It’s Not Crazy To Think Biden Sabotaged Nord Stream To Deepen US Involvement In Ukraine

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It seems to me unlikely that Russia blew them up for the simple reason that doing so removed Moscow’s one non-nuclear strategic lever over western Europe. If the point was to communicate, “Germany will freeze this winter,” why not just shut off the pipeline and let the world know that Russia had done it?

Far more likely, I think, is that U.S. special forces did it on orders from the White House. Tucker Carlson floated this idea on Fox News earlier this week and was roundly mocked for it by the likes of The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, among others. But the theory cannot be so easily dismissed — not least because, as Carlson and others noted after the sabotage, Biden himself said back in February that if Russia invaded Ukraine, there would no longer be a Nord Stream 2, that “we will bring an end to it.”

To understand why the Biden administration would take such a drastic step, we need to understand something that has been true about the Democrats for nearly two decades, and certainly since the administration of Barack Obama: They tend to view all U.S. foreign policy as primarily an instrument of domestic politics. From their opportunistic opposition to the Iraq war going into the 2006 midterms, to Obama’s policies on Iran and the Arab Spring and especially Russia, Democrats have come to calibrate their responses to events abroad through a domestic partisan lens.

American foreign policy is for them a means to an end that has mostly to do with gaining and retaining power in Washington. Think of the now infamous “Russia Reset,” when in March 2009 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a giant red plastic “reset” push-button, a symbol — albeit a botched one, the button was mislabeled with the Russian word for “overcharged” — meant above all to be a repudiation of President George W. Bush’s Russia policy, which called for missile defense installations in eastern Europe that Obama promptly canceled in the name of the “reset.” For Obama, who ran for and won office as an anti-Iraq war candidate, Russia policy was less about U.S. or European security and all about showcasing to his domestic supporters just how unlike his predecessor he was.

The Russo-Ukrainian war is no different. Facing a historic midterm wipeout and the loss of Congress, it isn’t hard to see why, with November barreling down on us, the Biden administration would choose this moment to escalate in a way that draws NATO into the war as a way to rescue the president’s failing administration. Biden, in this scenario, becomes a war president. How much easier and more plausible it would be to then blame the tanking economy and rising prices on Putin and Russia? Easier, too, to denounce Republicans who oppose U.S. involvement as traitors to democracy — something Democrats already do with far less provocation.

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