If Washington was involved, it would mark a
dangerous new stage not only in the Ukraine war
but in Europe’s acceptance of vassal status
By Jonathan Cook
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 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 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 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.
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 evidence suggesting that the US,
rather than Russia, was the prime suspect.
Western media like the
Associated Press 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: “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, a senior diplomat in the
Biden administration, issued Russia much the
same warning,
telling 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 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 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 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 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.
U.S. hostility towards Russian economic ties
with Europe is not new. Long before Russia’s
invasion, Washington had been
quite
openly 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 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 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 US foreign-policy goal
overnight.
It has also preempted the pressure building
in Germany, through
mass protests 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.
One can hardly be surprised that European
leaders are publicly blaming Russia for the
pipeline attacks. After all, Europe falls under
the US 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 US – 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 US 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 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 US policy
circles who has
long advocated 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 US 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.
If the US 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 US 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 US
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 US
industries.
By contrast, this act of sabotage strangles
Europe economically, driving it into recession,
deepening its debt and making it a slave to US
energy supplies. Effectively, the Biden
administration would have moved from offering
European elites juicy carrots to now wielding a
very large stick at them.
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 US is
maneuvering to avoid the collapse of its
post-war global dominance, the end of its
military and economic empire.
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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.
Jonathan Cook
is a Nazareth- based journalist
and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize
for Journalism. No one pays him to write
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