The State Department announced on Tuesday that Victoria Nuland, the third highest-ranking U.S. diplomat, would step down. Her career in U.S. diplomacy is a case study in Beltway bureaucrats failing upward over their decades in Washington.
Nuland’s “tenure caps three and a half decades of remarkable public service under six Presidents and ten Secretaries of State,” the department said in a press release. “These experiences have armed Toria with an encyclopedic knowledge of a wide range of issues and regions, and an unmatched capacity to wield the full toolkit of American diplomacy to advance our interests and values.”
But Nuland’s tenure also puts her at the center of foreign policy failures for decades. After a brief hiatus from the State Department under President Donald Trump, Nuland returned to the agency when President Joe Biden nominated her as Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s under-secretary of state for political affairs.
After working under Vice President Dick Cheney as a principal deputy foreign policy adviser, Nuland was U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) under President George W. Bush until 2008. She went on to join the Obama administration first as a spokeswoman for the State Department and then as assistant secretary of state of European and Eurasian Affairs until 2017. It was under President Barack Obama that Nuland spearheaded efforts to overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine and install a pro-EU regime, which prompted Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Independent Substack journalist Jordan Schachtel outlined “The Real Victoria
