An American investor tried last month to sell top German economic officials on an audacious plan to buy a Russian undersea pipeline. Despite years of international friction over the pipeline, he proposed to eventually activate it and deliver natural gas to Germany.
The investor, Stephen P. Lynch, had already made the pitch to the Trump administration, which he was betting would want U.S. control over a pivotal piece of energy infrastructure. Now the Germans wanted to hear for themselves about Mr. Lynch’s proposal to lead a takeover of the much-criticized pipeline on the floor of the Baltic Sea, called Nord Stream 2.
The German officials were skeptical in their May 6 meeting in Berlin, Mr. Lynch recalls, asking him how he intended to persuade them to allow Russian gas to flow through the pipeline, which was partially sabotaged in 2022. That was not his job, Mr. Lynch says he answered, predicting that the Germans would persuade themselves eventually of the benefits of buying cheap Russian gas again.
Amid the frantic geopolitical jockeying of recent months, touched off by Mr. Trump’s re-engaging with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the future of Europe’s energy supply has emerged as a source of tension and vulnerability as the continent seeks to chart an independent course.
Leaders in Berlin and Brussels have maneuvered in recent weeks to foreclose any possibility of new Russian gas imports, seeking a decisive break with the decades before Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when Europe’s reliance on cheap Russian energy gave the Kremlin a powerful point of leverage. When President Trump meets with Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, at the White House on Thursday, Mr. Merz will reiterate his opposition to using Nord Stream 2 if the issue comes up, Mr. Merz’s spokesman said this week.
As Russia mobilized for war, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. vowed that, if Moscow invaded, “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2,” and he imposed sanctions on the state-controlled company that owned it, while Germany refused to allow the newly completed pipeline to begin operation. After the invasion, European businesses and governments sharply reduced their dependence on Russian gas, trying to punish Moscow economically even though the effort came at considerable cost to themselves.