The United States and Britain are the primary suspects in the sabotage attacks against Nord Stream 1 and 2 based on a cost-benefit analysis, former Trump Pentagon advisor Douglas Macgregor believes.
“Let’s use the process of elimination. Would the Russians destroy their own pipeline? 40 percent of Russian gross national product or gross domestic product consists of foreign currency that comes into the country to purchase natural gas, oil, coal and so forth. So the Russians did not do this. The notion that they did I think is absurd,” Macgregor said, speaking to syndicated columnist Judge Napolitano on the Judging Freedom podcast.
Germany, the pipeline’s primary European beneficiary, is also “extremely unlikely” to have sabotaged the infrastructure, Macgregor said, pointing to Berlin’s economic interest in the pipelines, and dependence on Nord Stream for the country’s energy security.
“Who else might be involved? Well the Poles apparently seem to be very enthusiastic about it. As you know the [former] Polish foreign minister said ‘Thank You United States of America’ for doing this,” Macgregor added, referring to Radoslaw Sikorski’s now-deleted tweet about the incident.
“Then you have to look at who are the state actors that have the capability to do this. And that means the Royal Navy, the United States Navy Special Operations. I think that’s pretty clear. We know that thousands of pounds of TNT were used because these pipelines are enormously robust. You have several inches of concrete around various metal alloys to move the natural gas. So it’s not something that you could simply drop a grenade down at the end of a fish line and disrupt. That means it takes a certain amount of sophistication,” the former official, who is also a retired US Army colonel, explained.
On Wednesday, sources told the Wall Street Journal that Danish officials at a NATO meeting had calculated that the force of more than 500 kg of TNT had been detected in each of the explosions disrupting the Nord Stream pipelines, which led to the release of massive methane bubbles on the surface of the Baltic Sea.
Macgregor suggested that the sabotage attack on the Russian gas pipelines may have ultimately been perpetrated after Berlin, the economic and military “gorilla in the room when it comes to the EU and NATO,” began “to give the impression that they were no longer going to go along with this proxy war in Ukraine.”
“I’m hesitant to say ‘we know it must have been Washington’. I can’t say that because we just don’t know. But it’s very clear that we have foreclosed Berlin’s options. Berlin was drifting away from this alliance. [Chancellor] Olaf Scholz said ‘I’m not sending any more equipment, I won’t send any tanks’. Now he’s in a bind because the United States has simply robbed him of the option of bailing out. Who’s going to supply him gas and oil and coal and everything else if he bails out? Where does he turn now? And remember, the Germans, who are facing terrible consequences at home refuse to restart nuclear power plants,” the former official said.
Macgregor believes that the German government may eventually collapse due to the energy crisis, and suggested that the Ukrainian security crisis has also placed NATO itself on a “slippery path” to potential disintegration in the long run.
'Unprecedented Act of State Terrorism'
The Kremlin characterized the sabotage of the Nord Stream network as an “unprecedented act of state terrorism.” In an address to the nation on Friday dedicated to the entry of four new regions into the Russian Federation, President Vladimir Putin accused the “Anglo-Saxons” of sabotaging the pipelines to destroy Europe’s energy infrastructure. “It is clear to everyone who stands to gain. Those who benefit are responsible, of course,” Putin said.
Also on Friday, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service chief Sergei Naryshkin told reporters that Moscow has materials that “point to the Western footprint in organizing and carrying out” the sabotage.
Officials in Denmark, Sweden and Germany have not ruled out deliberate disruption, and NATO has paid lip service to supporting investigations “underway to determine the origin of the damage.”
A Pentagon spokesman refused to answer a question by Sputnik about the suspected presence of US military helicopters in areas off Denmark’s Bornholm Island where the gas leaks occurred prior to the incidents.
Meanwhile, Western officials and media have claimed that Russia sabotaged its own pipelines. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed speculation to that effect last week, saying the West's claims were "quite predictable," and that it was "predictably stupid and absurd to express such hypotheses."