Former Pentagon advisor points to Nord Stream suspects
Washington and London are the most likely culprits behind last week’s attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines, former Pentagon advisor and retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor has claimed.
He argued that the sabotage ploy would help ensure that Germany can’t back away from arming Ukrainian forces against Russia.
Speaking in an interview with podcast host Andrew Napolitano, Macgregor dismissed suggestions that Russia was responsible for the explosions that sprung leaks in the Nord Stream conduits, which carry natural gas across the Baltic Sea to Germany. “The Russians did not do this,” he said, noting that Russia’s economy is heavily dependent on energy exports. “The notion that they did, I think, is absurd.”
Macgregor, a special advisor to the secretary of defense under then-President Donald Trump, pointed out that explosives equivalent to thousands of pounds of TNT had to have been used to breach the pipelines. “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.”
Considering the level of sophistication required to pull off such an attack, Macgregor said, “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.” He noted that former Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski reacted to the Nord Stream attacks by saying, “Thank you, USA.”
The pipeline blasts came at a time when German leaders were “beginning to give the impression that they were no longer going to go along with this proxy war in Ukraine,” Macgregor said. He added, “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?
However, Macgregor said that such a strategy could backfire as the consequences of the Ukraine crisis cause more suffering among the German people. Just as Italians voted their leaders out, Scholz’s ruling party may fall, he added. “I think we’re on the very slippery, dangerous path that we never wanted to be on, which is the path to the end of NATO.”
