He wanted to dispel whatever doubts some undecided voters might still have about his ties to Russia by reminding them that he imposed sanctions against that megaproject, which debunked the Democrats’ Russiagate claims and were even hypocritically waived by Biden for a nine-month period.
Trump boasted during his live interview with Tucker Carlson at a charity event in Arizona on Thursday night that he was responsible for “killing” Nord Stream II. In his words, “The Democrats] love to say that I was a friend of Russia, I worked for Russia, I was a Russian spy. The biggest job Russia ever had [was] Nord Stream 2. This is the biggest pipeline in the world, [it] goes from Russia to Germany and all over Europe. I killed it. Nobody would kill it but me. I stopped it.” He has a point that’ll now be elaborated on.
For starters, he clearly wasn’t referring to September 2022’s terrorist attack since he wasn’t in office then and therefore couldn’t have had anything to do with it. Rather, what he wanted to convey is that the Democrats’ false claims of him being a Russian puppet are debunked by the fact that he sanctioned Nord Stream II, which was done in an attempt to poach the European energy market from Russia. In an unexpected turn of events, Biden waived those sanctions in May 2021, one month before meeting Putin.
A senior State Department official told CNN that “While we remain opposed to the pipeline, we reached the judgment that sanctions would not stop its construction and risked undermining a critical alliance with Germany, as well as with the EU and other European allies.” At the same time, Biden justified the move by saying that “Nord Stream is 99% finished. The idea that anything was going to be said or done was going to stop it was not possible.”
The argument can be made, however, that this was just a “goodwill gesture” for facilitating his meeting with Putin in Geneva that June to discuss the gamut of their countries’ bilateral ties after Russia’s military buildup along the Ukrainian border that spring. No breakthrough occurred, which can be attributable in hindsight to anti-Russian hawks in the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) prioritizing Russia’s containment over China’s in the New Cold War.
Reflecting on that lost opportunity, the US seemingly thought that it could lower Russia’s strategic guard by waiving sanctions on that megaproject in the hopes that Moscow would then ignore NATO’s creep towards its borders, including via its clandestine expansion to Ukraine. It was these military moves that set the stage for Putin to then share his security guarantee requests that December, which were rejected and followed by the reimposition of those same sanctions one day before the special operation began.
The reason why this is important to reference is because it proves that Biden hypocritically promulgated a Russian-friendly policy (regardless of the cunning motive behind it) after his party weaponized the Russiagate conspiracy theory to prevent Trump from improving ties with Russia. In particular, Biden waived the same sanctions that Trump imposed and arguably did so as a “goodwill gesture” for facilitating Biden’s meeting with Putin, who met with Trump without any such implied preconditions.
It also can’t be ruled out that Biden’s decision to reimpose sanctions against Nord Stream II one day before the special operation began is what pushed Putin into authorizing that ongoing campaign after the US took back the big carrot that it gave Russia just nine months prior for ignoring NATO’s expansion. From his perspective, there was no longer any reason not to go through with what he’d by then signaled were his possible plans for demilitarizing Ukraine, thus possibly making everything inevitable by then.
Trump sometimes struggles to convey the complexities of International Relations such as when he failed to explain the relevance of why he decided to boast about “killing” Nord Stream II during his interview with Tucker. All that he wanted to do was show how those sanctions debunked the Russiagate conspiracy theory. He could have elaborated more on that like this analysis did, but in any case, it was a valid point to make for dispelling whatever doubts some undecided voters might still have about his ties to Russia.