Following a report that the United States bombed Germany’s Nord Stream gas pipelines from one of the most renowned journalists in the U.S., Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is calling for an investigation into the new allegations.
“As the American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claims to have learned from a source involved in the operational planning, the United States of America is said to have planned the demolition of Nord Stream and carried it out jointly with Norway,” wrote the co-chairman of the AfD parliamentary group, Tino Chrupalla.
In addition, Chrupalla urges Germany to not only investigate the report from Hersh, but also take dramatic action if the report is true and subsequently expel U.S. troops from the country.
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“The Pulitzer Prize winner’s suspicions must be investigated. Has NATO’s leading power carried out an attack on our country’s vital critical infrastructure in European waters? Then one would have to question whether the alliance guarantees security in Europe or rather endangers it. The consequence would be the withdrawal of all U.S. troops,” he wrote.
As reported by Remix News, Hersh details in his report how the Biden administration started planning the attack on the vital gas pipelines back in 2021. According to Hersh’s national security source, the attack was carried out by the CIA using U.S. Navy diving experts who planted C4 on the pipes, which was triggered to explode three months later using a sophisticated sonar signal from a buoy dropped by the Norwegian Air Force.
The report also details the internal back-and-forth debate that raged between the White House, State Department, the military, and the intelligence community, with a number of officials warning of the catastrophic consequences such an attack would have should the world learn which nation was behind the sabotage.
According to Hersh, one source said, “This is not kiddie stuff,” and further stated that if the attacks were traced back to the United States, “it’s an act of war.”
The AfD and the Left Party have long been suspicious about the potential role of the U.S. in blowing up the pipelines.
German MP Sevim Dagdelen, of the Left Party, said there is ample reason to believe the U.S. was involved, highlighting how President Joe Biden said he would “end” the Nord Stream 2 if Russia invaded Ukraine. Dagdelen suggested that blowing up the pipelines was Washington’s attempt to prevent rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow, as well as ensure Europe was buying U.S. shale gas and not cheap Russian energy, which has long served as the bedrock of Germany’s economy.
Perhaps most importantly, Sahra Wagenknecht, a leading Left Party politician and one of the most popular politicians in Germany, linked to Hersh’s article in a Twitter post that was seen nearly a million times. She wrote that “while the German federal government invokes transatlantic friendship and follows the USA uncritically, the U.S. government ensure that the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up, as Pulitzer Prize winner (Seymour) Hersh has meticulously researched. Whose interest does the federal government represent?”
Germany’s ruling parties have mostly ignored the story or downplayed it, and much of the German media is attempting to discredit Hersh’s report by merely pointing out that the Kremlin is using it as evidence it had nothing to do with the pipeline explosions. However, the German media has done little so far to dispel the central details of Hersh’s report, and even before the report, top media outlets were attempting to discredit any claim that the U.S. was behind the attack as “absurd” and a “conspiracy theory.”
The German government and media class may also have a substantial motive to ignore or downplay the report, especially if the core facts turn out to be true. It would be a political disaster for a government that has aligned behind the U.S. government against Russia while at the same time abandoning cheap Russian energy for expensive liquified gas from the U.S.
Furthermore, the environmental toll of the attack cannot be downplayed due to the massive volumes of gas that were leaked into the ocean. The Green party, which has made fighting pollution a central tenet of its platform, would be seen as aligning itself with a country that produced one of the biggest environmental disasters in the Baltic Sea in recent history.
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Typically, destroying critical infrastructure of another country is seen as an act of war, and if Germans start believing the U.S. was behind the attack, it may lead to a sharp shift in German public sentiment in favor of parties such as AfD and the Left party, a political outcome the government would likely desperately try to avoid. At the same time, deep skepticism about the entire NATO security alliance, and questions about how the U.S. could commit an act of war against its own ally would also raise extremely vexing issues for the entire Western liberal establishment.
The question now is whether further leaks about potential U.S. involvement in the sabotage attack will come to light in the coming months. If additional corroborating information comes out of Norway or other unexpected sources, the U.S., NATO, and Germany may have an unprecedented crisis on their hands.
There is also the question of whether any German officials knew about the attack beforehand and how much Germany has already learned over the course of its own investigation. The AfD wants to explore all these points via a parliamentary investigative committee.
“All the open questions must now be answered by investigative committees,” wrote the AfD co-leader.
“The Bundestag has a right to know what knowledge the federal government has. Could government officials have been privy to the planning of the attack? All the findings of national authorities must flow together in the European Parliament. The European states must not put up with such violent interference. They are even less allowed to participate in it.”
