On September 26, 2022 Joe Biden unilaterally declared war on both Russia and Germany. This, at least, is the only logical conclusion if the allegations by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh last week are true. Hersh maintains, based on claims from an anonymous source within the White House, that Joe Biden skirted congressional notification while ordering the U.S. Navy to plant remote-controlled explosives on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic last year.
The Nord Stream undersea pipelines, when fully operational, could supply over a third of Europe’s energy needs by shipping cheap Russian natural gas from the Arctic into the heart of Europe. The mysterious explosions that ripped through both pipelines last fall, forcibly cut off Germany from cheap Russian natural gas—an outcome openly favored by the United States for years. As long as Europe remained dependent on Russian natural gas, the major continental powers had a powerful reason to maintain relatively cordial relations with the Russian government. Nord Stream had been one of Putin’s most potent diplomatic bargaining chips with Europe during his war in Ukraine.
The American foreign policy complex well understood this dynamic. In February 2022, just weeks before the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, Joe Biden told a journalist at the White House that if Russia were to invade, it would mean the “end” of the Nord Stream pipeline. When pressed on how he would accomplish this, Biden simply stated that he “promised” the pipeline would no longer be operable.
Hersh argues that Biden kept his word. The U.S. Navy, working with its Norwegian allies, was able to identify the ideal spots for detonation and then planted explosives under the cover of a large-scale NATO sea exercise in the summer of 2022.
Western journalists in the immediate aftermath of the explosion speculated that it had been the product of a Russian attack. According to this theory, the Russians had, for unknown reasons, blown up their own pipeline. This claim always rang hollow. Why would Moscow destroy its own infrastructure when it could just as easily turn off the flow of natural gas at will while pursuing a strategy of geopolitical flexibility?
The United States, on the other hand, had the motive, the opportunity, and the capability to carry out the attack. Biden and his lackeys openly displayed hostility to the pipeline’s continued existence. Hersh’s reporting simply validates what any common-sense observer could already see: the ostensibly “neutral” United States had launched an economically destructive attack against a geopolitical rival and a major European ally.
The sheer hubris of the alleged assault boggles the mind. If, as seems clear, Joe Biden followed through on his word and had the Nord Stream pipelines disabled, it puts the lie to all the high-minded talk about defending “democracy” in the West. No American voted for conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia. Congress did not declare war, as the Constitution mandates. Nor did the United States make any bones of consulting with its ostensible European allies.
Germany, it turns out, is not a sovereign country. Seymour Hersh alleges that Biden browbeat German Chancellor Olaf Scholz into accepting the destruction of Nord Stream. No self-respecting national leader could accept such terms. Certainly not one who values independence and freedom of action.
There is a deeper truth at the bottom of the Batlic, amidst the Nord Stream wreckage. It isn’t just Germany that is no longer a sovereign power—in fact, the very concept of the nation-state has been destroyed. All of Europe is an American satrapy. France, England, Italy, Austria, Luxembourg—these petty powers have no real existence as independent entities. They are neither economically nor militarily self-reliant. They cannot even secure their needed energy requirements without outside intervention.
Africa and South America, as a whole, are little better. Will anyone pretend Nigeria or Peru are independent nations that could stand up to a concerted American assault? In Asia, the Gulf States are little more than American-sanctioned outposts. Would Bahrain exist without America? Would Kuwait? In the Far East, Japan is still occupied by American forces. India has no meaningful modern military tradition worth mentioning. China became the manufacturing capital of the world because of explicit policy choices made in Washington, D.C.
This is not a new development. The nation-state died in 1945. The mid-20th century Anglo-American-Soviet alliance made sure of it. American liberals and Soviet communists at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam marched in complete lockstep on the future of the world order. There were tensions, of course, but there was no doubt in the minds of either Franklin Roosevelt or Josef Stalin that the postwar order would be fundamentally leftist.
Both liberals and communists could agree that the highest human aim was the satisfaction of man’s material needs (filling his stomach) and the elevation of the oppressed. For the communists, such a world would come into being with the global revolution of the proletariat. Liberals, on the other hand, thought it could come into being by exporting McDonald’s, blue jeans, and rap music on a global scale.
In our own time, even this difference has disappeared. The American Left now openly encourages the “marginalized” and “oppressed” to fight back against “systemic racism” on a global scale. American embassies across the planet fly the pride flag and display Black Lives Matter signs. The economic proletariat under communism transformed into a racial proletariat under liberalism.
The modern American state, just like the USSR, engages in widespread censorship, surveillance, and economic central planning. The COVID lockdowns showed that paeons to freedom in the West are an utter farce. In a state of emergency our rulers will seize whatever of our rights they want to seize.
The nation-state definitionally relies on the premise of a fundamental equality between countries. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, asserts that the “powers of the earth” exist in a “separate and equal station.”
Moreover, the Declaration holds that “free and independent states” have “full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce” among other authorities. This was the old order. It doesn’t exist anymore. Russia, in the eyes of the United States government, has no right to “levy war” against Ukraine. Germany has no right to “establish commerce” in natural gas with Russia. In modern liberal eyes, there are aggressors (the bad guys) and the victims (the good guys).
In this Marvel-movie understanding of foreign policy, the United States is always the hero and the villains are anyone who steps out of line with “liberal democracy,” which just means gay rights, feminism, antiracism, and, as of five minutes ago, transgenderism. Russia is not a sovereign power but an aggressor state. In this framework, Putin and Hitler are equivalent. In this great cosmic battle between good and evil there is no option for America simply to stand aside.
The destruction of the nation-state meant the death of neutrality, the older laws of war, and the distinction between civilians and soldiers. During World War II, American bombers hammered cities full of women and children with conventional and atomic weapons in the name of defeating tyranny. The Soviet Red Army, for its part, engaged in a campaign of mass rape and ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe as it pushed into the heart of Western civilization. FDR put tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans into camps. Stalin murdered 10 million of his own citizens with starvation policies and forced labor.
This is the spiritual core of the “rules-based international order.” This is what it is.
Today, a transnational ruling “elite” centered in Washington, D.C. exerts quasi-planetary rule in the name of “human rights.” It is wrong to call this arrangement in any way American. Ordinary middle-class voters in the heartland have zero say in the methods and ends of this system. Americans, of course, are forced to pay, in blood and treasure, to keep this framework in place.
There are cracks in the system, however. Despite the West’s attempt to “destroy” Russia’s economy—a move that, if successful, would result in the mass killing of civilians—Putin remains in power. Despite the uniparty D.C. regime’s best efforts, Donald Trump managed to attain the heights of the presidency in 2016, breaking the foreign policy consensus on immigration, trade, and war in the process. The Afghanistan debacle in 2021 revealed just how limited American military force really is.
The Nord Stream bombing displays enormous chutzpah from the American ruling elite. But it is also a clarion call for all those with eyes to see and ears to hear: A world dominated by D.C. is a world without freedom and real political life. Europe will never again be a heart of culture and civilization as long as it remains in the thrall of D.C.’s power. Until that yoke is thrown off, Europe will remain a medieval history theme park, its churches empty, its militaries laughable, and its people morally and spiritually degraded. Americans outside the hallowed halls of financial and political power in New York, D.C., and Silicon Valley are little better off.
For those who dream of a better world, the path is clear: The postwar international order needs to die. Only after its demise can men of high vision begin the process of carving out a new, more free, more noble, world order.