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Breaking news from the Spiegel (German weekly center left newspaper) on the sabotage of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline:
While the article itself doesn't speculate at all what this could mean, commenters are less reluctant. General tenor: this indicates that the saboteur was a state actor within NATO, probably the US, maybe Poland with US backing, and Sweden is paying ransom in order to be able to join NATO.
I don't think Sweden's action here gives us any insight into who the culprit is. It could simple be because of administrative or political reasons (some dude wants to run his own investigation, and feels he'd be second fiddle to Germany). Or some other country is pressuring for this because they want multiple investigations that will both come to the same conclusion. If a joint investigation concludes "it was Russia", Russia will just say the committee was flawed or w/e. If multiple investigations say Russia, even if they are all working off the same evidence (or lack of), then it seems more credible to the average person. How could multiple investigations by multiple countries be wrong!
If Sweden blew the pipeline, they'd have an interest in being part of the joint investigation. If Sweden knows who did it and wanted to cover for them, they'd have an interest in the joint investigation.
The other possibility is that Sweden is being pushed out, but it's being framed as Sweden wanting to do their own investigation. Maybe NATO countries don't want Sweden to know who did it, and are worried that a joint investigation with Sweden would expose who did. Maybe NATO isn't willing to share classified intelligence with Sweden. Maybe Germany and/or Denmark are the culprits, and they don't want Sweden knowing.
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I just don't understand how there's any confusion as to who's behind the sabotage. We know there were explosions - Danish and Swedish seismologists reported fairly substantial explosions of 100 kg of TNT or more.
We know the US benefits a great deal from this - they said so themselves. The US has consistently opposed Nordstream 2 and wants these pipelines shut down.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/10/03/blinken-deems-the-bombing-of-nord-stream-pipelines-a-tremendous-opportunity-n2613896
The US had many methods to blow up these pipelines. People have raised the P3 overflights over the area, US navy in the region. My personal favourite is the USN's minelaying exercises just off Bornholm Island in June, in the precise part of the Baltic Sea where the explosions happened. Leave a few mines (or the advanced underwater drones they were testing) from the exercises behind, just in case Putin does escalatory moves like mobilizing more troops for Ukraine. Lo and behold, shortly after he mobilizes, the pipelines explode.
If it were the Russians, why would they blow up their own pipeline and not an enemy pipeline? They control Nordstream, they don't control the Norwegian-Polish pipeline or other pipelines that reduce their leverage and fuel their enemies. Why would they do something that creates a 'tremendous opportunity' for the US to sell LNG to Europe and render them more dependant on America? Why do they reduce their own leverage over Europe? People have suggested that it was Putin's plot to secure himself from regime change by denying a revenue source that a successor could draw upon by rapprochement with the West. But a successor to Putin can draw upon the resources of the entire Russian state! There's hundreds of billions of dollars worth of seized foreign currency reserve that they could angle to get back. And there are many other oil and gas pipelines and opportunities for graft in Russia. These pipelines in particular might add a few marginal tens of billions on top of an already vast sum of loot. The burning-bridges theory is not compelling, nor is the signalling theory. If you want to show you can blow up a pipeline, you blow up an enemy pipeline not your own.
The argument that Putin blew up his own pipeline that gives him leverage over Europe is silly. The US has both the means and the motive. When Iranian nuclear facilities are sabotaged we don't imagine that it might be the Iranians blowing up their own facilities - we know it's the US or Israelis or both.
In this case, it's the US either directly or via Poland. Poland and the US have identical interests and are very closely aligned. They're basically the same entity. It's not reflexive anti-Americanism to blame America for sabotage that advances their perceived strategic and commercial interests and hurts one or perhaps two US rivals. If it were the Polish-Norwegian pipeline that exploded, I'd blame Russia.
Is it a feature of slavic warfare to do lots of false-flag attacks, or to just claim everything is a false-flag attack?
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Well, there's historical form for this kind of misstep. The Confederate burning of the cotton crop appears as a perfect analogy here. The idea was that once the Confederacy starved Britain of cotton, they would realise how important they were and intervene. But it was a total failure, obviously, since Britain just started getting cotton from elsewhere and the move only antagonised them. The Russians could have been attempting something similar. If they stopped gas supplies by sabotage, they could have intended to so cripple the central European economies that they stop support for Ukraine once the tap turned back on, lest they face another stoppage. A stupid idea, perhaps, but I don't suppose Jefferson Davis was any more stupid than Putin is.
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Possible reasons why Russia blew the pipes;
They want Germany to agree to use NS2.
As propaganda for Russians, so they feel like the west is attacking them
As a demonstration to other countries that they have the resources to take out pipelines and other infrastructure and not leave a trace of evidence (or see if those countries can find any trace of evidence)
Russia wanted the pipelines out of commission because they are shifting their focus towards the east, and they are going to strip down this pipeline so they can speed up construction of those eastern pipelines
Backroom peace talks focused too heavily on NS1, and Russia wanted that off the table
The possibility of getting fuel from the pipes makes gas futures slightly cheaper, and Russia wanted to drive them higher, because economic pressure has been one of their biggest war tactics
A successor to Putin will still need public support. I know we pretend Russia isn't a democracy, but a Putin successor would need the consent of the people to rule. One easy way to get that consent is saying "I'll turn on the pipeline." That card is largely gone, for now. Restoring relations with the west is no longer a simple turn of a valve.
Everyone has means and motives. China has means and motive. So does Germany. Hell, the UK has means and motives. Israel, Iran, India. Greenpeace has the means and the motives. To say that Russia doesn't just because the US does is silly. Russia has as much motive to do it as anyone else. This is basically a game of Clue; everybody is a suspect.
It's not common to see merchants destroy their own wares to make them more attractive to buyers! Only 1 pipe of NS2 is left. Why would Germany prefer to use 1/4 pipelines when they could use 4/4?
How is this an argument for Russia doing it?
Imagine I murder someone in some undetectable way and don't leave any evidence it was me. It's not a show of my strength since it's undetectable! It would only be a show of strength if it was my business rival or political enemy and I couldn't be directly blamed, yet everyone suspects me because I gain something. This is an argument for the US being behind it, not Russia.
NS1 is an asset to Russian peace talks. They can say 'we can send you gas again if you agree to our annexations'. If it's gone, then they can't say that.
The sanctions explicitly designed to crush the Russian economy and Western weapons explicitly supplied to kill Russian soldiers weren't enough? This would also justify George Bush attacking the WTC to make Americans think they're under attack. Or the Ukrainians shelling their own cities to whip up international outrage over civilian casualties.
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No way on (2). When Putin needs a Casus Belli he bombs some civvies. He wouldn't torch something that was making good money.
It wasn't making money. That was rather the a point of why it didn't affect gas prices mechanically as much as emotionally.
The pipelines destroyed were filled (pre-pressurized), but not active, and had been inactive so long that they were likely due for a long and expensive maintenance period before they could be activated anyway.
Nor has not-making good money exactly stopped Putin's pipeline strategy, given the rather implausible maintenance shutdowns and refusal to accept claimed required maintenance parts. Putin's strategy is to hurt the Europeans, not make the most money for himself.
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This sort of limited imagination is why you won't understand.
A lot of people have both the means and the motive, including the Russians, despite your protests otherwise and past arguments that NATO presence in the Baltic means that all of it is constantly and effectively monitored and thus couldn't possibly happen without American sanction or agency. This sort of prescription of American omniscience and incapability of anyone else is a rather blunt indication you're not actually familiar with the capabilities that would be required, as is self-centered style of dismissing other actors as candidates because you deem the cost-benefit silly or unreasonable... as if this weren't happening in the context of a Ukraine conflict that was only a surprise to so many Very Serious People because it seemed silly and unreasonable Russia would ever try such an obvious strategic mis-stake and mis-read as invading Ukraine.
And shooting down an airliner. And expecting pro-Russian candidates to win elections and deliver pro-Russian negotiations after taking the most pro-Russian regions out of the Ukrainian electorate. And invading Ukraine again, but bigger, and expecting a lot of things that were really, really silly in both prospect and retrospect. And this is without the other silly things, like using radioactive poisoning assassinations in countries with capabilities to detect it, or drilling holes in walls to steal piss to dope your people for the Olympics, or sacking your own military reformer for political expedience in the midst of a major military modernization campaign.
'There's no way that someone would do something really, really stupid' is not the defense you seem to think it is, especially it's not even the second, third, or fifth time said person would have done something really really stupid. And especially not when, from other perspectives or considerations you reject, may not even be as stupid as that.
Other actors make decisions based on their perception of the context and conflict and relative cost-benefit, not yours. That people do not share your cost-benefits-contexts does not mean the premise that they did it is any sillier than the idea that the US used an overt exercise months ago to lay mines to sabotage German infrastructure in response to for a checks notes Russian partial mobilization, as opposed to any actual sign that the Germans were actually going to restart a pipeline the Americans had already pressured them to stop. Or only laying mines, covertly, after such a resumption, thus mitigating the risk that other actors/collectors, including the Russians might discover the mines in routine maintenance/monitoring over the course of several months.
This is, whether you feel it is or not, very silly. Which is fine, in and of itself, but if silly can be applied in one direction, it's not an objection in another.
There were German protestors demanding the pipelines be turned back on. I don't know if you've seen German gas prices recently - they're pretty high!
https://www.yahoo.com/news/germans-call-nord-stream-2-050655816.html
The US was testing sophisticated underwater unmanned vehicles along with its mine-clearance exercises, exercises which presumably involve laying mines. It's easy to imagine that a few of them stay under, hidden to the best of their ability on the seabed, awaiting the order to strike. If they're discovered by anyone before they strike - well the US was conducting exercises there and they lost a few drones! Mechanical problems, these things happen. If you think I'm envisioning big obvious mines stuck directly onto Nordstream, visible to any inspection, then perhaps your familiarity with these capabilities is less than you think.
You know perfectly well that there's a difference between false knowledge 'the Ukrainians will collapse easily', cruelty such as 'let's ensure this guy we hate has a torturous half-life' and random bizarreness like 'let's blow up our own pipelines'. The latter is not like the former.
Yes. And? Were you going to actually going to try and imply that an unspecified number of protestors in a democratic society meant an imminent government reversal of its own policy?
The fact that the Germans have high gas prices is not news, and neither is the point that general German popular opinion was not in favor of activating Nord Stream 2, nor is it now.
Nor does this actually serve as evidence of who bombed the pipeline in the way you seem to imply it does. This observation is absolutely compatible with a Russian-responsible-but-trying-to-divert-the-blame-to-divide-the-west hypothesis argument, especially since trying to encourage energy concerns political movements more favorable to Russian strategic interests has been a long-running Russian strategic line of effort. That does not make it proof, but it is compatible.
This would not serve as proof of a US-does-this-to-prevent-Nordstream-Reactivation, however, as there is not immediate cause-and-effect of higher energy prices- or even anti-government protests- and the German government re-activating the pipeline, let alone why- if the imminently divided German political establishment WAS coming to a pipeline consensus- the US wouldn't do other actions to keep the status quo, which was no pipeline activation, if the bombs were allegedly planted months ago with a command-activation capability.
If the bombs are supposed to be remote-activated, triggering them before they are needed would be a bit of a goof.
Substituting your imagination for evidence or other people's rationals that might drive their own decisions is why you are being silly.
You're suggesting that American mine sweepers in a NATO exercise are covering specialized American underwater mine-laying drones, in an announced military exercise with multinational participation and observation including by the same state you alleged they were deploying the drones against. You're not even alleging anyone saw these drones, or even what mine-laying drones they are, when mine-laying vessels and mine-clearing vessels have, shall we say, slightly different functions and thus forms, none of which you claim were observed for any modifications to mine sweepers suggesting they were modified to carry/deploy said unspecified drones. You offers no rational for why- if it were the Americans- they wouldn't just let an unmarked CIA boat do it during a German federal holiday while everyone's distracted and no one else is looking. The exercise itself has been your proof.
This is silly, as it's just an isolated demand for stupidity to conflate correlation with causation without actually proving a causal relationship.
Well, yes. Two actually happened, establishing a pattern of spiteful strategic incompetence, and the third is an accusation you've expressed confusion about why people won't accept as true without evidence.
As far as trying to waive away a charge of selective appeal for stupidity goes, this is pretty silly.
Firstly, it doesn't matter even if they did blow up the pipeline with another method. I explicitly said that was possible in my first post. They could've used an aircraft or various other methods. The unusual proximity of the NATO exercises to the explosions just off Bornholm Island and their UUV mine warfare element is what raises the issue. 90% of the weight behind my argument is that the US obviously has the most to gain and the most capabilities to achieve and conceal this activity. The exercise is the cherry on top.
So when winter comes and the Germans realise they really do need more gas and public opinion shifts in favor of Nordstream, the US should blow the pipeline then? When it's even more obvious (if that's possible) that it's the US behind it?
The Russian strategic goal is to get Europeans using THEIR energy. If they favour renewables, it's because it means gas is needed for reliability, gas that they supply. If they attack nuclear, it's to ensure there's a market for their fossil fuels. If they attack fracking... it's so they export more and Euros are less self-sufficient. Notably, they do not attack their own gas infrastructure! This does not create revenue or achieve leverage.
If you're doing minesweeping exercises, you have to lay some mines. Fake mines, but mines nonetheless. We have loitering munitions in the world of aviation, why not underwater too? Wouldn't defending against Russian loitering munitions make a lot of sense as part of your official mine-warfare tests?
I wouldn't trust the Russian navy to do anything correctly, let alone detect stealthy underwater UUVs and divine their mission.
No. The third is YOUR accusation, that Russia blew up its own pipeline. This is obviously contrary to its own interests! You can be cruel, thuggish, corrupt and misinformed but still recognise your own strategic interests and not blow up your own pipelines that you built and paid for, that provide you with leverage on other countries, that you control! How is this so hard to understand? Saddam Hussein spitefully burned Kuwaiti oilfields to temporarily disrupt them, denying them to the West as his forces retreated from Kuwait. He did not start blowing up Iraqi oilfields or Iraqi infrastructure.
'I don't know or care how they did it, but they totally did it since they were in the geographic neighborhood' has been a good part of why your theory hasn't been taken as seriously as you'd like.
Substituting your theorizing and opinions on what's reasonable for other people's viewpoints and assuming their views accordingly is why you're not going to understand. I believe I raised this before.
If it's not going to make a difference in attribution, then obviously yes, since doing it before it's needed pre-empts all the other measures and options to prevent paying a lesser political cost.
In your argument of if the US being responsible, the US is presumed from the start to be willing to be obviously responsible for blowing up the pipeline if it judges it necessary. This would support doing it when necessary, but would not justify doing it before it's necessary, or doing it before other actions that might be less attributable. Like, say, a cyberattack.
In my argument of if the US is responsible, the US waits the maximum amount of time until it pays an unavoidable cost, while attempting other efforts across the elements of national power to prevent the activation without having to pay the cost of such an overt action. The American concept of government power pretty clear- Diplomatic, Information, Military, and Economic measures are all means of national power to affect others, and as one of the more expensive for the US military is not the first resort against allies, especially those who are already doing the desired action.
Accepting a cost only when necessary is not silly. Incurring an unnecessary cost earlier than necessary when other elements of the state paradigm of national power are working is silly. If sillyness is to be minimized...
Substituting your theorizing and opinions on what's reasonable for other people's viewpoints is why you're not going to understand other people's viewpoints of other people's viewpoints.
Aside from that you actually don't, are you even aware of how mines are laid in practice versus how they would have to be laid for your theory to work?
Repeat 'I don't know how they did it, but they totally did it!'
The question is not capability. The capability is not hard, even if you prefer to insist that it's beyond the scope of the Russians.
I graciously accept your concession of Russian capability to deploy loitering munitions that could cause this incident by your standards of capability.
Since your trust is irrelevant to their capability, this falls back under projecting your own presumptions of what other people perceive as reasonable.
I am not accusing Russia of blowing up the pipeline.
I accuse Russia, and Putin in particular, of the sort of strategic shortsightedness and malice that has repeatedly led them to do self-destructive stupid decisions in the recent past, to the point that blowing up their own (inactive, defunct, politically un-activatable, not-meeting-it's-strategic-function) pipeline for various reasons many would consider unreasonable is not a disqualifier for considering them in the slightest. But I am not accusing them, or anyone, as I wait for facts to emerge.
You have not provided any new facts, even weeks later, and continue to regress from anything resembling a falsifiable claim for a charge that would be very atypical of how the Americans normally go about resolving disputes with allies.
It's not obviously contrary to their own interests. You reject other alternative frameworks of the prioritization of relevant interests where it's rational, but this is why your opening post here was 'I can't understand,' and I agreed, that, indeed, you will not understand.
This is your limitation, self-confessed even. As long as you retain this inadequacy, you will continue to not understand and resort to silly justifications instead.
From your perspective, likely very, but that's the demonstration of how you're struggling, and not the reason why. Among other analytic failures, this specific analytic model objection rests on the model's assumption that the Nordstream pipeline was actually giving Putin the leverage he wanted.
Your presumption that it did is, again, projecting your own beliefs onto others.
Given the course turn of the German government from before and after the war, and Putin's many repeated failures for the last half-decade to try and insert Nord Stream approval/activation as a solution to a variety of situations (including post-2014 Ukraine, the Belarus migration crisis, 2021 'offramp' negotiations, and more), it would be quite reasonable for people-who-are-not-you to come to the conclusion that no, Nord Stream was not providing Russia sufficient leverage over Germany to advance Putin's prioritized interests. German not only did not embrace neutrality on Ukraine, but continued to provide significant financial and even some military support despite Russian pressure attempts, german lobbying efforts, and not-very-subtle demonstration energy cutoffs. In fact, with the 2022 turning point and massive, deliberate shift of energy import strategy to gas import terminals despite the higher cost, the relevant time window for the leverage argument was rapidly shifting, as once the Germans did complete gas infrastructure much of the economic logic of bucking the EU and NATO would dissolve once the German capital investments were complete.
If a pipeline that is not supplying gas, is not providing the demanded geopolitical leverage (German neutrality on Ukraine), has a very visible shelf-life of geopolitical relevance (use-it-or-lose-it), and is not providing the effect of dividing the Germans from their NATO allies... well, by golly, it sure is lucky for Russia that some NATO ally decided to obviously blow it up before the Germans completed their import infrastructure! That sort of direct sabotage and attack might actually get the Germans to oppose supporting Ukraine, and break with Europeans out of righteous anger and look to reactivate the pipelines that can be reactivated! Including those non-bombed parts of the previously dead assets!
...no Russian President with a history of strategic shortsightedness would ever entertain the thought of when trying to grasp at straws to turn around a losing war he thinks he can win if he breaks European support for Ukraine.
Once you take away the assumption that it was actually providing geopolitical leverage, the rest of your 'it couldn't happen because it makes no sense' argument starts to fall apart. That money was spent to build and pay for is irrelevant- that applies to the military as well, and the state of the Russian economy as a whole which Putin's oligarchy consistently loots via corruption, and the economics of Nordstream itself from the start. If money were the goal, the Russians wouldn't have been selling the Germans cheap gas in the first place, but market-value gas for more money, nor would they have done pretextual shutdowns.
Because the Americans were very clearly not following him, and they were still of use for him. When the Americans did follow him, and it was of no further use, he absolutely did start trying to blow up Iraqi infrastructure.
This comes back to the assumption that the Nord Stream pipeline sections bombed were providing more use to Putin as they were at the time (inactive, not generating concessions, losing value over time) compared to, say, some other option that might deliver strategic benefits.
Even if/when Germany does finish developing LNG infrastructure for ships, importing it by ship from the US would still be hugely more expensive than getting it via pipeline from Russia. That's why pipelines exist in the first place. Liquefying natural gas to -160 degrees to fit on a ship and then regasifying it at the other end is energy-intensive!
Even if Nordstream was not providing sufficient leverage over Germany to achieve Russian policy goals at this point in time, it could do so in the future as a bargaining chip, strengthening the Russian negotiating position. Germany has historically been amongst the most pro-Russian countries within NATO. They and France were less enthusiastic about arming Ukraine prewar, they were unwilling to bring them into NATO and even today it's the UK and US who provided the majority of weapons to Ukraine. Germany is still amongst the most pro-Russian countries in NATO, it is only that everyone dislikes Russia more than before.
There is no 'use it or lose it' for Russia. They control the flow of gas in that pipeline, which is innately cheaper than anything anyone can do with ships. They can just shut it down but leave the pipeline there. The US is not substituting this pipeline with their own, they're selling their gas at much higher prices by ship.
This argument that Nordstream was not providing leverage to Russia simply does not hold up. Germany would inherently prefer cheap gas to expensive gas. That is leverage, it allows Russia to impose costs by not providing cheap gas. That is the whole point of turning the pipelines off. There is no shelf-life and its presence does split Germany from the rest of NATO to some extent. This may not be visible and may be outweighed by other factors but it's present nonetheless.
There are no strategic benefits to Russia from this. The Germans are now more dependant on the US. US energy exporters are making a lot of money. The media seems happy to imply that the Russians are to blame for this, so even the false-flag angle isn't working out for Russia.
It seems obvious to me that you and Dean are operating with different definitions of leverage (potentially, among other things).
Dean is disputing that a contributor that is "outweighed by other factors" can meaningfully be called leverage. To paraphrase:
"I've got a tool to help me accomplish a task."
"If you use the tool, can you accomplish the task?"
"No."
"Then how is the tool meaningfully useful in this context?"
In this case, despite the existence of the pipeline in a non-functional state, Germany was continuing to support Ukraine. The aid of the tool (non-functioning pipeline) was not accomplishing the task (getting Germany to bail on Ukraine). Might this have changed as winter sets in and Germany becomes more desperate for fuel? Maybe! Or maybe not, perhaps Germany decides that support-for-Ukraine remains their preferred position.
The point is, there's no evidence that turned-off-pipeline was going to be a winning move for Russia in terms of swaying German policy. There is a logical argument to that end, which you've made, but logical arguments can be wrong all the time.
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Ukraine has to be the number one suspect. Ukraine is at war with Russia and blowing up infrastructure is what you do in war.
And blowing it up means the pipe that runs through Ukraine becomes more critical for Europe, which means Europe will be more invested in Ukraine's defense. Presumably.
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Ukraine doesn't have the ability to project power inside it's own sovereign territory, let alone under the Baltic sea.
It certainly has the motive, but it has no means.
Ukraine used to be part of the Soviet Union and has lots of highly capable military people. Also, my impression is that the attack was within the capacity of a few people with diving experience who had access to explosives.
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Ukraine shells Russian border regions, destroying power plants, and assassinates people near Moscow; at the moment, it's one of the most militarized countries on Earth with millions of fanatical defenders. Ukrainian representatives tell Musk who provides their state with critical infrastructure to fuck off. Ukrainian decision makers consider Europe not humoring Russian demands a matter of personal, national and perhaps ethnic survival.
Come now. Baltic sea isn't the Moon, 350 ft isn't that deep and 100 kg TNT isn't a lot.
Did you miss that part that a lot of Ukrainians live in Russia, and Ukrainians still can enter Russia without a visa, while Baltic sea isn't full of Ukrainians boats/subs?
No. Did you miss that Russia (and particularly Moscow) has one of the highest proportions of cops to civilians in the world, whereas the Baltic sea is, well, a sea, and only significantly observed by NATO members and soon-to-be members?
More directly: this is a silly objection. There is no need to fill the sea with boats to carry out a small diversion, and there was apparently no need to involve local Ukrainians in any known operation in Russia. The presumption of complexity of such an operation is unfounded. We can list reasons to argue that one or the other kind of attack is a priori "easier" till we're blue in the face, but ultimately both are trivial for a nation state like Ukraine, so this is not a helpful criterion to narrow down the list of suspects.
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Off-topic for subthread but since you are here:
Was Elon Musk actually on Myrotvorets or is the screenshot fabricated?
I believe it's fake. Haven't seen the posting. If you enter Musk into their search, it says he was not put up there yet but they are "working on that" (it's the standard form. The whole site is absurd).
Ukrainians are, individually, extremely rude and disinhibited in their nationalism, but this isn't institutionalized. SBU wouldn't just put an American benefactor like Musk on a kill list, even though many on Twitter would welcome it.
I saw people saying that he was on there very briefly. It might be a Russian psyop of course but they put children and Roger Waters on there. So they might as well have put Musk before someone with a brain gave them a call.
The furthest I've been able to trace this has been to an Intel Slava Z telegram post of the only screenshot of it that seems to exist (2 minutes before the Eva Bartlett tweet of the same screenshot, that Musk later responded to), and I'm not fluent enough in the russian side of the internet to look any further than that.
There are no public archives of it:
https://archive.ph/https://myrotvorets.center/*
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://myrotvorets.center/*
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It would be one thing that German or another Western country's military or political leaders know that this has been done by a nominal ally.
It would be a very different story if every voter (who's living standard is falling) knew from public evidence that the reason they are cold this winter is because of the action of a nominal ally.
I would assume that political leaders of the 5 eyes and of France and Germany "knew that some US agency was spying on them. But before Snowden, there was no proof for it. Now, the median voter may not be worried by massive surveillance, but they surely are impacted in their creature comfort by the efforts their leaders impose on them.
There have already been demonstrations and strikes in Europe, and the gas depot's are full, and the winter has not yet begone.
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I keep hearing this "I bet all the other intelligence agencies wiretap the NSA too" line, but do we have any evidence for this? What would even be the mechanism by which they do this? I've never heard of a French or Lithuanian spy network in Langley being busted, nor do the Americans host BND collection sites. It always struck me as a likely cope because the unbridled supremacy that would be implied by America unilaterally keeping tabs on friend and foe and nobody being able or willing to stand up against it would offend the sensibilities of the public in both America and its allies (with or without scare quotes). Blue-tribe Americans, too, laughed about "Team America World Police" jokes, but it was always an uncomfortable sort of laughter. For all we know, combined US soft and hard power does really reign that supreme. Out of all the world's intelligence agencies, I would personally maybe trust Israel's to find out if the US ran a reasonably well-compartmentalised operation to blow up the pipelines, and that's only because they have the political clout to prevent the US from unleashing its full counterintel powers against them.
What do your priors expect to see if it were true?
There's a lot of problems to overcome just in terms of getting to the point of publicizing. Who, specifically, is detecting this violation, and how? If it's spying on the NSA, the NSA would presumably be able to discovery/track/identify the culprit... but if they're identifying the culprit through their covert means, that would implicitly mean spying on the culprit in terms. In otherwords, 'in the course of spying on X, we discovered X was spying on us.'
Probably not a good start, but also- why would you publicize it? What's the gain?
If, hypothetically, the French were discovered trying to infiltrate the NSA, what's the gain in publicizing it? They already were willing to assume the risk of discovery. Are you going to try and escalate retaliation, break the US-French alliance, so that they... presumably spy on you less, having broken the partnership and thus increasing the need of the French government to know what the Americans intend to do? Why not try and blackmail/leverage the secret information instead, to get concessions/favors? Why reveal this to anyone at all, when you can use the discovered attempt as free security testing and patch the hole in your system, without telling the French you know that they knew, or telling anyone else 'HEY GUYS THERE'S AN EXPLOIT THAT YOU MIGHT FIND ELSEWHERE.'
And this is without the risk of retaliation. One of the dynamics of spy partnerships is not just the shared capabilities and benefits, but the shared complicity. The NSA partnerships with various countries in Europe are a matter of public record, and it's probably not a coincidence that Merkel conspicuously dropped the 'friends don't spy on friends' line and her government conspicuously dropped the subject of NSA spying on German leaders after German media in 2015 started breaking stories of German espionage on Europeans friends and partners for the US.
So, hypothetically, let's say that a European country spies on the US/NSA. What, specifically, do you think the US government would do upon discovery? Publicize it, or utilize it?
Sorry for the late response, but I'm a bit confused that you seem to only consider the possibility that e.g. the French successfully spying on the US would be revealed by the US. Considering the power gradient between France and the USA and the discomfort many Americans themselves have with their government wielding its power abroad (to say nothing of the non-Americans, wrt the American government), the thing I'd expect to see, if France did that, would be France to use its findings publicly: e.g. if the US did something against the interests of France, like, say, disrupting a hypothetical Russia-France pipeline or scooping a real France-Australia arms deal, to drop some information in public of seedy things that the US got up to, whether it is the disruption itself or something else that the US would lose status over if it got confirmation by something with the stature of the French government. (CIA rendition flights? Funding of unsavoury rebellions? Bribes?)
That we haven't seen such an instance of an uneasily allied government working to lower the status of the US (ever, as far as I know) seems to imply that either there is no obtainable information that would achieve that (which strikes me as unlikely, considering the above three examples which are almost certainly factual + Snowden cache details), they never stand anything to gain from that (which... I guess I can't rule out, in particular in the shape of the US credibly threatening any allied security service that would dare participate in this) or they don't actually have the information.
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Lithuanians won’t be doing that, obviously, given that they are a tiny country with population smaller that Tampa, Fl metro area, and very little capacity to act on any scoops they might get from US. But, for example, Israel spies in US are regularly caught. See, eg. this
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So the counterfactual is that Sweden was super happy to form a joint investigation. In which case, I could well imagine some Motte-poster writing how this indicates that the saboteur was a state actor within NATO, as the likely explanation is that Sweden is paying NATO ransom by basically handing over the investigation to NATO Denmark and NATO Germany. The Motte-poster would go on: If Russia was the suspected culprit, Sweden would like to do its own, thorough investigation to verify against the statements of Denmark and Germany to check the trustworthiness of their old friends and hopefully-new allies (and also to hone their skills at these kinds of investigations). Such an thorough investigation would be dangerous if it risked finding the "wrong" culprit, as the investigation results might leak: much safer to involve NATO Denmark and NATO Germany if the results might be "wrong". Heck, it might even be the US pressing Sweden to do their own investigation, since they don't trust the Germans.
Did anyone say "Sweden not joining the investigation would indicate NATO culpability" before the news broke? Or just supply some stronger reasoning to as why this indicates a NATO culprit, taking the counterfactual into account?
I agree that the lack of preregistered hypotheses is diminishing the value of this analysis, but
This is literally «imagining a guy, tricking themselves into believing that guy exists, trying to find a guy who might have said or done things they imagined and then getting mad about it.»
The "imagine a guy" was just me using some rhetoric to make the writing less dry. I don't really see how I could argue that the counterfactual is relevant without making a hypothesis like this.
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Denmark is one thing, but if Germany was allowed to see the evidence it would be a slight update against it being a NATO country as the attack precluded what was otherwise a mutually beneficial business relationship for Germany and Russia, and so the Germans would be miffed behind closed doors to find that it was disrupted by their allies even if they wouldn't go as far as exposing them to the public for it.
For what it's worth, I had a debate with a German friend (not Mottizen, but rat-adjacent) who explicitly registered his prediction two days ago that Germany would be allowed to participate in the investigation as an equal (contra me) and he would update against it being Russia if it turned out to be not so. I don't know if it adds anything to this discussion to post (obviously easily doctored) Discord screenshots or you can take my word on this...
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Perhaps, but I think this is a bit too much speculation of hypothetical events, hypothetical responses of Motte-posters and unreasonable required predictions that really don't match what I have seen here. Most of the posts I have read here have been firmly against Russia in it's current invasion. I even read a highly voted post calling what is a complex geopolitical game, morally "black and white" in terms of there siding against Russia.
People are suspicious of the US because it tried for years to influence Germany to not go through with the pipeline. The sitting US President announced in February if Russia invaded Ukraine the US would shut down the pipeline and refused to give a means of how they planned to do so. Now Russia has invaded Ukraine, the pipeline has been sabotaged with explosives and Germany has just been excluded from the investigation into who caused it. It's not unreasonable to suspect the two largest losers from the pipeline sabotage, Russia and Germany, have been denied access to the investigation for some ulterior motives. Particularly when the impact of the investigation will affect the Russian's war in Europe that the Swedes have taken a firm opposition to alongside NATO.
That said, I have doubts that the Swedes have damning evidence in their report that they are hiding as to who sabotaged the Pipeline. It was a clandestine operation and I imagine that they only thing left would be telling what type of explosives were used that is unlikely to tie it back to a country. Nor do I believe Sweden needs a ransom to join NATO or not want to aid Russia at this time.
I'm not speculating, I'm just pointing out that this evidence doesn't point in any direction by considering the counterfactual. If my argument is wrong, please correct it.
Sure, that Germany is excluded from the investigation is suspicious. But Germany being included is also suspicious. This is a suspicious event, every action is suspicious. I can't update just based on a plausible story, when you can make a plausible story for either culprit. If I'm to shift my probability of blame, I need a story that is better than the counterfactual, and I'm not feeling like I'm getting it here.
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That conclusion strikes me as confirmation bias, because both Denmark and Germany are already in NATO. Why does Sweden need to pay NATO this “ransom” by breaking away from the international team? Maybe you can give a contrived explanation, but it may be too far fetched to be persuasive to those who don’t already have “NATO is behind this” as a prior.
I agree that this conclusion might be confirmation bias. But the Swedish move looks strange. Basically, the options are:
Accident
Russia
Some NATO state
Ukraine
Some other state (Sweden, Finland, etc.)
While I agree that we cannot conclude 3, I think we should lower the probability of 1 and 2 if the report is true.
If the report is true, the probability of number two drops to nearly zero. That's the option that's been pushed by spooks pretending as pundits since the start, and proof of Russian self-sabotage is all upside for NATO and NATO's friends.
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One of those countries that would have been part of the joint team recently had issues with Russian spies embedded within the government did they not? That's been the main thrust of en.twitter comments on the issue. If we're taking internet comments as useful indications of truth anyways.
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Wouldn't Sweden itself (with US backing) be simpler than a non-US state actor within NATO, if this were ransom?
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I had kind of moved, weakly, towards accident (despite previously saying it was not). But this strongly suggests some deliberate agent did it and they do not want to reveal their monitoring capabilities that shows how.
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