Meet PJ Crowley’s Replacement

Victoria "Toria" Nuland. Click to go to FP.com

FP/The Cable’s Josh Rogin reports:

The Cable has confirmed that career Foreign Service officer Victoria “Toria” Nuland will soon be named as the State Department’s top spokesperson, the latest in a string of promotions for senior career officers in Foggy Bottom.

Nuland’s job will somewhat different than her predecessor P.J. Crowley, who resigned after making off-message comments criticizing the Defense Department’s treatment of alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning. Unlike Crowley, Nuland will not be dual-hatted as assistant secretary of State for Public Affairs. Former National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer will be officially named to that job soon, a State Department official confirmed.

Nuland is currently the Special Envoy for the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. From her bio on the State Department website:

Ambassador Victoria Nuland was named Special Envoy for Conventional Armed Forces in Europe in February 2010. She previously served on the faculty of the National War College (2008-2009).

She was the 18th United States Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from 2005-2008. As NATO Ambassador, she focused heavily on strengthening Allied support for the ISAF mission in Afghanistan, on NATO-Russia issues, and on the Alliance’s global partnerships and continued enlargement.

A career Foreign Service Officer, Ambassador Nuland was Principal Deputy National Security Advisor to the Vice President from 2003-2005, and the U.S. Deputy Permanent Representative to NATO from 2000- 2003. From 1997-1999, she was Deputy Director for former Soviet Union affairs at the Department of State, with primary responsibility for U.S. policy towards Russia and the Caucasus countries. She has also spent two years at the Council on Foreign Relations as a “Next Generation” Fellow looking at the effects of anti-Americanism in 1999-2000, and as a State Department Fellow in 1996-1997, when she directed a CFR task force on “Russia, its Neighbors and an Expanding NATO.”

Via Laura Rozen/The Envoy:

“Toria is very skilled and talented and will do very well here,” one denizen of the State Department’s “executive level” seventh floor said, noting that given Nuland’s ties to GOP circles – her husband is Brookings foreign policy scholar and Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan, and she previously served as an adviser to Cheney — “who better…to aggressively defend the Administration’s foreign policy?”

That paragraph struck me as very telling, especially since this is the person the Obama Administration is replacing PJ Crowley with.

Just as an aside, Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol were co-founders of the now defunct neocon think tank PNAC, which BTW has morphed into the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI). Nuland herself was one of Cheney’s top policy advisors.

I think the noises out of the seventh floor touting all this GOP cred is interesting given the clueless class and their recent and utterly baffling hope that Obama will have incentive to move left now that he’s captured Osama. See tristero’s reaction to OBL’s death:

If ever there was a time that Obama could be persuaded to pursue even a moderately liberal agenda – as opposed to a (roughly) centrist/right one – that time is now.

More on Nuland from the FP/Rogin link that I started out with:

During the first term of Bill Clinton‘s administration, she was chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and then moved on to serve as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs.

In an interview, Talbott, now president of the Brookings Institution, praised Nuland as a consummate professional who proved that Foreign Service officers could be trusted to put professionalism over politics.

Talbott says Nuland is dedicated to whatever Administration she works for. Being as dedicated to Bush and then to Obama as she was to Clinton is not something I really consider a selling point:

“Her appointment demonstrates that Secretary Clinton has, quite rightly, an extremely high estimation of the value and confidence in the Foreign Service,” Talbott said, “The more use that’s made of the foreign policy civil service and the Foreign Service, the better.”

He noted Nuland’s public role as the U.S. envoy to NATO as evidence she can handle the spotlight and highlighted her roles across several administrations as evidence of her apolitical nature.

“She has a high degree of self confidence and an absolute dedication to working for the administration she is working for, whatever administration that is,” Talbot said.

Perhaps Nuland is more of an independent career foreign servant than an ideological type, but this appointment, combined with the trumpeting of Nuland’s GOP ties to say “who better to aggressively defend the Administration’s foreign policy” strikes me as part of a pattern of the Administration playing to the the right-wing after “Obama killed Osama” was supposed to have given Obama the national security trump card and assorted Democrats and progressives spoke of it as if this would give Democrats/progressives the national security trump card.

As usual, I think the left made the mistake of confusing victories and trump cards for Obama as victories and trump cards for the left. I don’t know how they expected Obama to move to the left on anything, when it seemed plain as day to me that he had all the more incentive to move to the right on everything from national security and foreign policy to drill, baby, drill.

Any thoughts?