Senate Democrats voted down Sen. Ted Cruz’s bill to reimpose sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 energy pipeline on Thursday. Democrats are instead set to approve a weaker, deferred sanctions bill next week.
Democrats have made a serious strategic error, and Vladimir Putin is already demonstrating why. The Russian leader has suspended thermal coal supplies to Ukraine for nearly three months and has reversed energy flows through his Yamal gas pipeline to Europe for three weeks. Simultaneously, Russia’s Gazprom energy giant (the CEO of which takes direct orders from Putin) is refusing to provide increased supplies to Europe. This has helped to drive European gas prices far above $1,000 per 1,000 cubic meters.
It is thus unclear why Democrats are willing to give Putin a new Nord Stream 2 stranglehold over Europe. But that’s what they’ve just done.
Nor could their timing be much worse. As senators were voting, national security adviser Jake Sullivan was addressing the White House press corps, warning of Russian deception efforts to establish a pretext for invasion. Russia’s defense minister recently invented, for example, a U.S.-Ukrainian plot to launch a chemical weapons attack on pro-Russian areas of southeastern Ukraine. Such plotting flows from the Soviet strategic theory of “maskirovka,” or “camouflage/masking,” and is a favorite of Vladimir Putin. Russia has likely been applying political maskirovka in its negotiations with the West this week.
Pushed by Sens. Chuck Schumer and Bob Menendez, the weaker sanctions bill would impose a range of moderate (not severe) sanctions on Russia in the event that it reinvades Ukraine (as is very likely). Critically, however, their bill doesn’t explicitly commit to sanctioning Nord Stream 2, even in the event of such an invasion. Instead, it pledges only to “consider all available and appropriate measures.”
This political jargon can be translated into one word: deflection.
The White House and Senate Democrats insist that by not sanctioning Nord Stream 2 now, they are giving the West leverage over Putin. They insist that their approach preserves good relations with Germany, as if this were somehow the preeminent concern of U.S. foreign policy. Democrats also strongly hint that Germany will not operate the pipeline if Russia attacks Ukraine.
This has always been a fallacious argument.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his SPD party (the majority partner in Germany’s coalition government) seem even more determined to appease Putin than was Angela Merkel. Green Party leader and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock is the only minister seriously committed to European solidarity. And Germany, on Thursday, made official the Democratic Party’s fallacy. Speaking to a German broadcaster, Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht argued, “We should not drag [Nord Stream 2] into this conflict. … we need to solve it in talks — that’s the opportunity that we have at the moment, and we should use it rather than draw a link to projects that have no connection to this conflict.”
Does that seem like the rhetoric of a government ready to get tough on Putin? So much for Democrats’ German special relationship.
Putin is salivating. Nord Stream 2 represents the central linchpin of his energy-extortion strategy in Europe. The pipeline will allow Russia to make its winter heating of European homes and businesses conditional upon European political appeasement. It will also, contrary to unserious U.S.-German pledges to prevent such an outcome, allow Putin to deny Ukraine billions of dollars in annual energy transit fees for supplies through existing pipelines.
To be sure, Germany may delay Nord Stream 2’s activation by a few months if Russia invades Ukraine. But if Putin tells Scholz that energy supplies and price relief mean activating Nord Stream 2, Scholz will blink, Ukraine and trans-Atlantic security be damned.
Democrats fail to realize that Germany is no longer a serious U.S. ally on issues related to Russia (or China, for that matter). Berlin hosts Russian chemical weapons programs. It refuses — now officially — to spend 2% of its GDP on defense as its NATO obligations require. It has now abandoned NATO’s nuclear deterrence posture. Put another way, who cares if the Germans are upset over Nord Stream 2 sanctions? What matters is trans-Atlantic security.
The retention of U.S. military bases in Germany is not an excuse. The United States should bite the metaphorical bullet and move the bases to Lithuania and Poland. Whatever its other problems with the democratic rule of law (problems that the U.S. should address), at least Warsaw takes trans-Atlantic security seriously.
