Donald Trump is nothing if not mercurial. Tariffs are announced, then delayed, dropped, or reannounced. Friends become enemies and enemies friends. Federal workers are fired and rehired. The only certainty is uncertainty – and chaos.
So it is, apparently, with Russian natural-gas exports, which for decades were the lifeline of Germany and other energy-intensive economies in northern Europe.
In 2018, during his first term as U.S. president, Mr. Trump ripped into Germany and its then-chancellor, Angela Merkel, for making Germany’s energy supplies “totally controlled by Russia.” He was talking specifically about Berlin’s support for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline across the Baltic Sea that would double up Germany’s dependency on cheap Russian gas.
Trump 2.0 seems to have a different – even opposite – view on Russian gas exports.
Reports this month in the Financial Times and in the German press suggested that the United States and Russia are mulling a restart of the Nord Stream pipeline with the backing of American investors. Russian President Vladimir Putin said as much earlier this week at a Kremlin press conference on the U.S. attempts to broker a ceasefire with Ukraine.
“If the U.S. and Russia reach an agreement on energy, then the gas pipe for Europe will be secure,” he said. “This will be useful for Europe, because it will get cheap Russian gas.”
The reversal was both astonishing and unremarkable. Astonishing because reopening the Nord Stream pipeline could, once again, make Germany beholden to Russian energy and the blackmail whims of Mr. Putin; unremarkable because Mr. Trump is plainly cozying up to the Russian dictator at the expense of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Unremarkable also because Mr. Trump is transaction-oriented; a deal to reopen Nord Stream with American money is better than the lack of one, never mind the potentially dire geopolitical consequences for Europe.
Both Nord Stream 1 and 2 played a starring role in the first year of the war – and created one of its most enduring mysteries. Who sabotaged them?
Nord Stream 1 had been delivering Russian gas to Germany since 2011. The parallel pipeline system, Nord Stream 2, was fully built by the time the war started but denied an operating licence by Chancellor Olaf Scholz. A few months after the war began, the Kremlin reduced, then eliminated, Nord Stream 1 gas deliveries, citing almost certainly bogus maintenance issues.
A massive subsea explosion on Sept. 26, 2022, made it impossible for either pipeline to make deliveries even if the war had ended by then. Three of the pipelines’ four tubes were wrecked.
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Russia denied blowing up the pipelines, credibly so. Why would it wreck one of its main energy export assets? U.S. investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, citing anonymous sources, said the White House ordered the sabotage. He noted that, only two days before the Russian invasion, then-president Joe Biden said “we will bring an end to it,” meaning the Nord Stream pipelines, if Russia were to invade.
Later, a flurry of media reports blamed the Ukrainians for the attack. Since then, almost all the investigations into the explosions have been quietly dropped.
The lack of Russian gas triggered an energy crisis in Germany and elsewhere in Europe that saw the closing or downsizing of many energy-intensive factories. Germany went into shallow recession. Norway and the United States came to the rescue by flooding northern Europe with liquefied natural gas (Canada had none to sell). But the LNG was expensive compared with Russian gas.
The FT broke the story that Matthias Warnig, a former Stasi officer in East Germany who ran Nord Stream 2′s parent company on behalf of Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled gas giant, is behind the effort to restart the pipeline with support of American investors. He is a friend of Mr. Putin and has a backchannel to the Trump White House. Several reports have said that Stephen Lynch, a Florida businessman with close ties to the Russian energy industry, wants to invest in the pipeline to “de-Russify” it, effectively putting it under American control. None of the men said to be involved would comment.
Germany’s new government has shown no interest in the reopening of the Nord Stream pipelines, which have become a symbol of the country’s failed energy policy, that is, the overreliance of gas from a capricious supplier with a cruelty streak. But Germany’s factories have suffered greatly from high energy prices, so it might be tempted to resume Russian gas deliveries if the price were right and the war ends.
Doing so would be a mistake for Germany. Paying for LNG (and ramping up renewable energy) is a small price to pay for preventing Russia from cutting off gas exports ever again.
At the same time, a reopened Nord Stream with American ownership would seem like an own goal. In 2024, the United States supplied 45 per cent of the European Union’s LNG purchases, valued at US$13-billion, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Were the Nord Stream pipelines to operate again, American LNG sales would certainly fall, possibly plummet.
But profits for the U.S. LNG industry may not be the overriding goal for Mr. Trump and his backers. He obviously likes Mr. Putin more than he does Mr. Zelensky and seems keen to restore Russia’s sanctions-free role in Western markets.
What better way to start than to give the Nord Stream pipelines a new lease on life? In other words, rewarding the invader.