I like this analysis, where it was probably Russia, although we may never know, but it's actually more harmful to Russia if we have these conspiracy theories going around the perpetrator/cause. They want people to be panicked by their hybrid warfare and instead the West is largely ignoring it.

If that's actually what happened, nobody would admit because the endgame is catastrophically bad.

Actually whoever did it it seems like the best course of action for Europe is to not talk about it. Russia, USA, Ukrainian terrorists it doesn't really matter.

I think it isn’t enough to require NATO response. It could be used if NATO wanted to escalate but it would be weak reason. But would be good propaganda. Which means that if the US knew, they would probably announce it.

On the side of the Russians doing it - the Russians total lack of motive proves it was them. Blowing up your own pipeline is so incredibly stupid and self defeating that people will always doubt you did it, making it the perfect false flag attack! Imagine how inspired the Russians are to support this war now that a piece of inanimate infrastructure blew up with a heavily indirect impact on their day to day lives! Plus the Germans will suspect America because of the Russians total lack of motive.

On one hand, we have a story with no real evidence in anyway shape or form, that gets key facts about the players involved completely wrong from someone who used to be credible.

Wherever Hersh got his story doesn't seem to know a lot about reality.

Yes the US had reasons for disliking this pipeline. But I would forward that blowing it up at that time would be a dumb move. They were kneecapping the Russian economy anyway AND getting lucrative LNG business from Europe. The downside to being caught seems to outweigh the gain of doing it in such an ostentatious way.

Plus the US didn't need to blow it up to achieve the same goals. They have so many diplomatic levers. I don't think German politicians give any credence to it being the Americans.

So it could be the US, but only if they were really stupid. I guess Russia doesn't have a monopoly on stupid.

That's "their single anonymous source."

> the Americans have the abundantly clear motive of kneecapping the Russian economy, while increasing the value of their own oil exports.

If you're going to dismiss Russia's motives as purportedly stupid, you also need to acknowledge the stupidity of America's motives in attempting to achieve what it had already achieved.

One of the things that makes this interesting is that no one has a great motive (save the one actor that most are ready to discount due to lack of opportunity to do it--Ukraine).

It did not. War will end sooner or later and pipeline will again become tempting source for cheap gas for Germany and other European countries. Now after 3 of 4 lines gone Germany has no way back to being dependant on russian gas.

> They want people to be panicked by their hybrid warfare

Why? People were already panicking about Russia (rolling through Western Europe, using nukes, etc).

The argument in the video I linked is not very convincing to me at all. Nobody was ever under any doubt that Russia could bomb some unguarded infrastructure near its border. And he just handwaves the idea that the US could have carried an operation to sabotage the pipeline as a "clandestine activity" (i.e., making it look like an accident) just by hacking it or something. It's a Hollywood analysis of "hackers". Why even fight Russia at all, why not just hack all their military, factories, refineries, communications, and power plants?

It might be a fun exercise in simplistic game theory type analysis but taking that and using it to assign Russia as the most likely culprit seems like astounding hubris and naivety.