A Family Who Studies War

by Not Sure

20 August 2023

Is warmongering a hereditary disease? If a hawk marries another hawk, what are the chances their offspring will be doves?

We await to see how the West will handle the recent coup d’état in Niger, a country described as critical to the U.S.’s counter-terrorism strategy. The perpetual war continues in Ukraine, and Victoria Nuland states that all the U.S. wants is for Russia to get out of Ukraine and allow it to be a free and independent country. One thing is certain. Where there is conflict, strife, insurgency, counterinsurgency, war, and peacekeeping missions, we will hear from Victoria Nuland.

There is a picture from 2005 of Victoria Nuland being sworn in as NATO ambassador by Dick Cheney. Behind her stands her husband, Robert Kagan, and their unnamed children. In an article about Robert from that same year, he calls his daughter Elena, “the most amazing 9-year-old historian I ever knew.” (This is not the Elena Kagan who is a Supreme Court justice, whose father is also “Robert.” Different Elena, different Robert.) I don’t know what has become of Elena in her adulthood, but Victoria Nuland’s and Robert Kagan’s son, David, graduated from Hamilton College in 2019. He played football throughout his college career and studied History and Government. He is now Associate Editor of The Catalyst: A Journal of Ideas from the Bush Institute. This is a bit of his bio:

“He assists Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Tepperman in producing an award-winning publication on a wide range of critical policy issues, both domestic and foreign. Before joining the Bush Institute, Kagan worked for the International Republican Institute in its Transatlantic Strategy Division. His work was focused primarily on countering foreign authoritarian influence in Europe. He worked with several European parliamentarians and civil society organizations to help bolster their countries against the subversive tactics of the CCP. He also worked on programs which tracked and reported Kremlin disinformation campaigns across the Western Balkans and Visegrad Four.”

(Tepperman was born and raised in Canada before moving to the U.S. Prior to working at The Catalyst, he was Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Policy magazine and before that Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs, the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations.)

This is from a MintPress News article about Victoria Nuland:

“President Joe Biden’s nomination of Victoria Nuland for Under Secretary for Political Affairs, the third-highest position at the State Department, is a dangerous sign. Nuland exemplifies the neoconservatives who have led American foreign policy from one disaster to another for the past 30 years, all while evading any shred of accountability.”

Robert Kagan co-founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in 1997. You’ve often heard Alan Watt remind us of the famous General Wesley Clark quote about “the list.” After September 11, 2001, Clark was in Washington D.C. to visit a senior general and inquired if the plan was still to strike Iraq. “‘Oh, it's worse than that,’ the general said, holding up a memo on his desk. 'Here's the paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense [then Donald Rumsfeld] outlining the strategy. We're going to take out seven countries in five years.' And he named them, starting with Iraq and Syria and ending with Iran.” In subsequent interviews, Clark has said the hit list included Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan. PNAC was always transparent about its aims, and in 1998, sent an open letter to President Bill Clinton advocating unilateral action against Iraq.

Nuland and Kagan have been called the ultimate Washington “power couple” and are quoted as saying that they fell in love on their first date “talking about democracy and the role of America in the world.” This may be quite the kinky couple since their idea of “democracy” is decidedly perverse.

Robert Kagan’s father, Donald Kagan, was born in Lithuania, and immigrated to the U.S. with his mother at the age of two, shortly after his father passed away. Raised in Brooklyn, Donald played high school football. For many years, he taught history at Yale University, with a focus on ancient Greece. He is known for his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War, fought between Athens and Sparta. Donald was one of the original signers of the 1997 Statement of Principles of his son’s neoconservative PNAC think-tank. PNAC was started with foundation donations and “big oil” backing.

Robert Kagan’s brother, Frederick, has a Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet military history from Yale University, and is a resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, another foundation-backed conservative/neoconservative think-tank, whose origins in the late 1930s are tied to banking and pharmaceutical companies. Fred’s wife, Kimberly, is a military historian educated at Yale University. Kim is the daughter of Kalman Kessler, an accountant, and his wife Frances, a New York City schoolteacher. Kim has described her family as being the “most patriotic family in America” and presumably this also refers to the family she married into.

In 2007, Kim Kagan started her own “thing,” the Institute for the Study of War, a non-profit think tank with ties to several military contractors, including General Dynamics with ties to the Crown family (Aspen Institute.) Other backers or companies with advisory positions include Microsoft, Palantir, General Motors, and Raytheon.

This is from a 2018 article in Militarist Monitor, not up to date, but still interesting.

“Kimberly Kagan has been a close adviser to U.S. generals serving in recent U.S. wars. These relationships have drawn scrutiny, particularly the relationship Kagan and her husband Fred had with General Petraeus. According to a December 2012 Washington Post investigation, the Kagans visited Afghanistan repeatedly and extensively throughout Petraeus’ tenure there, during which time they received extraordinary accommodations for civilian visitors—including near round-the-clock access to military and intelligence officials, top-level security clearance, and priority travel to anywhere in the country, as well as desks and military email accounts. In return, the Kagans advised Petraeus and penned supportive op-eds about the general and the war effort when they periodically returned home.

Although the Kagans did not receive compensation from the U.S. military for their advisory work, the Post noted that they continued to receive paychecks from their respective think tanks while they were advising Petraeus. “For Kim Kagan, spending so many months away from research and advocacy work in Washington could have annoyed many donors to the Institute for the Study of War,” it observed. “But her major backers appear to have been pleased that she cultivated such close ties with Petraeus.”

Many of ISW’s major contributors and fundraisers—including DynCorps International, CACI International, and General Dynamics—are military contractors with active interests in the Afghan war. At a 2011 ISW event honoring Petraeus, Kagan thanked her corporate supporters for sponsoring her “ability to have a 15-month deployment [in Afghanistan] essentially in the service of those who needed some help.”

Victoria Nuland’s father was a surgeon and writer who taught bioethics, the history of medicine, and medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. The late Sherwin Bernard Nuland was born in The Bronx, New York, to immigrant parents, his father from Moldova and his mother from Belarus. There is something accessible about the writing of Sherwin Nuland. He writes candidly about his struggles with depression, his childhood marked by shame and anti-Semitism. He describes his father as often ill, a man who never learned to read or write English, who shared a home with his wife’s family but never spoke to them, a man who resented his American sons and their opportunities and successes, whose fits of rage terrified the family.

In later years, Sherwin Nuland thought about the symptoms his father manifested and believed that the man had lived and died never knowing he had tertiary syphilis. On the other hand, perhaps Dr. Nuland just needed to find a diagnosis to fit a man whose real disease was uncontrolled rage and hatred.

***

This Redux is the second hour of a four-hour talk that Alan Watt gave on August 2, 2020:

All Hail CapCom:
"Capitalists Finance Communists to "Bring in Equality,"
For Technocrats The Good Life, For Proles Mediocrity."
© Alan Watt Aug. 2, 2020

Alan talked about war, materialism, the use of fear to obtain compliance, the destruction of religion and the family, Bertrand Russell’s writings on the preferability of scientific dictatorships, pestilence, abortions, and bioethics. We swallow propaganda, send our sons to die in wars fought for reasons which are always kept hidden. We change our fashions and loosen our morals on command. Unwanted babies are killed; the elderly will receive whatever care or end the State decides is “efficient” or “sustainable.”

***

In 1994, Sherwin Nuland wrote a well-received book about the end of life, entitled How We Die. Some excerpts are raw and graphic, others touching. He said writing the book taught him, “The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are.” I wonder where the doctor fitted in a family of war hawks.

The new and improved name for eugenics is bioethics. Arguments for the unthinkable must be made human and accessible. To topple man from his God-given perch on the pedestal, it takes generations of thinking in “relative” terms.

When policies promoted and acted upon lead to the deaths of millions, and those deaths are deemed “worth it” in the scheme of things, when heads of state are murdered and their deaths are cackled over by psychopaths on national television, then as a nation, as a people, as a collective formerly known as “humanity,” we have passed the point of no return.

Dr. Nuland liked an epigraph, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” I like that too. I think that compassion and generosity and hospitality and forgiveness are qualities that are truly human, but I’ve long ago absorbed George Carlin’s quip, “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.” When those in the big club are hellbent on waging war on us, or using us to fight their battles, we’d be insane to continue to comply or to forgive those crimes. Hawks and warmongers must be named and held accountable.

Additional reading:

“Divide and Rule”: Italy’s PM Giorgia Meloni Is Biden’s “Political Asset”. U.S. Behind Niger Coup d’Etat. America’s Hegemonic Wars Against Europe and Africa

https://www.globalresearch.ca/divide-and-rule-italys-pm-giorgia-meloni-is-bidens-political-asset-u-s-behind-niger-coup-detat-americas-hegemonic-wars-against-europe-and-africa/5828714

Queen of Chicken Hawks: Victoria Nuland Had A Hand in Every US Intervention in the Past 30 Years

https://www.mintpressnews.com/victoria-nuland-hand-in-every-us-intervention-past-30-years/275272/

Victoria Nuland Delivers Keynote Speech at the Berlin Transatlantic Conference

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/videos/victoria-nuland-delivers-keynote-speech-berlin-transatlantic-conference/

2022 Aspen Security Forum

https://www.aspensecurityforum.org/2022-agenda-in-person-asf

Aspen Ideas Festival - Victoria Nuland

https://www.aspenideas.org/speakers/victoria-nuland

Robert Kagan and Interventionism’s Big Reboot

https://newrepublic.com/article/170213/robert-kagan-interventionisms-big-reboot

Robert Kagan ’80 follows father but forges own path