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Nord Stream 2: in the headlock of the USA

Nord Stream 2: in the headlock of the USA

Veröffentlicht am: 29. Dezember 2019 | Anzahl Kommentare: noch keine

By Hermann Ploppa.

Ted Cruz, Republican senator in the Washington Congress, who is a permanent candidate for the US presidency, and his colleague Ron Johnson do not hesitate to write and send a blackmail letter against Edward Heerema. Heerema is director of the Swiss company Allseas Group, which is leading the construction of the disputed Nord Stream 2 pipeline in a consortium. Although it has no access to the sea itself, the Swiss Allseas Group has the world’s most efficient ship for laying gas pipes on the seabed. In the best Wild West manner, Senators Cruz and Johnson threatened the Swiss CEO with massive stress if he did not immediately stop laying pipeline pipes in the Baltic Sea.

Previously, Republican Ted Cruz and his Democratic colleague Jeanne Shaheen had already crammed the so-called ” Protecting Europe’s Energy Security Act ” through both houses of the Washington Congress. A law, ladies and gentlemen, not a resolution. Now imagine if the German Bundestag were to unanimously pass a “law to enforce social justice in the US state of Texas”. It would be bizarre, and the world community would rightly shake its head at such an aberration of the human spirit. But the fact is that the USA is something different than just one state among many others. The USA quite simply has the right of the strongest on its side, and considers itself invulnerable. It has worked well so far, except for Vietnam and Iran.

And although our Foreign Minister Heiko Maas owes everything he represents in politics to the pro-American networks in our country, he also noticed the blatant violation of international regulations in the case of the US sanctions policy. He said to the US blackmail manoeuvres: “European energy policy is decided in Europe and not in the USA … We fundamentally reject foreign intervention and sanctions with extraterritorial effect.”

Altmeier’s Department of Commerce was already more lax: one takes note of the US Congress law “with regret” (1). And Mrs. Merkel let it be understood that one did not want to set the “sanctions spiral” in motion with one’s own countermeasures (2). Very humane. Yes, 2,100 kilometres of the impressive pipeline network from Vyborg in Russia to Lubmin near Greifswald have already been completed. There are still 300 kilometres to go, including the stretch from the Danish border to Hannover. Should actually be finished by New Year’s Eve now. But then the Danish government had been reluctant for a while to let a section of Nord Stream 2 pass through their territorial waters, which took a lot of time to complete. This is important because, at the end of the year, a contract with Ukraine, which had allowed Russian gas to pass through that country, expires. Subsequent regulations are not yet in the bag.

It is clear, then, that the long hand of our great ally, the United States, seems to reach quite far into the decisions of smaller neighbouring European states. But since this temporary game cannot really stop Nord Stream, the sanctions law have been passed. By the way, the US law also affects the Turkstream southern bypass (3). Another pipeline project that will pump Russian gas past Ukraine to Western European customers through the Black Sea. It is all the more understandable why the Russian government, whatever one may think about international law issues, could not leave Crimea to NATO. Turkstream would probably have fallen under the wheels of NATO’s maritime naval force. It is doubtful whether it is wise from such geostrategic aspects that the US has been constantly wrestling with Turkey, NATO’s second strongest power, since the failed coup against Erdogan in 2016. In general, the weakened, benevolent hegemon is fighting with more and more “partners” around the globe, just like an alcoholic who has had his last beer taken away. China, Iran, Russia, Turkey – and now also the European Union. Only hastily by the USA newly installed fascist regimes in Brazil, Bolivia and who knows where else follow everywhere synchronized and blindly with the world ruler in all errors and confusion of geopolitics.

Fossil fuels are the juice of life of the Anglo-American world domination (4). The USA imposed the fixation of all industrial development on fossil energy with extreme force. With this fixation Pax Angloamericana had created a machine for printing money. To enforce the fossil paradigm required two world wars. Germany was also affected. After the First World War, the two pariah states Germany and the Soviet Union joined forces and forged not only an extremely close military alliance with the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922. Germany now also purchased Soviet oil, which was marketed in Germany at over 2000 filling stations by the Soviet DEROP chain of filling stations, among others. After the Reichstag coup d’État, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi organisation not only broke up the military alliance with the Soviet Union, but also the extremely successful DEROP petrol station chain in order to make room for Anglo-American oil companies. Under Hitler, 90 percent of the German oil industry was now under Anglo-American control.

After the Second World War, the newly strengthened Federal Republic of Germany began to purchase natural gas and also crude oil from the Soviet Union. Even then, the USA imposed a so-called pipe embargo on the Soviet Union. Allegedly, as is so often the case, European security interests were threatened if the German Mannesmann group sold the Soviets pipes for their pipelines. German industry was outraged when the then German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer gave in to pressure from the USA and translated the sanctions into his own laws. Adenauer only did this in order to get out of the American headlock in his own way through his Franco-German alliance with de Gaulle. In the phase of détente, West German pipes could then be supplied to the East, and since then Western Europe has been obtaining its gas mainly from the Soviet Union, from which Russia was later to emerge. And when the new Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan tried to intimidate Western Europe once again and demanded the cessation of Eastern gas imports, the Europeans simply ignored the cowboy’s exhortations from Washington on a large scale.

Today, unfortunately, the cards are somewhat differently shuffled. For where the Soviet bloc and the European Community used to be direct neighbours, a belt of states loyal to the USA now separates Old Europe from Russia. After the implosion of the Soviet bloc, the transatlanticists implanted new elites in the former satellite states of the Soviet Union, who were trained and instructed in the USA. Today, the former Warsaw Pact states are dominated by political forces that are far more America-hearted and also far more market radical than the elites of former Western Europe, which former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld derided as “Old Europe”. That is to say: the moderately pro-American Western European states with their consensus-oriented social and economic policies are obsolete models.

Whereas in the past the Federal Republic of Germany was the model student of the Americans, the USA today has great hopes for Poland. The Polish governments, whether liberal or right-wing populist, are making great efforts to get every imaginable stick they can find to Washington. They are offering billions of dollars to the USA to please open military bases in Poland. The Polish government has long since succeeded in raising the country’s military budget to over two percent of the gross domestic product. In order to buy with the money of course only military equipment from US-American production. When US President Trump visited Poland, the government there announced that it would willingly buy large quantities of American fracking gas. The money wasted on the USA is of course missing from the Polish social budget. The quality of life in Poland is still rather modest and the exodus to the West continues unabated. At the same time, the strategists in Washington and Warsaw are tinkering with a new alliance of states within the EU, namely the Intermarium. Intermarium is the latinized name for the Polish word: “Miedzymorze”, which means: between the seas. The Polish strategists have unearthed a concept of their former politician Pilsudski, namely an alliance of states around Poland from the Baltic to the Black Sea. So, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, plus Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria, which circle around the Polish sun as planets.

If this concept of intermarriage were to take on a more concrete form, Western Europe, and Germany in particular, would be hermetically sealed off from the markets in Asia and Eastern Europe. This would be a geopolitical headlock that could easily lead to the total economic suffocation of Germany. This is the basis of the US calculation behind the current sanctions efforts. And we should be clear about one thing: Russia has every possible option to move towards Asia. The new alliance system of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the promising option of the Silk Road are a safe ticket to a better future for Russia. Russia’s President Putin can watch the latest cowboy attitudes from Washington with serenity.

However, things are getting tighter for the German economy. And a German caste of politicians, almost ninety percent of whom now come from pro-American think tanks and lobby groups, is completely unsuited to carry out liberation strikes against the American economic war against Germany. The war against VW, the purchase of the rotten Monsanto company by Bayer out of incomprehensible suicide impulses; the war against the German bank; and now the war against the energy artery in the form of Nord Stream 2. If the German population does not now force a radical paradigm shift, the American headlock will, I emphasize it once again, turn into a final suffocation. A German economy that is disconnected from its future markets is already in free fall, as is already evident in the car industry. At some point, Germany will then only export cuckoo clocks and the Germans will earn their money as tourist guides who guide Chinese and Russian tourists through Cologne Cathedral.