06.10.2022

Weighing the evidence

After eliminating the improbable, Daniel Lazare points a finger of blame at the probable culprit

Enter Columbo, dressed in his usual rumpled raincoat and holding an unlit cigar, along with Suspect 1 (USA) and Suspect 2 (Russia).

Columbo (rubbing his forehead): Sorry, gentlemen, but I’m confused. (to Suspect 1): You, sir, tell me that I shouldn’t believe anything Russia says about the Nord Stream pipeline bombing, because everything Russia says is a lie. So, when he says he’s not responsible for the attack, we should believe the opposite, right?

Suspect 1: Yes. Russia is responsible. Every word he says is disinformation.

Columbo (to Suspect 2): And you, sir - you say you didn’t do it because you have no reason to bomb a pipeline that cost you $11 billion to build.

Suspect 2: Yes, but that’s not all. Why would I bomb a section just 10 miles from the Danish island of Bornholm, a centre for Nato military exercises? Wouldn’t it be safer to bomb it at the other end of the pipeline just a few miles from my own shore? Why would I bomb it in the first place, when the controls are already in my possession? If I wanted to shut it down, wouldn’t it be easier to flip a switch?

Suspect 1: It’s a lie!

Suspect 2 (angrily to Suspect 1): Your own president promised to destroy the pipeline on February 7. If I invade Ukraine, he said, “there will be no longer Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” When a reporter asked how, he replied, “I promise you we will be able to do it.” Is that a lie?

Suspect 1: Yes!

Suspect 2: How about Radek Sikorski? “Thank you, USA,” he tweeted just a few hours after the event. Sikorski is not just anyone, you know. He’s a former foreign minister of Poland, he’s a member of the European parliament, he’s got positions at Harvard and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and he’s married to Anne Applebaum, one of America’s most prominent neocons. He’s plugged in at multiple levels, so what does that tell you? I suggest you talk to him.

Columbo: How do you spell Sikorski?

Suspect 1 (to Columbo): You don’t believe that nonsense, do you? Which side are you on, democracy or autocracy?

Suspec 2: Just a few days ago, Antony Blinken said the explosion represented “a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponisation of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.” Can you imagine if Putin called it a tremendous opportunity? The entire world would regard it as an admission of guilt.

Columbo: That’s true.

Suspect 1: Irrelevant!

Suspect 2: All I’m saying is that I had no reason to engage in such an action, whereas the US has the motive, the means, access, plus the technical know-how. Biden vowed to do it, and Blinken celebrated the results once the deed was done. (Pointing to Suspect 1) Yet he says that’s all irrelevant. I don’t understand.

Columbo: There’s a lot about this case I don’t understand. (To Suspect 2) Thank you for your help, Russia, you’re free to go. I don’t think we’ll be needing you any longer. (To Suspect 1) USA, please stick around. I have a few more questions I’d like to ask you tomorrow. Something about your statements doesn’t add up. (Glancing at his watch) Gosh! I’m late for my meeting with the German chancellor. I’ve got to run …

Big problem

As the above colloquy illustrates, the US may have a problem on its hands with regard to Nord Stream - a big one. Nine days after a series of explosions ripped through a section in the western Baltic, the press is still dutifully echoing the official Washington line that “everything is pointing to Russia,” to quote Politico.¹

Yes, Russia is guilty, it’s putting out disinformation, it’s lying through its teeth, and so on. But, although it is too early to be sure, there are signs that the Washington narrative is beginning to crack. Most remarkable is a statement by economist Jeffrey Sachs during an interview on Monday with Bloomberg News:

I would bet [it] was a US action, perhaps US and Poland … I know this runs counter to our narrative - you’re not allowed to say these things in the west - but the fact of the matter is that all over the world, when I talk to people, they think the US did it. And, by the way, even reporters on our papers that are involved tell me privately that, well, of course [the US did it], but it doesn’t show up in our media.²

The hosts were clearly taken aback that Sachs was saying the quiet part out loud, so they hastily cut him off. But there it was - the first indication that perhaps public opinion is not solidly behind the US after all.

Sachs is no ordinary economist. On the contrary, he is an international consultant who helped impose free-market shock-and-awe on Russia during the transition from Mikhail Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin and he now heads up something called the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is even more plugged in than Radek Sikorski, in other words; so, if he says that a groundswell of dissent is emerging, he may well be correct. If so, the US is in for some rough political weather, as are Nato and the Ukrainian war effort in general.

The reason is obvious. Alarm is spreading now that the economic sanction imposed on Russia in the wake of the February 24 invasion is backfiring on the euro zone. Inflation is up a record 10%, energy costs are up 40%, while power is in short supply, as France struggles to get its 32 nuclear power plants back on line and Germany warns that it may have to slash electricity exports in order to conserve supplies at home.³ Amid warnings that the Nord Stream cut-off could cause as much as a five percent economic contraction in the European Union this winter,⁴ word that the US - supposedly Europe’s main ally - has compounded the cut-off by putting Nord Stream out of commission for the foreseeable future can only add to the pain - and to the anger too.

This is especially the case in Germany, where protests in two dozen cities have called for an end to sanctions and for Nord Stream’s reopening. “It’s like we’re heading into a really dark time and people won’t just stay quiet,” a taxi driver said near the seaside village of Lubmin, where Nord Stream exits onto German soil. “There could be unrest, maybe even a revolution.”⁵

A revolution? It wasn’t the Socialist Worker that reported these words, but the New York Times, so plainly the ruling class is worried. But, if it turns out that the Nord Stream attack was America’s way of telling Social Democratic chancellor Olaf Scholz that he should stop dilly-dallying about delivering German-made Leopard tanks to the Ukrainian government, then the unrest will be even more extreme. Germans will be left wondering whose side America is on: theirs, Ukraine’s or its own.

It is a perfect storm, if such suspicions prove true. And, since the US is far and away the likeliest culprit, they probably will.

The US line on Nord Stream has not made sense from the get-go. The idea that Russia built Nord Stream so it could gain political leverage by hooking Europe on cheap gas is unconvincing for the simple reason that, if Russia gains political influence by selling gas to the west, the west gains the same by sending energy revenue to the east. It is merely two sides of the same transaction. As Gerhard Schröder, Germany’s Social Democratic chancellor from 1998 to 2005 and now chairman of Nord Stream AG, put it a few months ago, “For us, dependency meant double dependency. The so-called energy weapon is ambiguous. They need oil and gas to pay for their budget. And we need oil and gas to heat and to keep the economy going.”⁶

Influence is a two-way street. Besides, if Putin hopes to someday re-establish some semblance of normal ties with Europe, which he clearly does, then he would no doubt have liked Nord Stream to remain in place so he could resume gas sales. The idea that he would destroy an asset that is still potentially valuable is therefore absurd. And yet the Washington foreign-policy establishment insists that it is the case.

But it does make sense for the US to put Nord Stream out of commission. One reason is to punish Russia by robbing it of an $11 billion investment, while another is to send a shot across Europe’s bow as a reminder that compromise is no longer a possibility.

Condoleezza Rice - secretary of state and national security advisor under George W Bush - laid out a third reason in a German news interview in 2014:

Now we need to have tougher sanctions, and I’m afraid at some point this is going to probably have to involve oil and gas … I understand that it’s uncomfortable to have an effect on business ties in this way, but this is one of the few instruments that we have. Over the long run, you simply want to change the structure of energy dependence. You 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. For years we’ve been trying to get the Europeans to be interested in different pipeline routes - it’s time to do that.⁷

Dominance

“Change the structure” is the key phrase here. While the US certainly wants to make money off energy, it is equally interested in who produces energy, who gets it, and why. The theme goes back to the Marshall Plan, when the America set aside 10% of aid, so that Europeans could purchase US-controlled oil from Saudi Arabia. The goal was to get European capitalism back on its feet, to establish the Saudis as the primary supplier, to limit inroads by Soviet oil producers and, finally, to sideline coalfields in Britain, France and West Germany, in which communist-led mine unions were dominant. The aim was to “change the structure”, as Rice puts it, so as to strengthen US strategic dominance and US oil profits as well.⁸

The drive for strategic dominance extends through the Carter Doctrine, which announced in 1980 that a Soviet bid “to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America”, and continues on to the present day. Even though the US imports 70% less Persian Gulf oil than in 2005, thanks to the fracking revolution,⁹ for instance, its interest in the region is undiminished. As Joe Biden told the Gulf Cooperation Council in July: “We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia or Iran”.¹⁰ The more other countries want Gulf oil, the more the US wants it too.

Given all this, the real reason for the US war on Nord Stream is clear: Putin’s attempt to set up an independent delivery system was a direct threat to US interests. Considering the many bombs the US has dropped in the Persian Gulf region in order to strengthen its monopoly over energy supplies, is it really beyond imagination that it would explode an underwater bomb in order to accomplish the same goal in the Baltic?

Hardly. Now that Sachs has let the cat out of the bag, it will be interesting to see how Europe responds to this latest assertion of US hegemony.