The fight for Nordstream 2: is Germany a Sovereign Nation or just another US Empire Regional Outpost?

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has threatened to levy sanctions against Germany over the Nordstream 2 pipeline project. Nord Stream 2 is a gas pipeline that will transport gas between Russia and Germany which is then routed throughout Northern Europe. While this project is new, Northern Europe has had approximately one third of its gas supplied by Russia for many years without incident. Blinken's threats are no less than an attack on Germany's national sovereignty and, because Germany is the top dog of the EU, on the sovereignty of every nation in Europe. As a sovereign nation, Germany has the authority to determine the best path to support its strategic interests. The standoff between these two allegedly allied nations bares out a reality that many US allies avoid. The United States is a brutal empire that will turn on any ally that refuses to follow its dictates. 

     Germany has enthusiastically supported America in bloody regime change operations and preposterous evidence free claims about adversaries with never a thought that the proverbial chickens may one day come home to roost. In fact, Berlin may have unwittingly helped the NATO neocons in their quest to freeze the 11.5 billion dollar joint venture by manufacturing a ridiculous claim that Russian blogger/politician Alexei Navalny was poisoned by novichok three different ways and still survived. Nato and the US neocons then sought to leverage that implausible claim as leverage to attack the pipeline project. Berlin must've believed that they were too close to the court of the mighty emperor to fall victim to his capricious temperament. What they couldn't quite fathom was the extent of America's hubris and the differences in worldview between the two countries. Germany sees itself as one of the most powerful nations in a multipolar world, while the US views itself as the indispensable nation in a unipolar world. The US empire places nations outside of its immediate geographic orbit into two distinctive categories, nations that it has conquered and nations that it intends to conquer. Nations in its near abroad, as they say in Russia, are front or back yard property and are treated, via the Monroe doctrine, as their respective geography dictates. Canada is culturally a Western European nation and is given significant latitude to maintain the appearance of sovereignty. The people of the South receive the "backyard" treatment which unfortunately means that not even a veneer of independence needs to be maintained. This system of international hierarchy worked pre-Trump as the neocons were still struggling to gain complete control over US foreign policy and the rising powers of Russia, China, and Iran were still gaining traction. Now that the neocons have full control of the US empire's foreign policy, the authoritarian nature of their brand of imperialism has become its most prominent feature. Germany is now caught in a trap that it helped construct.    

     Fret not Germany, for your perils are many but your peers are legion. The bad news is that the US empire currently enforces unilateral sanctions on a quarter of the world's population. The really bad news is that the US is politically, economically, and socially unstable which means that there is no avenue for using traditional diplomatic channels to resolve international disputes. America is the world headquarters of unregulated free market fundamentalism and international piracy thinly veiled as liberal interventionism. Free market magical capitalism has become a quasi-religion in US culture, and indiscriminate state violence is the tool of choice to impose and enforce that religion on a world that grows weary of its long-term effects. This naturally means that the number of nations joining Germany in rejecting American hegemony is expanding alongside the list of the newly sanctioned. Even now Germany finds itself caught up in a political contradiction. Berlin is politically forced to argue for the continuance of NATO to protect it from Russia as it allies with Russia to contest EU and US opposition to their joint economic venture. Certainly the EU/US coalition will find it more difficult to justify massive military expenditures to prevent a Russian onslaught when Russians are already in Germany working on the pipeline. 

     The US empire has spread itself wafer thin, abandoned all methods of international diplomacy, and failed to address a major health crisis and its subsequent depression level economic collapse. Germany would do well to hold its ground and consider taking President Biden up on Donald Trump's offer to remove US troops from their land.  Berlin can once again be the capital of a great nation or simply remain another regional outpost of a decrepit empire.