On March 2nd, Rania Khalek headlined “Bombshell w/ Seymour Hersh: US Blowing Up Nord Stream Was ‘Act of War’” and he told Khalek that ever since at least the time of the Kennedy Administration (1960), the U.S. Government has been doing all it can to end Germany’s trade with Russia — Russia having by far the least costly gas and oil to sell to Germany (which then would resell some of it to the rest of Europe), and Germany buying that (the lowest-cost energy) to supply to its industries so as to make Germany the manufacturing power-house of Europe and thus a major economic competitor even to the U.S. itself. Hersh said that Joe Biden’s having approved the plan by Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken, and virtually his entire foreign-policy team, to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines, appealed to the President for that reason: in order to keep Germany down — not ONLY in order to keep Russia down.
Then, at 26:30 into the interview, Ms. Khalek summarized and said: “So, basically, what you are saying is this was a decision that you believe was made in order to break obviously Western Europe off from Russia, so they have to stay stuck in this war in Ukraine.” Perhaps she didn’t get the idea that what Hersh had described was a plan by the U.S. Government, ever since at least 1960, to make Germany the economic power-house of Europe and to weaken all of Europe including Germany by keeping their energy-costs as high as possible, and by making Germany the middle-man supplying Russian oil and gas to the rest of the EU. Nonetheless, she got the point that, “Doesn’t this qualify as an act of war? It’s like a terrorist attack” But a terrorist attack, such as the ones on 9/11, are generally acts of military or paramilitary warfare, against physical assets — not acts directly of economic warfare, against the economy itself. She said that it was “against critical energy-infrastructure to get your way,” but this interpretation, yet again, “to get your way,” was more from the idea of a military invasion, than from the idea of economic warfare (America’s economic competition against Germany and against all of the countries in the EU).
At 29:00, Khalek broke in with “And also, like, because you are talking about an act of war against your own allies.” Hersh responded: “Nobody wants to talk about that.” He immediately continued that by his side-tracking off into how protective of the anonymity of his sources he is. Khalek responded to that by noting “Ned Price calling your report ‘utter and complete nonsense’,” and neither she nor he got back to, and following-up from, what Hersh had said was “Nobody wants to talk about that” — and, thus, they both implicitly included themselves in that “Nobody.”
The rest of the one-hour interview was devoted to personal anecdotes and exchanging standard liberal trivia.
Although Hersh had seemed to think that the U.S. Government could accept Germany’s benefitting as a middle-man in some Russian energy-sales to Europe, the Khalek-Hersh discussion didn’t get into at what point the potential that Nord Stream might have lowered energy-costs to the EU too much for the U.S. Government to tolerate, had generated Biden’s decision to destroy Nord Stream. All that seemed clear from the discussion is that, for a very long time, U.S. leaders have been in an economic war against Europe — and not ONLY against Russia.
So, if Germans, or Europeans in general, don’t care much about whether the U.S. Government has actually, for many decades, been at war economically against Germany and against other European countries, then they’ve got lots of company, because virtually nobody else does, either. The U.S. Government — apparently — has no opposition internationally, to its being at war against the economies of its own ‘allies’. If they’ll accept it, then it won’t have opposition anywhere. Does this mean: they deserve it? If a victim accepts, without objection, its own victimization, then who ought to object to it? Nobody? Really? Does that make sense?