The Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines under the Baltic Sea have been sabotaged. Multiple undersea explosions ruptured both lines. Neither one was operating at the time of the explosions, but the damage obviously means that they will not be able to provide natural gas from Russia to Western Europe anytime soon. The key question now is – who did it?
Let’s start with this. In order to pull off this operation, somebody had to enter the Baltic Sea, operate at a significant depth (the explosions occurred at locations more than 200 feet underwater), emplace large explosive charges, leave the area undetected and then detonate the emplaced charges. The amount of sophistication necessary to do this on a whole bunch of levels is significant.
No terrorist group on the planet is capable of such an operation. Only a handful of nation-states on the planet could do it. Factor in the location, the distance from home ports, etc. and you are probably down to the United States, Britain, Russia, and China. The British would never undertake this operation without the involvement of the United States in some sort of joint op. China has no conceivable motive for attacking the pipeline and no naval presence in the waters in question.
That brings us to two possibilities. The Russians blew up their own pipeline or the United States did.
The usual suspects – the same ones that told us Trump was a Russian stooge and Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation – are, of course, barraging us with stories right now about how Putin just blew up these pipelines. To the extent there seems to be a rationale for this, it goes something like this.
Putin is mad at Western Europe. Putin uses energy as a weapon. Putin blew up the pipelines to prevent Russian natural gas from getting to Western Europe.
Really? Pipelines have valves. Neither line was pumping gas when hit. Putin had the capacity to make sure that remained true forever. All he had to do was keep the valves shut on his end. That would have left the Europeans freezing in their homes. It also would have preserved his capacity to turn the supply of gas back on anytime he wanted.
Blowing up these pipelines did not hand Putin leverage he did not have. What it did do, though, was take away any possibility of Putin turning the gas back on for an extended period of time. Simultaneously, it removed the option of the Western Europeans knuckling under in the dead of winter, walking away from their commitment to Ukraine, and crawling back to Vlad begging for gas.
These explosions took one of Putin’s most valuable chess pieces off the table.
What did they do for the United States?
This sabotage forced the Europeans into a position of cutting free of Russian natural gas. It disarmed Putin. Not coincidentally, the explosions happened just as a new pipeline, Baltic Pipe, came online. That pipeline brings Norwegian natural gas to Europe.
Vladimir Putin is a thug. His fantasy is to reconstitute as much of the former Soviet Union as he can. His invasion of Ukraine was unjustifiable and he deserves the beating he is getting on the battlefield. Were it possible to wink him out of existence and install a truly democratic regime in Moscow while managing the instability and chaos that inevitably comes with regime change, the whole world would welcome Putin’s departure.
That is not how the world works. Killing Qaddafi did not produce a stable, democratic Libya. Toppling Saddam did not usher in a new day of peace and tranquility in Iraq. It set loose 1500-year-old sectarian grudges and plunged the nation into civil war. We threw out the Taliban in months. Putting together a stable, civilized government in its place ended up being a wee bit harder.
Washington is under the control of an administration filled with men and women, who, in addition to being compromised by Communist China, have long track records of horrific foreign policy and national security decisions. None of them have served in uniform and seen war up close. None of them have served as intelligence officers and gained an understanding of the real dangers our nation faces abroad.
They are Democratic Party functionaries. They are think tank warriors. All this seems like a game to them. The ‘consequences be damned’.
An attack on the Russian pipelines in the Baltic by the United States will not go unanswered. Putin will not sit back and passively absorb the damage done. He will hit back. He will direct his own very capable intelligence and special operations people to select a target that hurts us, and then in the same deniable way, he will strike.
Literally, hundreds of undersea internet cables connect the world and enable much of our modern way of life and commerce. Severing one or more of these and plunging banks in New York, the Stock Exchange, or currency markets into chaos would be eminently doable. And, what then? Do we respond? Do we escalate?
I hope as the facts filter out about these attacks another picture emerges. I hope we come to understand that this event was not what it appears to be. I pray the men and women in this administration are really not as cavalier and reckless as they appear.
Right now, though, I think any reasonable person has to be asking this question.
Did the United States just blow up two Russian pipelines?
Hope is just that..hope. It seems very clear that the US and NATO are behind this attack. Putin had nothing to gain from this because, as you say, he turned off the spigot. It's hard to believe the UK, Poland, Norway, and Denmark were not informed of the plan. If they did object, did it matter? These "think tank warriors" are pushing us into hot war with Russia.
Yes, the war in Ukraine is awful and Putin is a bad man; but you're ignoring the decades long provocation of Putin by the West. Those promises made to Gorbachev were broken repeatedly. NATO is on the Russian border. A couple weeks (days?) before Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border, Harris was in region talking about Ukraine joining NATO. The same lunatics that are pushing us towards war now were involved in the color revolution in 2014 that forced the pro-Russian government out.
Would you be comfortable with Russian or Chinese armed forces on our borders?
Would you be comfortable with Russian or Chinese war ships in the Gulf of Mexico or along the East or West Coast?
I used to believe that my country was acting for the good. I've been red pilled by the pandemic. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. My country...our country...has been "spreading democracy" for power and profit for decades now. We need to stop.
I hope that Putin understands, despite the provocations that will continue, that the American people do not want war. We are powerless to stop the lunatics running our so-called foreign policy.
Biden's (handlers') non-denial denial is telling. Especially in light of the videos making the rounds of Biden's earlier statements about taking out the pipeline(s).
That video, in turn, brings to mind Biden's pre-2020 election declaration about having the largest vote fraud operation ever (or something to that effect). We now know that they did, and successfully executed its intended purpose, and prevented the duly-elected President from taking office.
I'm no expert on international law or the rules of war, but it seems to me that if the U.S. did in fact sabotage those pipelines, it could well constitute an act of war.
God help us, this is all starting to feel like the summer of 1914 ...