Hindsight is 20/20. There were plenty of reasons to be skeptical that russia would turn off the tap. There's always counterparty risk when importing things, the US could also decide to cut europe off from LNG if they wanted.

Russia has only turned off the tap after Europe had already turned off every possible economical tap flowing in the direction of Russia, so in a sense, Europe did it all by itself. Sure, it's the right thing to do for Europe as no one want to help Russia sponsor the war on Ukraine... but that doesn't change the fact that Russia wouldn't just turn off the tap without Europe turning highly hostile to it and basically leaving Russia no option (it's costing much more to Russia than to Europe).

This is not true, Russia started reducing output last summer. Before their invasion of Ukraine.

That pipeline runs through Ukraine to an old & dying oil field- Russia was fighting with Ukraine about transit costs and graft and wanted to turn on Nordstream II next. It wasn't about sticking it to the Germans for no reason.

They spent billions to create the second pipeline to *increase* exports... are you trying to say they didn't have interest in increasing output? Why?!

At this point it is obvious that their occupation of Ukraine outweighs the $11 billion cost of the new pipeline. That's just the total cost by the way, not who paid what exactly.

The US has been a stable ally since the end of WWII and really prior for countries other than Germany. It’s also quite hard for a president to just unilaterally suspend trade. US sanctions require acts of congress, and it would be hard to get an anti European majority in the senate. So no, there was never any risk of the US suspending trade.

Meanwhile Russian has almost always been hostile to or at least in competition with Western Europe. Moreover Russia’s Duma follows Putin’s lead.

It is easy to say that now. Serious criticism of Putin/modern Russia in the West really only began after the invasion of Georgia and was not even remotely mainstream until the early 2010s. America literally banned the export of crude oil from 1970-2015 so their energy worries were not entirely unfounded. Also, nowadays most sanctions are done unilaterally by the executive branch.

LNG is expensive because you have to outbid the global market to get it. It would have been expensive and damaged the German industry 5 years ago as well. Maybe it would have been better to do it at their pace, but it's not like sacrificing cheap energy and natural resources is an easy step to take.