A new report in German media reveals why Washington’s handling of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline deserves to rank high on the list of the Biden administration’s foreign-policy scandals.
Under Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany boosted the 760-mile-long pipeline project. The Biden administration, reluctant to pick a fight with Berlin, acquiesced to its wishes and waived tough, mandatory sanctions that would have killed it during Biden’s first year in office. In doing that, the administration poked holes in a sanctions regime enacted under Trump. In one of the previous administration’s final acts, on January 19, 2021, the State Department took steps against a Russian company and a vessel involved in the pipeline project.
Officially, the new administration claimed that it opposed Nord Stream 2, which would have run underwater from St. Petersburg to Germany — but it still took Merkel’s side, dispatching Victoria Nuland, then a senior State Department official, to Capitol Hill to defend the sanctions waivers.
Merkel claimed that the pipeline was purely a commercial project and that alarm over its potential weaponization against Ukraine was therefore misplaced. But this month we’ve learned, via a report in the German newspaper Handelsblatt, that Merkel “concealed” evidence that Moscow was choking off gas flows through the separate Nord Stream 1, which was already in operation, to pressure Berlin into speeding up regulatory review of the project.
The report indicates that Merkel lied publicly about this, by telling the newspaper in a 2021 interview that she had no reason to believe that Russia was limiting those flows. According to Handelsblatt, the then-chancellor actively “concealed” that information.
Publicly, Merkel asserted that Nord Stream 2 was a commercial project, rather than a geostrategic noose intended to weaken Ukraine by bypassing it and therefore depriving Kyiv of transit fees it was receiving. But the fact that Merkel knew that Moscow, via the state-owned Gazprom energy firm, was withholding gas flows indicates that she understood well how Russia uses pipelines as strategic instruments.
Handelsblatt also revealed that, despite German demands that Moscow not reduce gas flows through Ukraine if Nord Stream 2 were to go online, internal analysis conducted by the German ministry of economy said that it wouldn’t be possible to compel Gazprom to abide by any such commitment.
That history has now been overtaken by the war in Ukraine. Practically speaking, all of this has been rendered moot, since Chancellor Olaf Scholz halted the project as the Russian invasion began, and saboteurs later blew up both Nord Stream pipelines.
However scandalous Merkel’s conduct is here, it’s important not to miss how it reflects on Biden. The Biden administration spurned Kyiv, which had already been facing Russian aggression since 2014. It prioritized Berlin’s wishes over other dire warnings from front-line NATO allies, including Poland and the Baltic states. At one point, the governments of Ukraine and Poland even issued a public rebuke of a deal between Biden and Merkel crafted to help Washington defend its stance.
In other words: The Biden administration’s purported transatlanticism favored Merkel, as she concealed critical information about a regime that has its sights set on undermining the West. It left a lot of America’s European friends out in the cold while the Kremlin sharpened its knives. That’s a scandal on par with shielding a high-ranking State Department official accused of mishandling classified information and blocking the release of the FBI’s analysis of the Chinese-surveillance balloon.