Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.
Exact full quote from CNN:
“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4085063
Unlikely. Too much risk no advantage. Frankly speaking it’s more likely Greta Thunberg herself dove down there and gnawed through it.
What possible gain is there for Russia to blow up the off-ramp to the gas sanctions? Best case scenario for Russia in regards to the pipeline would have been it being reopened when Europe decided higher energy costs are no longer worth it.
Furthermore, here is a direct quote from Biden:
The discussion started with a disagreement over the claims of subservience, right? Taking away the option to assert sovereignty over which sanctions are worth it is something that benefits the USA, hurts Europe, and takes away a potential advantage for Russia when the war inevitably ends someday and the practicality of buying from them instead of America (who charges more in addition to being less practical).
There would be no need to blow it up if Europe (Germany at bare minimum) was seen as completely subservient.
I didn’t say Russia did it. I mean it probably did but Germany isn’t off the table. Unlike the US Germany actually has the stealth subs to pull it off undetected, but all in all Russia is still the more likely option I’d say. Of course, the presence of ships in that area etc. is only circumstantial evidence.
And in your analysis you’re making a crucial mistake, a mistake I myself made directly before the invasion when Russian soldiers were getting itchy underwear on Ukraine’s border because I thought if they’re going to attack, they’d already have done it: You assume Russia is a rational actor. Or, maybe better put, that it considers the same things as rational as you do.
Blowing up NS2 from Russia’s side could have the motive of a) knowing or suspecting that you don’t need it any more – though it also wouldn’t be terribly hard to repair which people are constantly overlooking and b) to provide an excuse to stop deliveries. Russia was playing around back at that time with NS1 maintenance and turbines being needed which were stuck in the sanctions regime etc, allthewhile Germany was filling its gas storage and nationalising Russian gas assets on German soil. They might’ve thought that they need to disable NS2 so Germany wouldn’t say “well if NS1 doesn’t work why don’t we use NS2”.
As to the US threats: What was probably meant was sanctions. It’s true that the US has levers it can pull to force such an issue. Those would come at a cost to the US itself but they’re there and can be pulled if the cost is deemed acceptable.
And btw one thing is for sure: Germany will never again buy any (noticable) amount of Russian gas. Even if they retreat to their own borders tomorrow that ship has sailed, Germany is in full swing to replace all that fossil infrastructure with ammonia and hydrogen. NS2 is dead no matter whether it’s operational or not.
Oh another thing is for sure: Ukraine is way more important to Russia, or maybe better put Putin, than some gas pipeline. Pretty much the moment Germany changed laws to legalise sending weapons into crisis territories, i.e. Ukraine, Russia knew where Germany stood, and will continue to stand. We don’t tend to flop easily and they know it. As such it also might simply have been Putin being stroppy, expecting Germany really to go for that Duginesque1 division of Europe between great powers things, with Germany taking a forceful lead in Europe. He did later on comment that “siding with Ukraine was Germany’s mistake of the millennium” or something to that effect. So much for Putin’s rationality, he’s living in a completely different world than us, thinking state relations and decisions work on fundamentally different principles than they actually do.
1 not really, Dugin never came up with that stuff he’s not a theorist he just rehashes nationalist bullshit those theories actually date back to the German Empire trolling the Russians to bait them it’s a long story.
Fair enough on the rest, it seems like a weak motive given that Russia could simply not send the gas or disable it on their end, but that’s my opinion not a fact.
Out of curiosity, where did you pick up “seppo”? I’ve only heard Australians use it before, maybe the occasional brit.
Agreed on Dugin being full of nationalist BS.
Type 212, German-Italian, 214 is the export version without anti-magnetic dishwashers. I’m quipping, the exact differences aren’t really known but 212s do have antimagnetic diswashers and 214s are lacking some secret sauce but are still very capable.
Hydrogen fuel cell air independent drive, they’re not fast but very quiet, undetectable via active or passive sonar as well as magnetic sensors. Which makes them undetectable because there’s no such thing in the real world as gravimetric sensors (with range that doesn’t mean you’ve bumped into them anyway). Can traverse very shallow waters allowing combat divers to exit to shore, can also dive very deep because the Mediterranean is actually quite deep – strange combination of capabilities due to joint German/Italian design. Definitely capable of dropping two mines on pipes without anyone noticing.
By contrast US submarines are nuclear, meaning they’re glorified steam engines, quite loud. The Danes would have heard you enter the Skagerrak and then kept eyes on you, wondering WTF a nuclear deterrent submarine is doing in the Baltic Sea. Only alternative route would have been via the Kiel Kanal and… no.
A particularly foul-mouthed gooseberry pudding.
Thanks for the submarine lesson, that was an interesting read.
What? There was no risk and there was a ridiculous amount of money to be made. You have people in the intelligence community talking since the early 2000s how important it is to ‘empower poland, to drive a wedge between germany and russia’. The Americans had been threatening to ‘do something about’ the pipeline for years. And when they did it, the pan European media blackout made sure there was no risk involved. You yourself is a proof of that.
Meanwhile Europe will deindustrialize while paying hand over fist for American gas. They must also continue to dismantle their welfare state and spend that money in American weapons. But european governments don’t care, they are all personally invested in american investment funds shares anyway. Why else would the german foreign minister claim that the opinion of german voters are not relevant to her?
Vassals at least had a two way relationship with the King. This is borderline colonial.
What. We’re not buying US gas, not in any noticeable amount, that is. First of all usage was cut drastically (the likes of BASF could switch to other energy sources), most gas we still consume comes from Norway, LNG overall is only a tiny portion and of that most is Qatar.
If the US really did it then Germany is holding tight right now for Ukraine’s sake and there’s going to be hell to pay after the war.
What. The only reason any amount of US hardware is on our shopping list is because Eurofighter GmbH doesn’t want to give the US access to data they’d need to certify US nukes for the Typhoon because industrial espionage. F-35s are already certified, available off the shelf, and our Tornado fleet really needs replacement but really, it’s just for the nukes: The EWAR Tornados are getting replaced not by F-35s, but more, freshly designed, Eurofighters. Down the line there’s going to be FCAS and likely French instead of US nukes. Now it’s not that I’m saying that France would be less prone to industrial espionage than the US, in fact they’re notorious for it, but they already have all that data through Airbus anyway.
Poland is going on a shopping spree for quite a lot of American hardware, but that’s another topic, also, focussed very much on airframes. Tanks and artillery are onshored South Korean systems (which are onshored German systems). France will never buy American because strategic autonomy, in fact they were right-out insulted when hearing Germany is going to buy F35s, but seem to have cooled down seeing that it’s a stop-gap solution.
As a third party can see, the risk to the Americans really was zero. Everything to gain, nothing to possibly lose. What, are the Germans gonna rebel somehow? They’ll fall over themselves to pretend the chains aren’t even there.
I mean revoking SAP licenses alone would crash the US economy so we don’t even have to wait until actual hardware that they depend on breaks.
Thing is Germany produces approximately everything there is under the sun and in a gazillion of areas we’re the only producers. Think a hospital’s logistics collapsing because they can’t get replacement parts for their pneumatic tube system, any more. The stuff you never think of, that’s what’s suddenly going to be missing, everywhere. Or when did you last think about how to get blood samples from bed to lab, drugs from pharmacy to bed, in a large hospital? Certainly not by email.
But realistically speaking the US would probably willingly pay damages and reparations. Materially or in some diplomatic quid pro quo manner and all of that is going to happen behind closed doors and we’ll know once records get unsealed.
It’s just a cover for how reality slowly sets in. You went from believing that the US would never attack Germany to saying that, actually, the US would totally pay reparations for bombing Nordstream. They’d just do it behind closed doors in order to save face.
You’ll get nothing, and you’ll be happy to pay all the damages yourself, my friend. And once the records are unsealed you’ll be in your 60s, swearing up and down that such skullduggery from the Americans are in the past.
Why would I have a positive opinion of yanks in the future? They’re doing shit they get caught they deflect and whinge they get told privately some possible consequence and how to avoid it then they cave because said offer has been so well-crafted they can’t refuse. It’s called diplomacy. You know, the continuation of war by different means.
Why ask about the future, when it’s a mystery in the present as well. You’re the one who thinks they’ll pay reparations for something they think you deserved.
You weren’t supposed to buy cheap resources from Russia. You never had the permission to.
What, for making Russia pay for a pipeline that was never going to carry gas in the first place?
Or is this about not buying their gas, which we still don’t do? What are they doing about that? Trying to impose tariffs on steel and hurting their own economy in the process because they can’t produce high-grade steels?