“Swamp Monster” Victoria Nuland Didn’t Resign. She Was Pushed Out.

By Blake Fleetwood, columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

This job was the dream of a lifetime, the culmination of a 30-year career. One more step up, and she would be secretary of state. So close.

But she lost her dream job because her unyielding pro-war politics were bringing the US and Russia to the brink of potential nuclear Armageddon and a possible World War III. 

With Victoria Nuland’s Russophobia in place, there could be no negotiations or de-escalations with the Russians in the bloody Ukraine proxy war.

In her 32-year diplomatic career, Nuland was single-handedly responsible for some of the worst crimes in American history, resulting in millions of innocent deaths around the world. Her preventive foreign interventions, coups, proxy wars, aggressions, and anti-Russia provocations put America, Ukraine, and Europe in a very dangerous place. 

Her aggressive empire-building wars – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine – have been universally disastrous and massively expensive. Even worse: they have been completely counterproductive. America’s credibility as a liberal, compassionate nation has been severely damaged. 

Nuland is unapologetic about her failed empire-building disasters. In a recent interview with Politico, she said that the disasters happened because the US didn’t spend enough money or send enough troops. She also bluntly admitted that much of the billions spent on these foreign adventures actually ended up in the coffers of US defense contractors.

With editorial help from Nuland, her husband Robert Kagan penned a 2014 New Republic article entitled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire.” In it, Kagan called for an even more aggressive policy of foreign interventions to exorcise American fears of a multipolar world it can no longer dominate. 

But, of course, the present debacle in the Ukraine has proved to be Nuland’s greatest folly, a war which Noam Chomsky called “absurdly stupid.”

Of course, Putin’s invasion was villainous. 

But Nuland’s decade-long anti-Russian provocations created a volatile situation of falling dominos. Starting in 2014, Nuland helped establish 12 CIA bases and reportedly spent $20 billion ($22.67 billion today) in secret regime-change operations with the open support of the Obama administration. Some of this classified spending is allegedly now under investigation by US authorities. 

Nuland openly admitted that the US spent $5 billion in encouraging the anti-government demonstrations during the Maidan Square protests in 2014 that toppled Ukraine’s democratically elected President Yanukovych, who was about to finalize a trade deal with Russia. Two hundred people died during the CIA-funded protests.

All these machinations were graphically revealed when a tape recording of a conversation between Nuland and the US ambassador became public. Nuland was recorded saying “fuck the EU” for its less aggressive approach, which did not endear her to our European allies. “Biden is on board,” Nuland is heard commenting. On the same recording, she plotted about who the US would support to be the next president of Ukraine.

In addition to the billions spent in toppling the democratically elected government, Nuland was famously photographed handing out cookies to the anti-government protesters.

Many foreign-policy analysts considered her the Queen of Ukraine after she engineered the ouster of the elected president and installed a US puppet government. In fact, there are reports that the Kyiv city council is about to name a street after her. Nuland. 

Nuland’s empire-building happened under five presidents of both parties and 11 secretaries of state. Her relentless quest to expand the American Empire with regime change, false flag operations, CIA subterfuge, and outright interventions speaks to the remarkable power of the neoconservative military-industrial complex, which has captured the State Department, the military, and most of Washington’s legislators. In the last few decades, the US has wasted more than $7 trillion on forever wars.

One of Nuland’s first election interference actions occurred 28 years ago, when Bill Clinton was president. Nuland worked at the US embassy in Moscow in 1996. Russian President Boris Yeltsin had just survived an attempted coup.

In 1996, Clinton and Nuland (the Russian expert) directed a massive campaign to ensure the reelection of the very unpopular Yeltsin, who was then favored by only 6% of Russian voters. The International Monetary Fund, under pressure from Clinton and Nuland, granted a massive $10.2 billion loan (equivalent to $18 billion today) to Yeltsin’s government to pay long-overdue back wages and pensions to tens of millions of Russians – with checks conveniently arriving shortly before the election. Clinton also sent over his own American political advisers to work with Nuland to direct Yeltsin’s campaign with dirty tricks and negative ads. Yeltsin won. Ironically, in 1999, Clinton (with Nuland’s advice) supported Vladimir Putin to be Yeltsin’s successor. Nuland was learning the fine points of regime change and election interference. 

From Clinton, Nuland moved over to Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Secretary of State John Kerry, helping to arrange for preemptive wars in Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, which resulted in the slaughter of millions of innocent civilians, killed and wounded thousands of American soldiers, and squandered billions of dollars which were sadly needed to combat America’s growing domestic problems. 

Nuland, who has been called “The Queen of Chicken Hawks,” built a career of intervention and empire-building that backfired and has led to hatred and distrust of the US around the globe. 

Nuland’s departure as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs has been applauded by both the left and the right.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald called her a “Swamp Monster” and referred to Nuland’s career as “bipartisan, blood-stained, and ghoulish.” In a tagline to his System Update podcast on Rumble, Greenwald writes, “Victoria Nuland, Neocon Queen of Bipartisan DC Warmongering, Ends Her Bloodthirsty Reign.”

Steve Bannon said, "Preserve your documents. Lawyer up because we are coming for you.” 

“Don’t count her out,” opined Human Events editor Jack Posobiec. “She’s not fleeing the grift. She’s just fleeing Biden’s sinking ship.”

That said, she may be back. Swamp Monsters don’t die easily.

Blake Fleetwood was a reporter for The New York Times and has written for The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, The New York Daily News, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Village Voice, The Atlantic, and Washington Monthly on a number of issues. Read more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blake-fleetwood