Amos Hochstein Comes for Berlin

The US empire eats its young

The Biden administration has a disagreement with Germany over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and, as usual, they have chosen the path of aggression. Joe Biden has brought in Amos Hochstein to act as the Czar of thwarting Germany’s energy independence (ok, that’s not the real title). The creation of this position shocked many international security analysts who had settled into the widely accepted belief that the Biden team was going to ignore the project and avoid a major clash with a powerful ally. 

When the US empire chooses confrontation with a vassal state there is no turning back. It has implicitly signaled to all onlookers that a challenge has been accepted and this challenge will be crushed with all available tools. To the empire, losing a confrontation is tantamount to death. Enter Amos Hochstein. Hochstein is more than just another neocon egghead. He is a current board member for the Atlantic Council and a former gas lobbyist and board member of Ukraine’s state gas company Naftogaz. The fact that Ukraine, a high priority US client state, stands to suffer a significant economic loss from the completion of Nord Stream 2 will surely not be overlooked by the Europeans. This intentional indignity is the equivalent of Donald Trump sending Elliott Abrams to Latin America. 

The DC neocons only have a few tools in their arsenal and those tools are now pointed squarely at the German government. While military power is generally an option against poor countries full of brown people, a Western European nation such as Germany will merit the forces of soft power regime change. Yes, you read that correctly, regime change. Though it received no news coverage in the west, the US overthrew the government of its “ally” Australia in 1975. Times change but people remain the same. The knuckle draggers in DC that think nothing of violently taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians will certainly think considerably less of replacing a group of arrogant stuffy German courtiers that have grown too big for their britches. Meanwhile, the German Green Party is ripe for the picking. After a year of covid stumbling and several years of fighting back the tide of immigrants let loose by those very same DC neocons, Angela Merkel’s party is falling behind in the polls. Much worse for the Merkel political coalition is the fact that the Greens have indicated in no uncertain terms that they will be aligned with the warmongers in DC. A combination of factors such as this is too tempting for Victoria Nuland and her center for the creation of evil stuff think tank ghouls to resist. As die hard neoliberal ideologues, they well know that the Green Party will quickly sacrifice national sovereignty and patriotism for the illusion of immediate power. The US will step in with the usual social media manipulation, bribes, protests, and shady backroom deals to make sure that the German people have little input in the selection of their next Government. Basically, they will execute every rotten election interference trick that they accused their adversaries of doing in the US a million times over. Trust me Germany, facebook groups with pictures of puppies will be the least of your problems.

One could argue that the US will not be taking political power from the German government, they will be removing the illusion that Berlin could ever chart its own course. Joe Biden made it clear that he intended to rebuild America’s relationships with European allies. Apparently he also plans to rebuild those allies that refuse to accept neocon diktat.