Nord Stream

Russophobic rhetoric persists in Washington, but a counter-argument is emerging.
Patrick LAWRENCE

Submitted by Steve Brown…
Pipeline wars are often overlooked in the scheme of things, where pipelines represent competing national interests of a purely economic sort, beyond the usual political rhetoric surrounding ideology and demagoguery.

On Tuesday May 21st, US energy secretary Rick Perry made headlines after paying a visit to the newly elected administration of Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The visit itself wasn’t the cause of the headlines but rather Perry’s hubristic attack on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline and prophesying that a sanctions bill against western companies building the pipeline will pass into law in the immediate future.

The US sent Energy Secretary Rick Perry to the inauguration of the new Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to announce the sanctions bill on Gazprom’s Nordstream 2 pipeline would pass.
I can’t tell what’s more pathetic at this point, the neocons in Trump’s administration thinking that sanctions actually achieve their goals or using them to suck up to a new president they don’t actively control yet.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Trump came late to the meeting where Ukraine and Georgia were banging on about the Russian threat, started ranting about spending and blew up the decorous charade.

RT | June 03, 2013

After years of failed attempts to start developing one of the world’s largest gas fields, Gazprom might delay the Shtokman project for decades. The shale revolution in the US – the project’s key export market – is undermining its profitability.