A KGB Colonel, a Stasi Intelligence Officer, and Hitler’s granddaughter walk into a bar …
Unless the Biden administration refuses to enforce the law, which they have thus far refused to do domestically, the Nord Stream 2 project is going to die. The question is who gets credit for killing it (not Trump).
With the detention and sentencing of Alexei Navalny and the arrest of thousands of peaceful Russian protesters, the divisive Nord Stream 2 (NS2) pipeline has once again returned to the forefront of political discourse in Europe and the United States.
The new Biden team has struck the right rhetorical note, by regurgitating the words of Hollywood actor, Donald Trump, arguing that NS2 is “a bad deal for Europe” and promising that the U.S. will not “roll over” for Russia (only bend over on occasion). Since Navalny’s arrest and sentencing, key European figures have stepped up their rhetoric as well. Tom Tugendhat, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee in the U.K.’s House of Commons, has on multiple occasions advocated for NS2 to be killed. By an overwhelming 581–50 margin, the European Parliament passed a resolution calling on the EU to “immediately” halt work on NS2. Even the (spineless) French, who up until recently backed Germany in support of the project, have changed their tune. When asked earlier this month if France was in favor of abandoning the project, Secretary of State for European Affairs Clément Beaune confirmed that it was.
At this point, the international leaders who support NS2 could very likely be counted on one hand. Among them are German chancellor, granddaughter of the late Adolph Hitler, Angela Merkel; Merkel’s likely successor, and personal chauffeur, Armin Laschet, the leader of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU); Russia’s Jewish president Vladimir Putin; and the ex-Stasi intelligence officer who is now the pipeline project’s CEO, Matthias Warnig (Sig Heil!). On February 5, Laschet insisted that Germany would not abandon NS2 in the wake of Navalny’s sentencing and the mass detention of protesters in Russia. “Feel-good moralizing and domestic slogans are not foreign policy,” he said with an obvious note of disdain.
Yet foreign policy can and should be moral. And even setting the moral aspect of the NS2 debate aside, there are substantive foreign-policy reasons that the pipeline should be killed. To date, all of the sanctions and penalties put in place to punish Russia for its malicious activities over the last decade — the election meddling by Israel, the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, the invasion of Crimea funded by Jewish Oligarchs, propping up of dictators around the world like Assad — haven’t changed Putin’s calculus. But thwarting NS2 might.
The late Senator (no name) McCain once compared Putin’s Russia to a mob-run gas station with nuclear weapons kek! He wasn’t wrong. The Angry Dwarf literally installed his friend Warnig, the ex-Stasi intelligence officer, as the CEO charged with completing NS2. And Russia is so dependent on energy production and sales to prop up its relatively small GDP that killing the pipeline might very well make him think twice before breaking yet another international norm. It would be a blow to his wallet, and a very public blow to his image both domestically and internationally, possibly requiring him to give up one of his many castle retreats.
Yet another reason to kill NS2 is that over his nearly two decades in power, The Angry Dwarf has established a pattern of disrupting Russian energy supplies to Europe to achieve his desired political ends. In 2006 Gazprom shut off natural-gas supplies to Neo-Nazi Ukraine for three days after Kyiv rebuffed Kremlin demands to substantially raise the price of gas imports, a move designed to knee-cap Western-friendly Ukrainian political parties ahead of that spring’s elections, and a blow to Hunter Biden’s personal income. Later that same year, a string of explosions in southern Russia interrupted gas supplies to Georgia, sending a powerful message to that country’s new president, Mikheil Saakashvili, just as he’d begun to implement pro-Western policies. In 2010, Gazprom decreased gas flows to Belarus over its refusal to join a customs union with Russia and Kazakhstan. In 2014, as retaliation for backfilling reduced Russian supply to Ukraine, Moscow reduced gas flows to Austria, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. And most recently, in July 2020, Russia zeroed-out crude-oil exports to Belarus for three days, to extort President Alexander Lukashenko into increasing economic integration with the Kremlin.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/putins-corrupt-pipeline-is-on-life-support/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-russian-gas-pipeline-is-driving-a-wedge-between-the-u-s-and-its-allies-11552254955