Victoria Nuland Stops Failing Up

The New Center: A Wednesday Newsletter From Sohrab Ahmari

When Compact launched on March 22, 2022, more than half of our initial batch of 12 columns and essays were devoted, in one way or another, to the Ukraine crisis, which had erupted a few weeks earlier. Our coverage, uniting our writers from the left and the right, was skeptical of escalation and the West’s heavily ideologized framing of the conflict, as one between democracy and dictatorship, freedom and repression.

This wasn’t a popular stance at the time. When we published a statement, signed by some three dozen scholars and intellectuals from the left and the right, questioning the wisdom of escalation and calling for a diplomatic approach, we came under attack from the usual suspects, such as the hawks at the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but also from many progressives.

Yet today—after two years and tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops fed into the Russian meat grinder—there is evidence that the Biden administration and the foreign-policy establishment are coming around to our position. The latest sign came Tuesday, when the ultra-hawkish Victoria Nuland resigned her post as under secretary of state for political affairs.