PRESS RELEASE

Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan: Obama’s Favorite Neo-Cons Scheme for War on Russia

Dec. 5, 2014 (EIRNS)—President Barack Obama has inherited his neo-conservative 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 December 2013 that, since the end of the Cold War, the United States has spent $5 billion toward anti-Russian regime-change in Ukraine. Months later, she was caught on an unsecured phone line with U.S. 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.

This past October, Nuland was back in Kiev just prior to the Ukraine parliamentary elections. From Kiev she traveled to Berlin, where she delivered a blood-curdling speech at the Aspen Institute’s 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 right-wing 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 were 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 neo-conservative inner circle. Following the 2001 elections, she was transferred to the Office 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 under way in Kiev.

Nuland’s husband Robert Kagan is in competition with her as President Obama’s favorite neo-con. 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 that it was virtually mandatory reading within the Obama national security inner circles.