WATCH: US sabotage of Nord Stream predicted by 2014 John Mearsheimer report: War Room

Russia's Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed by a covert American military operation with the help of Norway, contrary to the popular narrative of self-sabotage, according to Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. 

On Steve Bannon's War Room, international correspondent Ben Harnwell and Revolver News editor Darren Beattie and broke down Hersh's report, citing international relations scholar John Mearsheimer's 2014 report on "Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault," which argues that "the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis."



"The argument never really made sense that it was… the Russians who blew up their own pipeline, but I think what remains interesting about this, is that… yes, it was bad for Russia, but it was really bad for Germany as well," Beattie said. 

Nord Stream 1, which was damaged by an explosion along with its new, un-operational counterpart on September 26, 2022, carried natural gas to Germany and other EU countries. According to Hersh, Americans placed explosive devices on both Nord Streams 1 and 2 during the mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, which, three months later, destroyed them.

Hersh, who gained notoriety for his exposé of the massacre in My Lai, Vietnam, wrote about how German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz had publicly endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron's "call for a more autonomous European foreign policy… clearly suggesting less reliance on Washington and its mercurial actions."

"If you read certain parts of the Hersh story, it said 'Okay, the Germans have this new prime minister and he originally paid lip service to this notion that Macron was promoting this strategic autonomy that Europe was going to gain more independence from US control,'" Beattie said. "And that whole conception was entirely shut down."

"I think it re-invites us to look at this sort of Russia-Ukraine conflict from the lens of really the United States reasserting complete and total dominance over the affairs of Europe, and in particular, of Germany, because this was a very vital thing for the German economy, particularly Nord Stream two, and we just blow it up and it's an open secret within Europe," he continued.  

According to Beattie, EU countries saying there's "no evidence" that the pipeline explosions were the fault of Russia is "their way of telegraphing that it's the United States."

"But at the same time, they're not, you know, they're not going to do anything about it, and that tells you everything you need to know," he added. "And so in a geopolitical sense, this really kind of reinforces the dominance and hegemony of the United States and in a twisted way, even though it was highly risky and for a number of reasons, it shows us that there are still bastions of competence, some pockets of competence within the United States. I'm somewhat impressed that they were able to pull this off even though, you know, they leaked it to some aging reporter," Beattie said of an inside source alerting Hersh to the real story.

"Still, it's a rare example of competence."

In Hersh's report, he named National Security Advisor to Biden, Jake Sullivan, as one of the keys in executing the commander-in-chief's wishes to blow up the pipelines.

"In December of 2021, two months before the first Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jake Sullivan convened a meeting of a newly formed task force—men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and the State and Treasury Departments—and asked for recommendations about how to respond to Putin's impending invasion," the former New York Times writer said.

"What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines—and that he was delivering on the desires of the President," Hersh stated.

War Room international correspondent Ben Harnwell then chimed in, connecting this information to Mearsheimer's 2014 argument against Western provocation of Russia.

"Jake Sullivan is there months before the Russians invaded Ukraine, heading strategy meetings on how they're going to take out these pipelines," Harnwell said. "So, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, you can now start thinking 'You remember that John Mearsheimer thesis that he was pushing back in 2014?'... Mearsheimer said, you know, 'What the US is doing here — what NATO is doing here, pushing these boundaries up to Ukraine — is walking Ukraine down the primrose path to be invaded by Russia.'"

He went on to explain his conclusion based on Mearsheimer and Hersh's arguments. 

"...I sort of landed on the conclusion... Okay, this is NATO seeking a post-war, or a post cold war role and it needs a war. And it needs Russia to do something to continue to justify its existence. And that's certainly been a consequence of the Russian invasion. But looking at the dates here [in the Hersh piece], looking at the Mearsheimer thesis, I'm starting to ask myself whether the whole Ukraine war encouraged along by NATO was simply a pretext for the US military industrial [complex] to go in and take out these pipelines."

Bannon posed a final question to Human Events' Jack Posobiec; "Are they cold hearted enough to have started a war that this little girl is gonna get shelled like the rest of her city? Just so they can control gas assets going into Europe and therefore prop up the petrodollar in the foreseeable future?"

Posobiec, a former naval intelligence officer, replied; "Steve, I'll just say it's amazing the trouble that the regime can cause when the petrodollar is on the line."

"We've seen it before, and we're seeing it again," he concluded.