Is NATO Closer To War With Russia After Nord Stream Sabotage?
- NATO pledged a “united and determined” response to the apparent sabotage on the Nord Stream pipelines discovered Monday and Tuesday.
- Although Russia most likely conducted the attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines, NATO is unlikely to invoke a provision requiring all members to come to the collective defense of a member that sustains an attack, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
- “NATO will not likely invoke Article V because the alliance is not eager to get into a conflict with Russia,” said Jasen Castillo, a professor at Texas A&M University with a background in military strategy and defense policy.
Russia may have bombed the Nord Stream pipelines earlier this week, but the North Atlantic organization created for collective defense against Moscow will not likely mount a military response, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has pledged a forceful response to “deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage” that blasted holes in the twin Nord Stream pipelines carrying gas from Russia to Germany. While the organization is bound by Article V of the treaty to go to war if any member nation suffers a direct attack and has all but explicitly accused Russia of orchestrating the attacks, it will likely avoid invoking a military response to Russia, according to experts on NATO and defense. (RELATED: NATO Officially Calls Nord Stream Attacks ‘Sabotage’)
“First, the pipeline wasn’t working any more, so [the leak] doesn’t change things that much,” Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former assistant secretary of defense, told the DCNF.
In addition, member states may find it impossible to determine whether Russia conducted the attack or ordered one of its proxy militias to do so. “Even if you get 70% that it’s Russia, you’re not going to get 100%,” Korb added.
NATO allies vowed to “deter and defend against the coercive use of energy” and other aggressive acts that fall short of overt acts of war in a statement immediately after the attacks. The organization asserted a “united and determined” response to any deliberate attack on critical infrastructure, including gas installations.
“Russia has repeatedly committed acts of aggression against NATO members or on NATO territory that fall below the threshold of conventional war,” John Hardie, deputy director of the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the DCNF, but none of those acts have triggered a military response.
“NATO will not likely invoke Article V because the alliance is not eager to get into a conflict with Russia,” Jasen Castillo, a professor at Texas A&M University with a background in military strategy and defense policy, said to the DCNF.
Countries suspect that Russia sabotaged its own pipelines to cut off any possibility of restoring the supply of Russian gas to an energy-starved Europe, according to CNN, citing U.S. and Danish military officials.
One European country detected Russian warships transiting through the area of the Baltic Sea where the four confirmed explosions took place, CNN reported.
However, Moscow called attempts to pin the blame on Russia “predictably stupid” Wednesday, Reuters reported. With the destruction of the pipelines, which may remain indefinitely offline, Russia lost “very expensive” gas and a route of delivering it to the country’s largest market, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said.
“Are we interested in that? No, we are not,” Peskov said.
In a since-deleted tweet, a Polish diplomat appeared to thank the U.S. after news of the gas leaks surfaced.
Intimations the U.S. sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines are “preposterous,” State Department Press Secretary Ned Price said.
“My guess, like NATO’s guess, is that this is an act of sabotage by Russia,” Castillo said.
Russia sought to manipulate the supply of gas to Europe as a means of “coercive leverage over NATO,” Castillo explained. Although only one of the Nord Stream pipelines operated at full capacity prior to the war in Ukraine, Russia has reduced flows to a trickle as punishment for their attempt to isolate the Russian economy and provide military equipment to Ukraine.
Russia could have incapacitated the pipelines “to make sure the Europeans recognize it’s going to be a cold winter,” affording the Kremlin a symbolic victory, Korb told the DCNF. “I can’t see the U.S. doing it or NATO allies because I don’t think it benefits them,” he added.
“It’s hard to see another country having the capability and the will to do this,” said Hardie.
Military escalation that could further charge Russian threats to deploy nuclear weapons against Ukraine and its supporters, Castillo said.
Members could scale up naval and air patrols of the Baltic Sea as a deterrent or increase sanctions pressure on Russia, experts said.
If Russia did blow up the pipelines, the act will “come back to haunt them” Korb said to the DCNF.
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The US is a suspect and here’s why: The White House has already declared they are at “war against fossil fuels” here at home, and they have the same attitude internationally. With the pipeline down, that eliminates Europe’s temptation to stop supporting Biden’s sanctions against Russia. It also will reduce Russia’s income from exported gas; and moreover cost them countless billions to replace ( as it’s looking irreparable by some estimates). The White House “wins” on all the above, thus they remain my top suspect. The attack is also a fairly cowardly and ill-thought out decision which looks to have the current administration’s fingerprints all over it.
I heartily agree. Russia does *not* stand to benefit by blowing up a major source of profit for their country. Besides they could just shut it off when they want to and turn it back on when they need the money.
No investigations? Another he said she said, someone said sort of story. We’ll never know, I guess. But a lot of people will suffer for it in some way. Ask ol’ biden what he plans on doing with Russia’s energy product out of the picture for many.
This is, by far, the biggest and scariest story as this Administration continues to push us toward WWIII. What little coverage that has been on the mainstream media suggests, of course, that it’s Putin’s sabotage. Which is nonsense and totally illogical as it is his continuing gas and oil revenue from Europe that is funding his war effort and his main source of revenue and his biggest negotiating tool. But Biden doesn’t want peace and he has suggested previously that he would somehow end the Nord Stream II pipeline, even though he supported it before the Ukraine war started. Clearly Biden only cares about “regime change” in Russian and never mind if Europe and the U.S. collapse along the way. He is playing a dangerous game and we have no idea, at this point, what the consequences of his uncalculated and feckless policies will be.
I’m so tired of all the Politicians waving Ukrainian flags and shouting “We must stand for Democracy” and proclaiming Zelenskyy a populist “hero” when he is, in fact, just another dictator and corrupt politician. Ukraine is the corrupt government that took a Billion dollar bribe from Joe Biden to fire the prosecutor that was looking into his son Hunter’s money laundering scheme and has historically been known to be a massively corrupt country. In amazing hypocrisy, they always talk about Ukraine’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity” while we have exactly zero territorial integrity with a completely open border that allows in millions of unvaccinated illegals; including criminals, cartels, terrorists (over 70 identified so far) and the Chinese made fentanyl that kills over a hundred thousand American citizens every year. Now all the Democrats and the war mongering Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham vote to send additional money (up to 54 billion so far) to fund a proxy war against Putin that we didn’t want, didn’t vote for and can’t win. They are complicit in the constant money printing of this administration that is the primary cause of the massive inflation that’s bankrupting our country and our citizens. And they are complicit in the reckless escalation of a war that was never in our National Security interests but may lead to world wide destruction.