On September 13, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) announced that it was appointing Victoria Nuland to its Board of Directors, effective immediately.
Covert Geopolitics has called Nuland the “queen of chicken hawks” and “Lady Macbeth of perpetual war,” as she has “promoted a foreign policy of intervention, coups, proxy wars, aggression, and occupation…in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.”
Nuland served as Acting Deputy Secretary of State from July 2023 to February 2024, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2021 to 2024, and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from 2013 to 2017, as well as U.S. Ambassador to NATO from 2005 to 2008 and as an adviser to Dick Cheney during the Iraq conflict.
Her husband Robert Kagan co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1998 around a demand for “regime change” in Iraq, a project that was accomplished in 2003 with President George W. Bush’s invasion.
Disturbingly, Nuland expressed glee at one of the greatest acts of environmental terrorism in history, the bombing and destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, telling Congress that “I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now…a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
In a February 2024 interview with CNN, advocating for congressional approval of $95.34 billion for Ukraine, Nuland remarked: “We have to remember that the bulk of this money is going right back into the U.S., to make those weapons.” Basically, she was announcing her support for war profiteering.
Founded in the 1980s to do overtly what the CIA had done for decades covertly, the NED is a non-profit corporation funded by Congress that specializes in mobilizing activist networks and advancing disinformation in countries targeted by the United States for regime change.
The neo-conservativism of the NED has been evident in its appointment to its board of leading war hawks like Henry Kissinger, Frank Carlucci (Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary), Zbigniew Brzezinski, current CIA Director William Burns, Francis Fukuyama and Paul Wolfowitz.
Nuland fits very well within this crowd, particularly as a key architect of one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in modern history—the Ukraine War—which NED and the neo-conservative establishment has fervently championed.
In July 2015, journalist Robert Parry wrote an article entitled “The Ukraine Mess That Nuland Made.” It detailed Nuland’s role as a “mastermind” behind the 2014 “Maidan” coup that precipitated a war resulting in more than a million deaths and that has placed the world on the precipice of World War III.
The Maidan coup unseated the democratically elected pro-Russian government of President Viktor Yanukovych and brought in a pro-U.S. regime which waged war on eastern Ukraine after it pushed for autonomy following the imposition of draconian language laws and other efforts to eviscerate the people’s Russian culture.
Nuland pushed for the coup within the State Department and helped hand-pick the post-coup leaders who would sow the seeds of the destruction of their own nation by picking a fight with the Russians they could never win.
These same leaders allowed foreign corporations to take control over their economy and imposed a neo-liberal economic program that resulted in the slashing of social services, attacks on organized labor, and declining living standards compounded egregiously now by the war.
Parry wrote that, “to sell this latest neocon-driven ‘regime change’ to the American people, the ugliness of the coup-makers had to be systematically airbrushed, particularly the key role of neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalists from the Right Sektor.”
Nuland was herself present at the scene of the Maidan Square protests with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, and famously handed out cookies. A leaked conversation with Pyatt featured her badmouthing the EU and choosing Arseniy Yatsenyuk as Ukraine’s first post-coup leader, even though he had almost zero support among the Ukrainian people.
“Yats is the guy,” Nuland declared, sounding very much like a pro-consul from a past age of colonialism in which the native viewpoint did not count. All while she professed to be leading a glorious “democratic” revolution.
Parry pointed out that Nuland’s conduct in Ukraine resembled her husband Robert’s and other neo-cons’ conduct with respect to Iraq.
In both cases, a complete disregard for local political considerations and history led to the unleashing of ethnic conflict, with the U.S. supporting elements in Ukraine that had fought the Russians in collaboration with the Nazis during World War II.
Nuland’s appointment to the NED will help to ensure that the mistakes/atrocities of the past are continuously repeated.
The NED engages in a form of social engineering that helps trigger uprisings and revolutions in many countries that often lead to civil wars.
In many cases, it pits young people seduced by the allure of consumerism and an idealized view of Western democracy with older, more established generations committed to preserving their country’s sovereignty from Western neo-colonialism and to securing a stronger social safety net.
As one example, the NED and Nuland were very active in triggering a youth revolt in Belarus against the socialist regime of Alexander Lukashenko, which had been praised even by the World Bank for resisting neo-liberal economic policies that fueled vast inequality levels in much of Western and Eastern Europe.[1]
In a statement announcing Nuland’s appointment to NED’s Board, NED Director Damon Wilson stated that, “as NED partners face increasing threats from autocrats around the world, Ambassador Nuland’s experiences will help the Endowment sharpen its approach to supporting democracy advocates. Her life-long commitment to democracy will be a valuable addition to the NED Board at this consequential moment for our mission.”
Nuland, however, was never committed to democracy in Ukraine but to imposing leaders who served U.S. imperial interests. The same is true for Iraq, Libya and Syria, where U.S. military and covert operations that she championed empowered Islamic fundamentalists and warlords.
Significantly, Nuland began her State Department career in the 1990s working on Russia-related issues under Strobe Talbott, the Clinton administration’s point man on Russia, who oversaw a U.S. campaign to support Russian Prime Minister Boris Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996.
Time magazine proudly proclaimed, “Yanks to the Rescue: The Secret Story of How American Advisers Helped Yeltsin Win.”
The bottom line is that Nuland has never championed real democracy, which must develop organically in any society.
She is a great fit for the NED because of her brazenly colonialist worldview and support for social engineering projects in the service of the U.S. Empire, which have made a mess of many countries around the world.
In 2018-2019, the NED spent almost three million dollars in Belarus according to its website and had at least 34 active projects. Much of the funding was directed toward training youth activists in political organizing, strengthening NGOs and financing independent anti-Lukashenko media, which played a pivotal role in trying to stir up opposition and protests against him. The NED had also set out to publicize human rights abuses as a means of undermining Lukashenko’s legitimacy. Nuland for her part met with Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya who led the failed color revolution against Lukashenko. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
For further details about her, please see this article by Rick Sterling from 2021.
The title is “Why Victoria Nuland Is Dangerous and Should Not Be Confirmed”
https://original.antiwar.com/rick_sterling/2021/02/10/why-victoria-nuland-is-dangerous-and-should-no