[D66] US sabotage Nordstream (6) : Can Europe Afford to Turn a Blind Eye to Evidence of a US Role in Pipeline Blasts?

[René Oudeweg]

mintpressnews.com
<https://www.mintpressnews.com/evidence-united-states-role-nord-stream-pipeline-blasts/282149/>



  Can Europe Afford to Turn a Blind Eye to Evidence of a US Role in
  Pipeline Blasts?

12-16 minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The sabotage of the two Nord Stream pipelines leaves Europeans certain
to be much poorer and colder this winter, and was an act of
international vandalism on an almost unimaginable scale. The attacks
severed Russian gas supplies to Europe and caused the release of
enormous quantities
<https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/nord-stream-risk-of-gas-pipeline-leak-was-estimated-to-be-one-in-100000-year-event-30-09-2022/>
of methane gas, the prime offender in global warming.

This is why no one is going to take responsibility for the crime – and
most likely no one will ever be found definitively culpable.

Nonetheless, the level of difficulty and sophistication in setting off
blasts at three separate locations on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines
overwhelmingly suggests a state actor, or actors, was behind it.

Western coverage of the attacks has been decidedly muted, given that
this hostile assault on the globe’s energy infrastructure is
unprecedented – overshadowing even the 9/11 attacks.

The reason why there appears to be so little enthusiasm to explore this
catastrophic event in detail – beyond pointing a finger
<https://usun.usmission.gov/remarks-at-a-un-security-council-meeting-on-leaks-in-the-nordstream-pipeline/>
in Russia’s direction – is not difficult to deduce.

It is hard to think of a single reason why Moscow would wish to destroy
its own energy pipelines, valued at $20 billion, or allow in seawater,
possibly corroding them irreversibly.

The attacks deprive Russia of its main gas supply lines to Europe – and
with it, vital future revenues – while leaving the field open to
competitors.

Moscow loses its only significant leverage over Germany, its main buyer
in Europe and at the heart of the European project, when it needs such
leverage most, as it faces down concerted efforts
<https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-seeks-keep-up-support-ukraine-despite-economic-damage-2022-07-18/>
by the United States and Europe to drive Russian soldiers out of Ukraine.

Even any possible temporary advantage Moscow might have gained by
demonstrating its ruthlessness and might to Europe could have been
achieved just as effectively by simply turning off the spigot to stop
supplies.


    Media taboo

This week, distinguished economist Jeffrey Sachs was invited on
/Bloomberg /TV to talk about the pipeline attacks. He broke a taboo
among Western elites by citing
<https://twitter.com/0ddette/status/1576916509766451200> evidence
suggesting that the US, rather than Russia, was the prime suspect.

Western media like the /Associated Press/
<https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-nato-united-states-baltic-sea-b837ae25021807a3caef4aa3043a8013>
have tried to foreclose such a line of thinking by calling it a
“baseless conspiracy theory” and Russian “disinformation”. But, as Sachs
pointed out, there are good reasons to suspect the U.S. above Russia.

There is, for example, the threat to Russia made by U.S. president Joe
Biden back in early February, that “there will be no longer a Nord
Stream 2” were Ukraine to be invaded. Questioned by a reporter about how
that would be possible, Biden asserted
<https://twitter.com/Partisangirl/status/1574685985115607040>: “I
promise you, we will be able to do that.”

Biden was not speaking out of turn or off the cuff. At the same time,
Victoria Nuland
<https://www.mintpressnews.com/victoria-nuland-hand-in-every-us-intervention-past-30-years/275272/>,
a senior diplomat in the Biden administration, issued Russia much the
same warning, telling
<https://twitter.com/Partisangirl/status/1574912267434409984> reporters:
“If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not
move forward.”

That is the same Nuland who was intimately involved
<https://consortiumnews.com/2022/05/25/nuland-pyatt-tape-removed-from-youtube-after-8-years/>
back in 2014 in behind-the-scenes maneuvers by the U.S. to help
overthrow an elected Ukrainian government that led to the installation
of one hostile to Moscow. It was that coup that triggered a combustible
mix of outcomes – Kyiv’s increasing flirtation with NATO, as well as a
civil war in the east between Ukrainian ultra-nationalists
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/azov-far-right-fighters-ukraine-neo-nazis>
and ethnic Russian communities – that provided the chief rationale for
President Vladimir Putin’s later invasion.

And for those still puzzled by what motive the U.S. might have for
perpetrating such an outrage, Nuland’s boss helpfully offered an answer
last Friday. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken described
<https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1576326018893492225> the
destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the consequent
environmental catastrophe, as offering “tremendous strategic opportunity
for the years to come”.

Blinken set out a little too clearly the “cui bono” – “who profits?” –
argument, suggesting that Biden and Nuland’s earlier remarks were not
just empty, pre-invasion posturing by the White House.

Blinken celebrated the fact that Europe would be deprived of Russian gas
for the foreseeable future and, with it, Putin’s leverage over Germany
and other European states. Before the blasts, the danger for Washington
had been that Moscow might be able to advance favorable negotiations
over Ukraine rather than perpetuate a war Biden’s defense secretary,
Lloyd Austin, has already stated
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/25/russia-weakedend-lloyd-austin-ukraine>
is designed to “weaken” Russia at least as much as liberate Ukraine. Or,
as Blinken phrased it, the attacks were “a tremendous opportunity once
and for all to remove the dependence on Russian energy, and thus to take
away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of
advancing his imperial designs.”

Though Blinken did not mention it, it was also a “tremendous
opportunity” to make Europe far more dependent on the U.S. for its gas
supplies, shipped by sea at much greater cost to Europe than through
Russia’s pipelines. American energy firms may well be the biggest
beneficiaries from the explosions.


    Meddling in Ukraine

U.S. hostility towards Russian economic ties with Europe is not new.
Long before Russia’s invasion, Washington had been quite
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjBhD-TW_QI> openly
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/world/europe/nord-stream-2-germany-us-russia.html>
seeking ways to block the Nord Stream pipelines.

One of Blinken’s recent predecessors, Condoleezza Rice, expressed the
Washington consensus way back in 2014 – at the same time as Nuland was
recorded secretly meddling
<https://consortiumnews.com/2022/05/25/nuland-pyatt-tape-removed-from-youtube-after-8-years/>
in Ukraine, discussing who should be installed as president in place of
the elected Ukrainian government that was about to be ousted in a coup.

Speaking to German TV, Rice said
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF0uYIjaTNE> the Russian economy was
vulnerable to sanctions because 80% of its exports were energy-related.
Proving how wrong-headed American foreign policy predictions often are,
she asserted confidently: “People say the Europeans will run out of
energy. Well, the Russians will run out of cash before the Europeans run
out of energy.” Breaking Europe’s reliance on Russian energy was, in
Rice’s words, “one of the few instruments we have… Over the long term,
you simply want to change the structure of energy dependence.”

.

She added: “You [Germany] want to depend more on the North American
energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we’re finding
in North America. You want to have pipelines that don’t go through
Ukraine and Russia.”

Now, the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2 has achieved a major U.S.
foreign-policy goal overnight.

It has also preempted the pressure building in Germany, through mass
protests
<https://www.aa.com.tr/en/environment/thousands-march-in-eastern-germany-to-protest-soaring-energy-prices/2696034>
and mounting business opposition, that might have seen Berlin reverse
course on European sanctions on Russia and revive gas supplies – a shift
that would have undermined Washington’s goal of “weakening” Putin. Now,
the protests are redundant. German politicians cannot cave in to popular
demands when there is no pipeline through which they can supply their
population with Russian gas.


    ‘Thank you, USA’

One can hardly be surprised that European leaders are publicly blaming
Russia for the pipeline attacks. After all, Europe falls under the U.S.
security umbrella and Russia has been designated by Washington as
Official Enemy No 1.

But almost certainly, major European capitals are drawing different
conclusions in private. Like Sachs, their officials are examining the
circumstantial evidence, considering the statements of
self-incrimination from Biden and other officials, and weighing the “cui
bono” arguments.

And like Sachs, they are most likely inferring that the prime suspect in
this case is the U.S. – or, at the very least, that Washington
authorized an ally to act on its behalf. Just as no European leader
would dare to publicly accuse the U.S. of carrying out the attacks, none
would dare stage such an attack without first getting the nod from
Washington.

That was evidently the view of Radek Sikorski, the former foreign and
defence minister of Poland, who tweeted
<https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FdrfRLHWIAACvVT?format=jpg&name=large> a
“Thank you, USA” with an image of the bubbling seas where one pipeline
was ruptured.

Sikorski, it should be noted, is as well-connected in Washington as he
is in Poland, a European state bitterly hostile to Moscow as well as its
pipelines. His wife, Anne Applebaum, is a staff writer at /The Atlantic/
magazine and an influential figure in U.S. policy circles who has long
advocated
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/anne-applebaum-nato-pays-a-heavy-price-for-giving-russia-too-much-credita-true-achievement-under-threat/2014/10/17/5b3a6f2a-5617-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html>
for NATO and EU expansion into Eastern Europe and Ukraine.

Sikorski hurriedly took down the tweet after it went viral.

But if Washington is the chief suspect in blowing up the pipelines, how
should Europe read its relations with the U.S. in the light of that
deduction? And what does such sabotage indicate to Europe’s leaders
about how Washington might perceive the stakes in Europe? The answers
are not pretty.


    Demand for fealty

If the U.S. was behind the attacks, it suggests not only that Washington
is taking the Ukraine war into new, more dangerous territory, ready to
risk drawing Moscow into a round of tit-for-tats that could quickly
escalate into a nuclear confrontation. It also suggests that ties
between the U.S. and Europe have entered a decisive new stage, too.

Or put another way, Washington would have done more than move out of the
shadows, turning its proxy war in Ukraine into a more direct, hot war
with Russia. It would indicate that the U.S. is willing to turn the
whole of Europe into a battlefield, and bully, betray and potentially
sacrifice the continent’s population as cruelly as it has traditionally
treated weak allies in the Global South.

In that regard, the pipeline ruptures are most likely interpreted by
European leaders as a signal: that they should not dare to consider
formulating their own independent foreign policy, or contemplate defying
Washington. The attacks indicate that the US requires absolute fealty,
that Europe must prostrate itself before Washington and accept whatever
dictates it imposes.

That would amount to a dramatic reversal of the Marshall Plan,
Washington’s ambitious funding of the rebuilding of Western Europe after
the Second World War, chiefly as a way to restore the market for rapidly
expanding U.S. industries.

By contrast, this act of sabotage strangles Europe economically, driving
it into recession, deepening its debt and making it a slave to U.S.
energy supplies. Effectively, the Biden administration would have moved
from offering European elites juicy carrots to now wielding a very large
stick at them.


    Pitiless aggression

For those reasons, European leaders may be unwilling to contemplate that
their ally across the Atlantic could behave in such a cruel manner
against them. The implications are more than unsettling.

The conclusion European leaders would be left to draw is that the only
justification for such pitiless aggression is that the U.S. is
maneuvering to avoid the collapse of its post-war global dominance, the
end of its military and economic empire.

The destruction of the pipelines would have to be understood as an act
of desperation: a last-ditch preemption by Washington of the loss of its
hegemony as Russia, China and others find common cause to challenge the
American behemoth, and a ferocious blow against Europe to hammer home
the message that it must not stray from the fold.

At the same time, it would shine a different, clearer light on the
events that have been unfolding in and around Ukraine in recent years:

• NATO’s relentless expansion across Eastern Europe despite expert
warnings that it would eventually provoke Russia.

• Biden and Nuland’s meddling to help oust an elected Ukrainian
government sympathetic to Moscow.

• The cultivation of a militarized Ukrainian ultra-nationalism pitted
against Russia that led to bloody civil war against Ukraine’s own ethnic
Russian communities.

• And NATO’s exclusive focus on escalating the war through arms supplies
to Ukraine rather than pursuing and incentivizing diplomacy.

None of these developments can be stripped out of a realistic assessment
of why Russia responded by invading Ukraine.

Europeans have been persuaded that they must give unflinching moral and
military support to Ukraine because it is the last rampart defending
their homeland from a merciless Russian imperialism.

But the attack on the pipelines hints at a more complex story, one in
which European publics need to stop fixing their gaze exclusively at
Russia, and turn round to understand what has been happening behind
their backs.

Feature photo | Police officers accompany a demonstration against
sanctions on Russia while a banner with the inscription “Open Nordstream
2 immediately” is held, September 05, 2022. Sebastian Willnow | DPA via AP

/*Jonathan Cook* is a MintPress contributor. Cook won the Martha
Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and
the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle
East
<https://www.amazon.com/Israel-Clash-Civilisations-Remake-Middle/dp/0745327540> (Pluto
Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair
<https://www.amazon.com/Disappearing-Palestine-Israels-Experiments-Despair/dp/1848130317> (Zed
Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net
<http://www.jonathan-cook.net/>./

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not
necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.

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