Bombshells, Landmines, & Nemesis

Victor Davis Hanson: Bombshells, Landmines, & Nemesis

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

Octogenarian journalist Seymour Hersh’s recent allegations that the United States blew up sections of the Russo-German Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were scarcely covered by the media that otherwise runs with the usual Hersh-fed embarrassments to the U.S. government. Oddly, in this case, it stayed mum. The story was adamantly denied by the Biden Administration and most of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. 

While Hersh mentioned Denmark and Norway as cooperating with the United States, it is equally difficult to believe that any European Union or NATO nation would on its own attack the assets of another member, especially the shared investments of Germany that for some time has dominated the governance of EU and the policies of European members of NATO. 

More disturbingly, on the eve of the Ukraine war in January 2022, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland quite indiscreetly boasted, “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” She did not say what she meant by “another” way. 

That was not an isolated threat. Joe Biden reiterated the same warning a month later. “If Russia invades,” he said, “then there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2 . . . We will bring an end to it . . . I promise you; we will be able to do it.” His choice of “end” implied more than voluntary German disconnection from an otherwise intact Russian pipeline. 

More recently, Nuland post facto expressed glee in an exchange with Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that her earlier threat had been reified, “Senator Cruz, like you, I am—and I think the administration is very pleased that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you say, a pile of metal at the bottom of the ocean.” 

...it was highly unusual for the president of the United States and an under secretary of State publicly to hint at a preemptive attack against a key asset of its ally Germany and a formidable power with over 6,500 nuclear weapons. 

Nor do NATO nations destroy, preemptively and stealthily, the property of other NATO nations—especially given that Germany was facing the onset of autumn and winter, and did not have the wherewithal to keep its 80 million citizens warm without the full gas deliveries through the pipeline. There are no suggestions that the German government might have winked and nodded at the explosion—given Berlin might have been otherwise afraid voluntarily to close down the pipeline given public support for the deliveries. 

Another landmine was a recent, also underreported, almost nonchalant accusation that the CIA used the FBI as a sort of entre to Twitter so the kindred federal agencies could suppress the expression of particular Americans. 

Journalist Matt Taibbi published a recent disturbing trove of internal communications, apparently revealing that the CIA, with help from the FBI, consistently sought to modulate and censure content on Twitter.

Finally, we are witnessing the strangest provocations to U.S. sovereign airspace in history. China apparently has been sending with impunity surveillance balloons throughout American skies. Our woke military either did not know of all of them, or could not or would not stop them, or did not disclose these apparent serial violations to their own civilian overseers.

A left-wing media destroyed the high-bar rules of journalistic evidence and investigation protocols through its concoction of Russian collusion and disinformation hoaxes. A discredited media claimed that any perceived presidential laxity with an aggressive foreign adversary—like China’s serial intrusions into U.S. airspace—was supposedly prima facie evidence of a compromised president “colluding” as an “asset” of an enemy.

Ironically Biden, the media, and the old Democratic House majority have provided Republicans the same tools to discover the truth which the Left had once used to destroy it.