Birds of Feather: Warmonger to Temporarily Fill Victoria Nuland's Shoes

Since Victoria Nuland's abrupt decision to resign as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, her shoes have been temporarily filled by US career diplomat John R. Bass. Who is Bass and what is his record?

Undersecretary of state for management John R. Bass, chosen as Nuland's temporary replacement, is a carbon copy of his predecessor.

Who is John Bass?

Bass began his diplomatic career in 1988 and has served in US missions in Iraq, Italy, Belgium, Chad, Georgia, Turkiye and Afghanistan.

Bass was special assistant for Europe and Eurasia to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott between 1998 and 2000. He was one of the US negotiating team focused on Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, when NATO invaded Yugoslavia and subjected the European country to brutal air strikes from March 24 to June 10, 1999.

Bass' boss Talbott was well-known for his 'Russia expertise'. It was Talbott who tried to mend fences between Moscow and Washington in the wake of NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia and settle the conflict on Washington's terms. Decades later, Talbott advocated militarizing Ukraine immediately after the 2014 February coup d'etat "to deter further aggression by the Kremlin and its surrogates."

In 2000 Talbott promoted Bass to his chief of staff, tasked with coordinating policy on arms reduction with Russia.

Like Victoria Nuland, Bass later served as a special advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, the architect of the 2003 Iraq war. Between 2004 and 2005 Bass advised Cheney on developments in Europe and Eurasia.

Bass was dispatched to Iraq in 2008 as leader of the Baghdad Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) made up of soldiers, sailors, airmen, career diplomats, engineers and city planners to "develop a normal relationship between the US and Iraq." However, after just a year of that assignment Bass was redeployed to Georgia by then President Barack Obama.

Meddling in Post-War Georgia Affairs

Bass served as a US Ambassador to Georgia between 2009 and 2012 and arrived to the country as it was recovering from then-President Mikhail Saakashvili's military adventurism.

In August 2008 Georgia launched an invasion of South Ossetia, which claimed the lives of Russian peacekeepers in the region. The pro-Western Saakashvili government openly sought to join NATO at the time. However, the territorial dispute was seen as a stumbling block in the way of Tbilisi's NATO aspirations. Encouraged by his US and NATO friends, Saakashvili decided to seize the breakaway republic by force — but failed miserably.

During his time as ambassador to Georgia Bass played a role in scuppering the Franco-Russian contract for sale of two amphibious assault ships to Russia.

He wrote a cable dated November 19, 2009 that called the deal "the wrong ship from the wrong country at the wrong time."

"The symbolism of France, the broker of the ceasefire and a major NATO ally, taking this particular opportunity to make one of NATO's biggest sales ever to Russia will not be missed in Moscow or in Tbilisi," claimed Bass. "Not only on the symbolic level is the sale problematic; this type of ship will give Russia a new capability to enforce, or threaten to enforce, its will in the Black Sea."

Bass was slammed by the Georgian opposition for meddling in the nation's affairs in 2011 by supporting a government crackdown on protesters. His diplomatic mission to Georgia ended when he was made executive secretary at the State Department in 2012.

Setting US-Turkiye Relations 'Ablaze'

Bass' next overseas posting was to Turkiye, where once again faced accusations of interference in domestic affairs.

Bass served as the US Ambassador to Ankara between 2014 and 2017. On July 15, 2016, a faction of the Turkish Armed Forces attempted a coup d'etat agaisnt President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The botched coup was believed to be a brainchild of Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish businessman living in the US. Bass' time in Turkiye also coincided with the Syrian War, which saw Washington arming the Kurdish separatist YPG as proxies against the government. Ankara treats the militai as an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), banned as a terrorist group by most NATO members.

In October 2017, Turkish newspaper Yeni Safak lambasted Bass for setting bilateral Turkish- American relations "ablaze," charging that Bass had "continually and provocatively come out in support of terrorist organizations during his three-year tenure as US envoy in Ankara." The newspaper accused Bass of falsely claiming the US had not armed to Kurdish separatists and of protecting Fethullah Gulen's associates.

Bass and Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal

Between 2017 and 2020 Bass served as a US Ambassador to Afghanistan. His departure coincided with the Trump administration striking a peace deal with the Taliban*, under which US forces would pull out unmolested.

But when Joe Biden entered the White House in 2021, he unilaterally pushed back the withdrawal deadline by four months. What followed was the chaotic and bloody evacuation of US and allied forces Kabul as the Taliban took back control.

Remarkably, Biden chose none other but Bass to supervise the retreat. Franklin Foer's book The Last Politician describes the administration's impotence as the Taliban took over. It tells Bass was in the middle of teaching future US diplomats at the Foreign Service Institute when in mid-August he was forced to return to Kabul because his successor, acting Ambassador Ross Wilson, was not "able to function at the level that was necessary to complete the job on his own."

"Bass hadn’t expected the request," the book reads. "Without knowing much more than what was in the news, Bass rushed to board a plane taking him to the worst crisis in the recent history of American foreign policy."

However, Bass' return to Kabul failed to save the day for the US forces and their Afghan allies.

After Nuland's surprising resignation, Bass is about to be thrown into yet another crisis the White House cannot control. The Ukrainian military suffered a string of defeats since summer with no face-saving exit in sight.

The seasoned diplomat will have to bear this burden until a permanent replacement for Victoria Nuland is found. According to the US media, the favorite to succeed Nuland is the current US ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith, a one-time Pentagon official and former deputy national security adviser to then-Vice President Biden.

* designated extremists by the UN