President Barack Obama has inherited his
neoconservative foreign and national security policy from the
very same people who were instrumental in the Bush-Cheney era
policy of permanent war and regime change. That continuity is
most clearly expressed in the husband-wife duo of Victoria Nuland
and Robert Kagan.
Nuland has been the face of President Obama’s war-mongering
against Russia. She infamously boasted in Dec. 2013 that, since
the end of the Cold War, the United States has spent $5 billion
towards anti-Russian regime-change in Ukraine. Months later, she
was caught on an unsecured phone line with US Ambassador in Kiev
Jeffrey Pyatt, hand-picking the post-Yanukovych regime centered
on “our man Yats,” during a conversation in which she was heard
saying that the Europeans can “f__k off.”
As Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian
Affairs, Nuland has been shuttling back and forth to Kiev and
other European capital fomenting the anti-Russia policies that
now leave the world on the brink of general war.
In October of this year, Nuland was back in Kiev just prior
to the Ukraine parliamentary elections. From Kiev she went to
Berlin, where she gave a blood-curdling speech at the Aspen
Institute Berlin 40th anniversary conference, attacking Russia
and Putin and effectively equating Putin’s actions in Crimea and
eastern Ukraine with the Islamic State’s butchery in Mosul and
with the spread of Ebola in Africa. She insisted “there must be
no sanctions relief until all foreign forces and equipment have
left Ukraine, until Ukrainian sovereignty over its international
border has been restored, and until all of the hostages have been
released.” She went on, “Even as we work on securing Ukraine
and its democratic and European choice, we have to work together,
the U.S. and Germany, across the Trans-Atlantic community to
secure our NATO space and to make sure that every NATO ally knows
that our Article 5 guarantee means what it says and that we will
defend every inch of our space… NATO also craves the strongest
possible Germany, leading our frontline reassurance mission with
soldiers, with planes, with ships on the front eastern lines.”
In late November, Nuland was back in Kiev, joining with Vice
President Joe Biden to pressure Ukraine’s President Poroshenko to
rapidly form a rightwing coalition government. She arrived in
Kiev from Latvia, where she delivered yet another provocative
threat to Russia, grabbing headlines with her declaration that
American soldiers are prepared to “give our lives for the
security of these countries… No one has the right to shoot at
territory of NATO.” She assailed Putin for allegedly violating
the Minsk accords and warned “Russia must make a choice.”
Although she is a career foreign service officer, Nuland was
a fixture in the Bush-Cheney neocon inner circle. Following the
2001 elections, she was transferred to the Ofice of the Vice
President, where she served as his Principal Deputy Foreign
Policy Advisor. In 2005, she was named Bush’s Ambassador to
NATO, a post she held from June 20, 2005 to May 2, 2008. She
arrived at Brussels as the original “Orange Revolution’ was
getting underway in Kiev.
Nuland’s husband, Robert Kagan is in competition with her as
President Obama’s favorite neocon. Kagan was not only a
co-founder of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). He
was also a founder, in 1999, of the American Committee for Peace
in Chechnya, an outfit housed at Freedom House and launched by
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alexander Haig and Steven Solarz, to
cheerlead for the Chechen rebels during the Second Chechen War.
When the Russians defeated the British-backed Chechen insurgency,
the group changed its name to the American Committee for Peace in
the Caucasus and remained active through 2013, promoting a hatred
of Russia that some say contributed to the climate where the FBI
and other U.S. agencies ignored the Russian warnings about the
Boston Marathon bombers.
In his January 2012 State of the Union address, Obama made
reference to a recent Kagan essay in the New Republic on the
“Myth of American Decline.” In interviews with reporters just
hours before that address, he spent ten minutes reviewing the
article, quoting it line by line, and touting its importance,
according to Josh Rogin. Then National Security Advisor Tom
Donilon confirmed to reporters that Obama was deeply impressed by
the Kagan essay and it was virtually mandatory reading within the
Obama national security inner circles.