Germany’s potential hesitation to supply more weapons to the Ukrainian regime was the impetus for US President Joe Biden’s decision to order the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, Pulitzer-prize winning American journalist Seymour Hersh has claimed.
In an interview published Friday, Hersh told China Daily reporter Zhao Manfeng that "the only thing" he can "think and suppose" is that Biden "was afraid of Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz not wanting to put more guns and more arms into Ukraine."
"Those who were involved [in the bombing] had the same thought," said Hersh, who noted he’s unsure whether Biden took the decision "in anger or in punishment."
But regardless of his motives, with the Western proxy war against Russia not "going well" for the American ruling class, the US president "decided in late September to trigger the mines," the journalist explained.
In February, Hersh exposed the US role in the plot to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines in a widely-read report on Substack that cited at least one source with "direct knowledge of the operational planning." Prior to the blasts the pipeline, which drew repeated criticism from the US, pumped Russian natural gas into Europe.
Given Biden’s public threat to "bring an end" to the pipelines just two weeks before Russian forces began their special military operation in Ukraine, Hersh said, there "wasn’t much of a secret what we wanted to do."
But the journalist said that, looking back at the American foreign policy elite’s well-established objections to Russian-European energy cooperation, he wasn’t "surprised one bit" by the Biden administration’s decision to sabotage the pipelines.
"Because Russia has a nearly ‘inexhaustible’ supply of ‘cheap and very clean’ natural gas, America has a long-standing history… of being very disturbed by the Russian gas and oil sales to Western Europe," Hersh stated.
The American establishment has "always been bothered by the fact that Russia… was ‘weaponizing’ gas," Hersh explained, borrowing a word that’s come to dominate mainstream Western coverage of Russian energy exports.
"And that’s the theme of American foreign policy towards Russia," Hersh said, underscoring the revelation that the Biden administration blew up the pipelines didn’t surprise him "one bit" when he first discovered their role in the plot.
Regardless, "the net effect" of the attack on Nord Stream is that Biden "cut off a major power source through Western Europe," the acclaimed journalist told the outlet.
"So Europe is in a crisis now."
And with tensions rising across the continent as elevated energy prices persist, Hersh suggested the American president’s decision to bomb the pipelines on which a major US ally relied on could come back to bite him soon.
"Down the road, this summer and fall, it’s going to be very difficult for Biden," the journalist predicted, adding: "he’s going to get a lot of criticism for what he did, that’s for sure."