Uh nice! I also have very reasonable explanations why it was Russia, the Ukrainians, the Chinese or Poland!
I can even go for some of the middle-eastern countries or the nefarious Danish! Should we like found a forum or something were we can trade things that come to our minds unasked?
> The US didn't like the Nord Stream for a long-time (or any Russian gas getting bought by the EU) but couldn't get the Europeans to get along. So they dragged those guys into a war
er...no one dragged European countries in to a war, aside from Russia, who started a war.
> The US didn't like the Nord Stream for a long-time (or any Russian gas getting bought by the EU) but couldn't get the Europeans to get along.
German here. To be fair: the US did have a point and it would have been a good idea to diversify our gas suppliers many years ago, but it's hard to compete with 4ct/kWh (and that's residential, not wholesale).
The price differential was the key driver behind our industry all but delivering themselves on a silver platter to Putin.
Any of these theories would require that Nordstream 2 also be destroyed. It remains. Germany has had all this time the option to turn it back on. They have declined. They refused to certify it well before the pipeline was destroyed. There was no dragging them to that position.
I am not really sure why Europeans get consistently treated as poodles being led around with treats or being beaten with sticks in geopolitical discussions.
(besides the fact that pipe A of NS2 has also been damaged)
Why would the existence of a new, still unused but surviving pipeline be a reason to dismiss US involvement in the sabotage?
Germany is already hostile to Russia (there are people like Gerhard Schröder, but they are not part of the current political establishment), so they are going to be hesitant to make changes that would be seen as being "soft vs Russia".
It's easier to keep the status quo than to make changes that would be politically fraught (like removing sanctions).
Sabotaging NS1 was almost certainly not done with the complicity of Germany, but despite the obvious economic damage it dealt, it was convenient for people who wanted to disentangle the economic relations that Germany had with Russia: this way there wouldn't be any contract that would have to be breached.
Moreover, sabotaging this is a very credible threat that... If Germany would want to actually approve use of NS2, they could risk and see the same thing happen again.
