I was initially skeptical. I didn’t see any reason for the US to have done this.
But here’s a counter-point. Russia didn’t need to blow up the pipeline to cut off gas. And it put them in the position of not being able to deliver fuel once Europe backed down.
The sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines earlier this week will likely mark a turning point in the Russo-Ukrainian war — although which way the war will turn remains, like responsibility for the sabotage itself, unknown.
On Thursday, Russia’s foreign ministry denied Moscow had anything to do with the attacks, saying it “looks like an act of terrorism, possibly on a state level,” and suggested that, with the pipelines out of commission, the United States could stand to benefit by increasing sales of liquefied natural gas to Europe.
For its part, NATO on Thursday formally declared the partial demolition of the pipelines an act of deliberate sabotage and said it would be met with a collective response. The European Union said the same a day earlier. The Biden administration dismissed Russian suggestions that the United States was responsible and said only that it would support its European allies as they conducted an investigation into the “apparent sabotage” of the pipelines.
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It seems to me unlikely that Russia blew them up for the simple reason that doing so removed Moscow’s one non-nuclear strategic lever over western Europe. If the point was to communicate, “Germany will freeze this winter,” why not just shut off the pipeline and let the world know that Russia had done it?
Far more likely, I think, is that U.S. special forces did it on orders from the White House. Tucker Carlson floated this idea on Fox News earlier this week and was roundly mocked for it by the likes of The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, among others. But the theory cannot be so easily dismissed — not least because, as Carlson and others noted after the sabotage, Biden himself said back in February that if Russia invaded Ukraine, there would no longer be a Nord Stream 2, that “we will bring an end to it.”
Wendell Husebø on Twitter: “Biden: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”Q: “But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany’s control?”Biden: “I promise you, we will.”3 holes were blown this week… / Twitter”
Biden: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”Q: “But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany’s control?”Biden: “I promise you, we will.”3 holes were blown this week…
To understand why the Biden administration would take such a drastic step, we need to understand something that has been true about the Democrats for nearly two decades, and certainly since the administration of Barack Obama: They tend to view all U.S. foreign policy as primarily an instrument of domestic politics. From their opportunistic opposition to the Iraq war going into the 2006 midterms, to Obama’s policies on Iran and the Arab Spring and especially Russia, Democrats have come to calibrate their responses to events abroad through a domestic partisan lens.
Put another way, American foreign policy is for them a means to an end that has mostly to do with gaining and retaining power in Washington. Think of the now infamous “Russia Reset,” when in March 2009 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a giant red plastic “reset” push-button, a symbol — albeit a botched one, the button was mislabeled with the Russian word for “overcharged” — meant above all to be a repudiation of President George W. Bush’s Russia policy, which called for missile defense installations in eastern Europe that Obama promptly canceled in the name of the “reset.” For Obama, who ran for and won office as an anti-Iraq war candidate, Russia policy was less about U.S. or European security and all about showcasing to his domestic supporters just how unlike his predecessor he was.
Read more. https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/30/its-not-crazy-to-think-biden-sabotaged-nord-stream-to-deepen-us-involvement-in-the-ukraine-war/