Smoking Pipe Diplomacy: Nord Stream 2 Solved?

Gas Pipelines: The New Cold War 

Seymore Hersh wrote a piece yesterday about the Nord Stream pipeline explosion last fall. If there was any doubt before about who did it, that doubt was laid to rest today. We did it. The US Navy used its specialized deep sea divers to rig C4 on a timer. I initially thought the Russians probably did it to punish the Germans for sending weapons and materiel to Ukraine. It wasn’t a strong enough argument. Nord Stream 2 was about to be a serious windfall for Russia, it hadn’t fully come on line yet. It’s not the only natural gas pipeline Moscow has running into Europe though. Most of them go through Ukraine.

 But Nord Stream (1 and 2) were an affront to NATO alliances from the beginning.

Why did the Biden administration waive sanctions on the NS2 if they thought it was a threat to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)? What did the US get in return? I can’t imagine Biden waived sanctions to make nice. Obviously this is before the war in Ukraine, May 2021. It’s possible that blowing up the pipeline was always a possibility if the Russians didn’t behave. After the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the plan to sabotage it went into effect. The details are all speculative, but Hersh tells a wonderful story.

 If this isn’t a movie in 2 years I’ll leave the country (not really). I can think of a few angles to write a screenplay from this.

But, it’s still an act of war against a sovereign country. Not only is it an act of war, it’s an act of aggression against a nuclear power. Moscow might not be the powerhouse it pretends to be, but it’s still a formidable enemy. They could drag China into the mix as well, we’d certainly have a World War 3 at that point. The US is likely betting that the Russians won’t be able to retaliate directly for the offense. But what if they unleash nukes in Ukraine and just go scorched earth on the place? It’s a real possibility.

There are too many unknowns and I’m getting a little nervous that we’re setting up for a protracted war. But not a direct head to head war, a proxy that goes on for years and eats up money and lives. The White House denies Mr. Hersh’s reporting by calling it “utterly false” and “complete fiction”. Russia knows it was the US anyway and that’s all that matters. How will they get back at us?

I’ve avoided writing too much about this whole Ukraine war. In part because I’ve had to rethink my positions on a whole range of issues. If Russia is so aggressive why is Germany allowing such an obvious takeover of their way of life? The Germans have allowed the greens to push a radical climate agenda on the whole country. It’s weakened their existence and forced them to seek out cheap gas from Gazprom (Russian national company). This doesn’t solve their supposed climate problem, it just shifts the blame for ‘destroying the planet’ to Russia.

It’s possible too that Germany doesn’t care much for the NATO alliance anymore. I can’t think of a better way to drive a wedge between us and the Russians than buying gas from Putin’s industries. It is frustrating to see your biggest (wealthiest) ally in Europe stop developing its own energy and turn to the very country that NATO was set up to contain. Europe and America needed a plan after World War II to keep the Russians in the East and the Germans weak. The NATO alliance holds for now, but it isn’t looking strong.

For a purely philosophical take, the America I thought I lived in doesn’t exist anymore. What vision of the world are we pushing anyway? The school curriculum talks about the evils of America’s founding. From Marxist notions of class struggle to critical race theory and victim studies, it’s a mess of lies designed to create friction. I guess I bought into the idea that America is a force for good in the world. At least, that was the prevailing view of Reagan and both Bushes, even Clinton. Maybe they didn’t really believe it but they stuck to the script, so to speak, and gave lip service to those ideals abroad. But if America as a country (and an ideal) is so rotten, why keep pushing such dangerous ideas on the rest of humanity.

Put another way, who wants the United States as a partner with our historic racism, sexism and homophobia? Just look at our awful past. Read this article about a kids show and recognize that it's a Disney program.

You can’t push an aggressive foreign policy whose military sabotages a sovereign nation’s pipeline while your schools teach America as the great evil. Music, movies and TV all traffic in it as well. Something has to give. Our belligerence on the international stage makes the point better than any left wing radical could. 

Sadly we’ve just the given the Russians a very public incentive to create more havoc.