Bonus – Humor from Blinken: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is not a particularly funny person, but in an incredibly flowery send-off for Nuland he inserted several unintended zingers that were difficult to get through with a straight face. Of Nuland, for example, he effused, “she has personified President Biden’s commitment to put diplomacy back at the center of our foreign policy,” which is hard to swallow without a guffaw considering that the Administration is literally at war with most of the globe. War on Yemen, proxy war on Russia, fighting in Iraq, airstrikes in Syria, drone strikes in Somalia, saber-rattling toward China. Threats to Belarus and most of the rest of the global south.
https://ronpaulinstitute.org/did-toria-jump-or-was-she-pushed
(This was first published as an update exclusive for Ron Paul Institute subscribers. Subscribe for free here.)
The sudden retirement announcement by State Department Deputy Secretary for Political Affairs Victoria “Toria” Nuland earlier this week left many US foreign policy watchers – your author included – trying to read the tea leaves to see what was actually going on.
There are plenty of theories and speculations as to what motivated someone like Nuland – whose entire professional career seemed to hinge on getting this proxy war on Russia started – to suddenly pack it in and pull out of the game, mid-inning. Especially as the Biden Administration and its supporters still largely claim (in public) that Ukraine can “win” and in fact is winning (with just one more cash infusion from Washington). Who would walk away when your life’s work was just coming to fruition? Does it make any sense?
There are many theories. Let’s look at some of them.
First theory: Cashing in. A sober Nuland sees the failure of “Project Ukraine” and wants out before it gets too hot in the APC. The neocons are very good at one thing: distancing themselves from their worst disasters in the most timely of manners. Example: all neocons circa 2006: “I never really believed Iraq had WMDs!”
In fact neocon Senator Marco Rubio just this week said that he’d always known Ukraine couldn’t win, but, “tried not talk about this publicly because I thought it undermined the leverage that Ukraine had.”
So at age 62 with a second Biden term looking very iffy, is Nuland looking to cash in for all her years in “government service” before her brand is tarnished by another Afghanistan-style collapse in Ukraine? There surely are plenty of think tank sinecures available for the likes of Nuland. The money that most Americans believe goes to protect us in the yearly National Defense Authorization bills, in fact to a grotesque degree goes to the Beltway “think tanks” promoting war – and is thereby used to promote…more military spending!
My old friend Chuck Spinney’s “self-licking ice cream cone.”
Then there are the universities, which bathe luxuriously in government money and in turn return the favor by slavishly supporting the national security state – that money tide that raises all boats.
Be seeing you
MCViewPoint 