should be utilized to hold individuals in our government accountable. If the actions of a public servant are undesirable, if they are either incompetent or have succumbed to corruption, we should take solace in having the ability to remove them from office with our vote.

However, it always seems as though the choices inevitably boil down to the old George Carlin adage, "Do you want the puppet on the left, or the puppet on the right?"

Contrarily, we are also told, or rather sold, that bipartisanship is a thing of the past and that, sadly, in modern times, the two parties are so radically opposed ideologically that no compromise can ever be had—only a constant gridlock keeping anything from changing and any real conversation from being had.

This purported “status quo” is an important thing to remember as we go on.

Another important political bill of goods to consider while reading this post is the idea that the abuses and excesses of the Bush-era "War on Terror" have, according to the liberal media, been acknowledged, assimilated, and will never again be allowed to happen.

We could list countless reasons why these two propositions in bold print above are false, but there is one single shining example we can point to to demonstrate the inaccuracy of those claims: the career of Victoria Nuland.

The Queen of Regime Change

Victoria Nuland has been described by author and journalist Glenn Greenwald as:

“the living, breathing embodiment of everything that is rotted, deceitful and destructive — not in one of the two political parties, but in the DC ruling class.”

Nuland was recently promoted by Joe Biden to the position of “Deputy Secretary of State”, which is the second highest ranking in the State Department behind Anthony Blinken, whose position she may well take if Biden is reelected. (#)

Her recent exploits include a highly embarrassing trip to Niger, where she demanded that Mohamed Bazoum, the prior president who existed under the thumb of the CIA, be reinstated by the same military junta that just removed him in a coup. (#) She also took the opportunity to threaten the armed forces new Chief of Staff, General Moussa Salaou Barmou, with economic consequences should they not reinstate the puppet president.

Her justification for this trip and the various threats made was that the U.S. "stands opposed to coups", and maintains a "resolute commitment to supporting democracy and constitutional order", which is quite rich coming from Nuland, the literal queen of regime change.

Suffice to say her argument was laughed at in Niger’s capital, where the junta unflinchingly rejected Nuland’s demands, including her request to meet with former President Bazoum, who is currently on house arrest.

Of course, the laughter wasn’t only coming from Niger; Nuland’s attempt to feign anger over coups or "attacks on democracy" had the whole world in stitches. After all, this is the same Victoria Nuland who was caught on a recorded and leaked telephone call in 2014 plotting to install a "pro U.S." leader as the next president of Ukraine once the leader who was in power—that is, the democratically elected leader Viktor Yanukovych, whom the deep state disliked—was removed from power.

You can listen to that leaked phone call below:

In the end, the U.S. supported the color revolution that inevitably led to Yanukovych’s ouster. This is something that half of the country is still bitter about, which is likely why recently-polled Ukrainians are so skeptical of NATO and the West. (#)

Her valiant attempt to "save Niger’s democracy" came in the very same week that a U.S. State Department cable emerged proving that State Department officials threatened the Pakistani military with various punishments if it did not remove the country’s democratically-elected populist Prime Minister Imran Kahn. (#) The tale of Imran Kahn is juicy enough to merit its own SubStack post, but I’ll keep the details relevant to the topic at hand.

In a nutshell, the U.S. security state or "military-industrial complex" that Nuland seems to represent was furious over Kahn's announcement of his neutrality on the war in Ukraine and wanted him gone.

AUTHORS NOTE: Everything happening in the world presently comes back to Ukraine, because what that war truly represents is a growing conflict between the Western hegemon [U.S., U.N., NATO, etc] and the BRICS nations, who are offering the world an alternative to western dominance. For more background on this, see my recent SubStack: New Kids on the BLOC.

Within weeks, Kahn would indeed be removed from power. He has been charged and convicted on dubious corruption charges, has been imprisoned, and despite being Pakistan’s most popular politician, he is now banned from running for any political office for a number of years. (#)

It is not a stretch to suggest that they (the political establishment that Nuland represents) are using the very same strategy here against Donald Trump.

So in essence, when Victoria Nuland dramatically feigns outrage on the world stage over other coups and "attacks on democracy," she’s doing so with a domestic audience in mind, particularly the corporate media and their captive viewership, because she knows full well that the rest of the world isn’t buying what she’s selling.

A Career That Transcends Political Affiliation

Victoria Nuland is the purest definition of an establishment diplomat.

Whether you are a fan or not, there is no denying that she is a very powerful and influential force in Washington, and yet, she receives far less journalistic scrutiny than she merits.

Her Wikipedia intro reads as follows:

[Nuland] is an American diplomat currently serving as Acting Deputy Secretary of State. 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.^[3][4] She held the rank of career ambassador, the highest diplomatic rank in the U.S. Foreign Service.^[5] 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^[6] and senior counselor at the Albright Stonebridge Group.^[7] Since July 2023 Nuland has served as acting deputy secretary of state following the retirement of Wendy Sherman.^[8]

One could spend hours picking apart just this intro alone, making the case that Nuland’s career has all the hallmarks of a cabal lackey who has ascended to her lofty station through the hidden paths to power. The Ivy League education (especially Yale), the affiliation with the nefarious Brookings Institute, and a job title as Permanent Representative to NATO—you don’t walk this path without being coopted and groomed by the powers that be, particularly the powers behind the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC).

Victoria Nuland’s entry into American politics occurred during the Clinton Administration, where she first served as chief of staff to deputy secretary of state (and fellow Yale-ee) Strobe Talbott before moving on to serve as "deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs", putting her in charge of U.S. policy toward Russia.

In the Bush Jr. (Yale) Administration, she would become the top advisor to deep politician Dick Cheney (Yale), who also enjoyed intimately close ties to the MICC. Nuland guided Cheney to advocate for and implement the invasion of Iraq and was instrumental in turning NATO into what it is today.

Her focus returned to Russia during the Obama administration under Hillary Clinton’s State Department and eventually shifted to running Ukraine under John Kerry (Yale).

Nuland did enjoy her first break from warmongering during the administration of Donald Trump, who essentially defanged her in a sense, at least temporarily. But, lo and behold, she is back in action under the Biden administration, working on Ukraine and stoking tensions with Russia, as has been her MO for many years.

With just a cursory glance, it’s obvious that she is just as fanatical about this war in Ukraine as anyone in Washington, and if we dig a little deeper, we see that she is actually part of the reason that this crisis even exists in the first place. So the chances that she will suddenly become dovish on the issue are slim to none.

Another marvel that she has accomplished is maintaining bipartisan relevance despite being a neocon extremist in a political era billed as having moved past the hawkishness of Bush-era endless-war policies. She remains steadfastly devoted to the policies that caused excessive devastation in the Middle East, advocating endless wars and effecting regime change in the name of "democracy." Yet her reputation and influence in DC endure despite the posturing from the liberal establishment that neoconservative thought was now disgraced and relegated to the junk heap of history.

Remember, Nuland played a key role in the policies that modern Washington and the corporate media supposedly regard as the most strategically misguided and morally unjust of any policy in the last 30 years, and that is the U.S. invasion of Iraq. She wasn’t simply a complicit member of the Bush Administration; she was glued to the hip of Dick Cheney and was his key advisor, specifically when it came to the Iraq war.

So to recap, you can vote for whatever political party you want, and Victoria Nuland will likely still be in power, with the exception of anti-establishment types like Donald Trump and perhaps RFK Jr., who has repeatedly and relentlessly hammered on U.S. involvement in Ukraine.

Reinvigorating NATO

NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was formed in the wake of the Second World War to create a "collective security system" where its independent member states agreed to defend each other against attacks by third parties. During the Cold War, NATO operated as a check on the threat posed by the Soviet Union.

But in the late nineties leading into the new millennium, a lot of Europeans were suggesting that NATO didn’t really have viability anymore given that, for decades, the whole purpose of that organization was to defend against a country that no longer existed. Most of you will recall that this is exactly what Donald Trump said in 2016, which is one of many reasons the U.S. Security State became so hostile towards him.

While Nuland was working as an advisor to Dick Cheney, she was also ambassador to NATO for the Bush Administration. At the time, NATO was being pushed by the hawks in Washington as the key to American power into the future.

Even back then, there was considerable talk about expanding NATO right up to the Russian border, which would include Ukraine. It was at this time that the current CIA director, Bill Burns, wrote a letter to Condoleezza Rice, who was very much in favor of a hawkish position towards Russia, warning her that beyond Vladimir Putin, everybody in Russia, including the liberal opposition, saw expansion into Ukraine as a red line. He also warned, prophetically, that if they pursued this course, there would almost certainly be war in the Donbas and Crimea. (#)

The political class in Washington knew full well that this expansion would provoke the very war we are now witnessing in Eastern Europe, yet they followed this course anyway. What we see today is all part of a chain of events that were initiated by the Bush-era NATO push.

In 2005, Radio Free Europe ran a piece signaling that NATO would be the MICC’s key to keeping the war machine humming along into the future.

A better-equipped, better-funded, and more flexible NATO is one of the central foreign policy goals of U.S. President George W. Bush during his second term.

In the words of the new U.S. ambassador at NATO, Victoria Nuland, the U.S. wants the alliance “retooled for the 21st century.”

The United States has in recent months indicated it wants the NATO’s next summit to discuss transforming the alliance…

…She said the United States has already begun talks with allies on how it would like to see NATO change. She said a key U.S. wish is to turn NATO into the world’s “multilateral security trainer of first resort.”

“We think NATO has huge untapped potential as a security trainer," Nuland said. "The United States [and] many other allies are committing a lot of resources nationally to meet the training needs of lots of our partners. The U.S. and France, for example, now are working with Lebanon to strengthen its security services. We believe that NATO can do more of this collectively, as we have started to do in our training center at Rustamiya for Iraqis. How much better is it to train others to manage their own security than to have to send troops in a crisis?”

Perhaps the most important takeaway from this article came when Nuland proclaimed:

"If the divisive debate over Iraq taught us one thing, it is that NATO must be the place where we talk about all the issues affecting our future -- the Middle East, Iraq, North Korea, China, Iran, just to name a few."

To add context here, you might recall that at the time, U.S. neoconservatives were fuming over the difficulties of getting the invasion of Iraq approved by the UN or the UN Security Council. Of course, China and Russia weren’t going along with the narrative, and in fact, France and Germany were adamantly opposed to the invasion as well.

So Victoria Nuland, in all of her benevolent bipartisan wisdom, essentially proclaimed that they (the MICC) have to leave the antiquated UN behind and use NATO as the vehicle to initiate the wars they want to fight, bypassing the rules that have been in place for decades that kept the Security State in some kind of check.

NATO was used to bypass the UN Security Council, which might have otherwise kept millions of casualties from happening on both sides of the various endless wars in the Middle East. In this light, you could say that Victoria Nuland is responsible for more death and devastation than Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Vladimir Putin combined.

Beyond the Bush era warmongering, we saw Nuland using NATO in the Obama administration to go after Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

Nuland was working for none other than Hillary Clinton when it came time to enact the regime change war in Libya. Hillary Clinton and fellow deep state operative Samantha Power took the lead in advocating for this war, and they did it through NATO, because of course it would have been nigh impossible to get the UN to agree to a completely unprovoked war in Libya.

How do Neocons like Nuland Remain Relevant?

Victoria Nuland, or “toria” as she is referred to by her fellow deep state operatives on either side of the political aisle, has long been surrounded by powerful individuals and evocative communicators.

Her father, Sherwin B. Nuland, was an American surgeon and writer who taught bioethics, history of medicine, and medicine at the Yale School of Medicine; so from birth, she was around prestigious Ivy League types.

Her spouse is “neoconservative scholar” Robert Kagan (another Yale graduate). Kagan is co-founder with William Kristol (a schmendrick who deserves his own spotlight) of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) a neo-conservative think tank with strong ties to the American Enterprise Institute. PNAC's policy document, "Rebuilding America's Defenses", openly advocates total global military domination.

Many PNAC members held highest-level positions in the George W. Bush administration. All Yale boys together.

Kagan was also one of the foremost boosters for the war in Iraq and, like his wife, is no stranger to ruffling European feathers. In the early 2000s, he penned an essay regarding what he called a “growing split” between the U.S. and Europe on foreign policy. The context you might be missing here is that France and Germany were clear from day 1 that the Iraq invasion would be a disaster; that it would create instability in the region, it would strengthen Iran, and it would create a power vacuum that inevitably led to the formation of ISIS. Unfortunately for France and Germany, all of these outcomes, as bad as they sound, were exactly what the neocons were hoping for. (#)

Both Robert Kagan and William Kristol have just as much blood on their hands as Nuland does. Their brainchild, Project for the New American Century , was the think tank in the mid-nineties that essentially laid the groundwork for the brand of neoconservatism that has haunted the globe for the last few decades. PNAC pressured then-President Bill Clinton relentlessly to adopt a more aggressive posture in Iraq; these men all but salivated over the thought of war with Iraq and Iran, and would plant the seeds well before 9/11 gave them the excuse they so desperately wanted.

It’s all very comparable to January 6th, if you think about it.

The liberal establishment had wanted to usher in a domestic war on MAGA Republicans well before J6—they just needed an excuse to do it. There are only so many plays in the deep state playbook; they just reuse them constantly.

In closing I’d like to address how these hawkish deep state assets stay relevant after Obama and the progressives saved America from bad bush-era neoconservatives.

There is an unholy matrimony that perhaps has always existed behind the scenes, but has become much more observable in the last half decade, and that is the marriage between the establishment left and the aforementioned neoconservatives. The war in Ukraine and the bipartisan support for our continued involvement in it is a shining example of what I’m talking about, but there was something else that drove these unlikely bedfellows together: their shared hatred of Donald John Trump.

We’re supposed to think that the Neocons have all gone off into the sunset, with heads hung in shame, but they remain just as powerful as ever and they enjoy public approval as a result of their anti-Trump rhetoric. The hate propaganda deployed against Trump was so powerful that liberals now sympathize with the very same war hawks they once loathed.

It is truly remarkable.

The neocons have good reason to hate Trump, he ran on a platform that condemned the endless war policies of previous administrations. Trumps administration marks the only time in history when these forces weren’t in power.

The positive spin to all of this is that as time goes on the public is becoming more aware, and pundits are finding ways to bridge the divide between anti-establishment or MAGA conservatives, and those people on the left who still remember the post 9/11 world.

The unabashed corruption that takes place between establishment politicians on both sides of the aisle has never been more obvious, and Victoria Nuland’s career serves as a way we can find at least SOME common ground with disillusioned liberals.

Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.

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