Shocked by Niger coup, Victoria Nuland appeared “desperate” during Africa tour
When US Acting Deputy Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, traveled to South Africa on July 29, her reputation as a blunt instrument of Washington’s hegemonic interests preceded her.
September 02, 2023 - Information Clearing House - "Gray Zone " ---A veteran South African official detailed meeting with an unprepared and “desperate” Acting Deputy Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, begging for local help rolling back the popular coup in Niger. The recent BRICS conference might give Nuland even more to fret about.
When US Acting Deputy Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, traveled to South Africa on July 29, her reputation as a blunt instrument of Washington’s hegemonic interests preceded her.
According to a veteran South African official who attended meetings with the senior US diplomat in Pretoria, however, Nuland and her team were demonstrably unprepared to grapple with recent developments on the African continent — particularly the military coup that removed Niger’s pro-Western government hours before she launched her multi-stop tour of the region.
“In over 20 years working with the Americans, I have never seen them so desperate,” the official told The Grayzone, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Pretoria was well aware of Nuland’s hawkish reputation, but when she arrived in Pretoria, the official described her as “totally caught off guard” by winds of change engulfing the region. The July putsch that saw a popular military junta come to power in Niger followed military coups in Mali and Burkina Faso that were similarly inspired by mass anti-colonial sentiment.
Though Washington has so far refused to characterize developments in the Nigerien capital of Niamey as a coup, the South African source confirmed that Nuland sought South Africa’s assistance in responding to regional conflicts, including in Niger, where she emphasized that Washington not only held significant financial investments, but also maintained 1,000 of its own troops. For Nuland, the realization that she was negotiating from a position of weakness was likely a rude awakening.
Serving both parties and advancing empire, one regime change op at a time
Throughout the past decade and a half, Victoria Nuland has established herself as one of the most heavy-handed – and effective – agents of Western-directed regime change ops within the State Department. As the wife of the arch-neoconservative strategist, Robert Kagan, who advised both Republican presidential contender, Mitt Romney, and Democrat, Hillary Clinton, Nuland embodied the interventionist consensus that prevailed across both parties in the pre-Trump era. In fact, her first high-level job came under the watch of Vice President Dick Cheney, when he appointed her to serve as his deputy chief of staff.
When Nuland returned to government as a Russia specialist in Obama’s State Department, she spearheaded the covert campaign to destabilize Ukraine, driving the 2014 Maidan Coup that sparked the country’s ensuing civil conflict and, ultimately, a Western proxy war with Russia that rages to this day.
“Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions,” Nuland, then Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, boasted during a December 2013 talk before the US-Ukraine Foundation in Kiev, flanked by a promotional panel for the Chevron corporation.
“We’ve invested over five billion dollars to assist Ukraine in these and other goals,” she continued, articulating Washington’s support for what she described as Ukraine’s “European aspirations.”
Nuland repeated the unintentionally revealing boast during a 2014 interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
Days before her address, she and then-US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, distributed “freedom cookies” to Ukrainians occupying Kiev’s Maidan Square in protest of President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to, in Nuland’s words, “pause on the route to Europe.”
Roughly three months later, the prolonged campaign of riots in the Maidan successfully dislodged Yanukovych’s government, resulting in the installation of a decidedly pro-EU (and openly pro-Nazi) regime in Kiev that would promptly win the title of “most corrupt nation in Europe.” Days before Yanukovych’s ouster, leaked audio revealed that Nuland and Ambassador Pyatt were actively selecting the opposition figures that would assume power in Kiev in the event of Maidan’s success.
“Fuck the EU,” she infamously remarked during the February 7 phone call, an apparent response to European leaders opposed to her government’s destabilization effort in Ukraine.
Nearly a decade since Nuland’s Kiev campaign, however, Washington’s ability to dictate the sovereign policy of foreign states is increasingly limited—particularly in South Africa and the surrounding region.
In Africa, the sun sets on the unipolar world order
The emergence of a new global order was on bold display when heads of state from Brazil, India, China, and South Africa convened for the 15th annual BRICS Presidential Summit in Johannesburg throughout the week of August 21. While Western media highlighted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s absence from the summit as evidence of deep divides within BRICS (Foreign Minster Sergey Lavrov attended the summit in Putin’s place), the bloc ultimately issued a unanimous August 24 declaration that it would extend full membership to Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
“BRICS is a diverse group of nations,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who chaired the summit, tweeted after announcing the results of BRICS’ landmark Johannesburg 2 Declaration before a room packed with international press. “It is an equal partnership of countries that have differing views but a shared vision for a better world.”
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