Leading members of Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election are seeking a huge European pipeline contract, the latest figures from the US president’s circle to mix business and geopolitics.
Jesse Binnall, a lawyer who worked on legal actions advancing Trump’s baseless claim that the vote was stolen from him, and Joe Flynn, who also sought to undermine Joe Biden’s victory, have been in Bosnia this week to discuss the project.
Designed to curb the Balkans’ reliance on gas from Russia, the Southern Gas Interconnection pipeline would cost about $200m (£149m) to build.
Binnall told the Guardian the company he and Flynn were representing, AAFS Infrastructure and Energy, had not yet been awarded the $200m contract. Meetings with Bosnian ministers “were exploratory as we assess the potential project”, he said.
“The Southern Interconnection is an important project with the potential to strengthen Bosnia and Herzegovina’s energy security and reduce regional dependence on Russian gas, and AAFS is excited about the opportunity to explore how American private capital and expertise might contribute,” said Binnall.
America bombed the other pipeline years ago and Europe said nothing. Maybe one day even Europeans will understand America’s war in Ukraine was a proxy war against Europe, not Russia.
Which one? Not nord stream ?
Of course Nord Stream, just a three letter org move against Russian and Western European integration, done with American intelligence and Ukrainian labor. We don’t gotta wait 75 years for the documents to see it, right?
Nordstream linked Germany and Russia. It represented the dependence of Europe on Russian gas before 2022, and without russia it is useless.
Politically it would make sense, given that the destruction was a clear push for Europe to get their shit sorted and find other sources of gas, which they subsequently did.
What the article is claiming here though, is a pipeline to “curb the Balkans’ reliance on gas”, “reduce regional dependence on Russian gas”.
So both a different region and to supply gas from elsewhere than Russia.
Now given who is advocating for the pipeline I would like to see an actual map and see how exactly it wants to accomplish this,
but I don’t see your point. Blowing up nordstream (whoever did it) was an anti-Russian-influence move that accelerated EU energy independence. It even accelerated the transition to renewables, and shut down the last remaining people trying to base the EUs future grid off of gas.
I just used this thread to rant about Nord Stream because the word pipe triggered some memories, I know it has little to do with the article and I’m sorry for hijacking the thread. But where’s the energy independence? I live in Europe, energy has only gotten more expensive since, nuclear reactors are turned off, etc. Are you sure it’s not supposed to lock us in with American interests and being dependent on Western sources? Because that’s what my lived experience and my wallet have shown me. This “dependence” argument is pure spin: we already were good energy wise and could’ve fully integrated the continent if we continued that way, daddy America just wouldn’t allow it (yeah, “whoever” did it, lol, it was American intel and funding and for American benefit, come on, Russia tried getting an investigation going and it was shot down by the UN with America itself vetoing it!). Daddy America is gonna take Greenland too and we won’t say anything still cause Europe is a collection of American vassal states.
Europe was getting really cheap gas from Russia, to the point it delayed renewables. This should have been phased out 12 years ago at the latest, but politicians could not resist the price.
In essence the electricity prices before 2022 were subsitized by russia, against a dependence on specifically them. Then 2022 saw a burst in costs, both due to now having to get lots of gas at market rates for the transition, and having to build a lot of infrastructure to get gas from elsewhere.
Now naturally the higher prices alone mean use of gas is decreasing. It’s simply not that good when you have to pay for it.
Personally, my energy costs are almost back to 2021 levels now, at this point the costs have mostly been paid. In '22 we had to pay for the new gas infrastructure and unfavorable gas rates, after that, we paid the higher rates, and for a faster transition that naturally carries a higher rate of investment costs too. Now gas use is down enough the increased costs are offset, while the transition is once again at a slower pace now that the remaining gas is both harder to replace and is sourced from more redundant sources.
In essence the EU took a cash lone in the 2010s to make electricity cheaper, and paid it back in the 2020s. Had they not, it would have been cashed-in by russia. We’d probably still have ended up with no gas ultimately, but it would have given russia another tool to pressure EU governments.
We really weren’t with our gas. You can’t just replace gas witg something else easily, gas is completely irreplacable in many areas (like smoothing renewables without batteries) and needs infrastructure changes in other areas (like new heating systems).
Noone else offers cheap gas rates, and with the shipping needed that would be impossible. The prices alone make this relevant for maybe 10 years. After that at the latest the EU won’t need any external gas.
Also our current import sources are not really in the USs sphere of influence, mainly it’s the middle east. And since imports are LNG (LFG), you’d have to shut down a lot of potential sellers before we would be reliant on the US, which don’t even have that much gas.
Then nordstream would have also sat still. In my experience politicians were way too tempted by the gas. People have been calling to become less dependent on Russian gas since Crimea, instead the dependence increased until Ukraine.
I’d bet on German intel personally. They were closest to the pipeline after all, and the only ones that would have been keeping track of the pipeline since its construction.
Could easily also be an individual there leaking that intel, as detonating norstream was widely seen as desireable.
But who knows, at the time US and EU were still cooperating quite well due to noone wanting to take Greenland.
Pretty strongly no. They have some politicians, my suspicion would be the current German givernment for example, but the majority and thus the actions of the EU are now finally solidly anti-US.
Joint military exercises in Greenland. Pushes to get rid of backdoored US software and cloud services. Disagreeing with the US on major political stances like Israel Palestine.
At this point the US would have to manipulate elections to get more administrations like the current German one (who were elected before Trump 2.0) into power, else it’s only gonna get more anti-US in the coming years. The pickup-truck import trade deal of mid '25 may be the last pro-US concession the EU makes.
Wow. Thanks for the lecture, really.
But why couldn’t we have continued relying on cheap Russian gas and maybe create some form of cooperation agreement and then, later on, phased out of it like China is with wind, hydro and solar, or in whatever other way? Is it maybe because it’s against American interests and as such any Russian -Western cooperation had to be shut down (and Ukraine had to be pushed farther still)? Our leaders have sold us off, I live in the UK now and am a French national and on both accounts this is true, with the UK following the Americans even more strictly… And yeah, Germany as well. I mean, Merkel and all high levels of government were found to be spied on heavily by the NSA and nothing happened to that story, we’re captured people.
Also, I don’t think people are necessarily gonna go full anti US imperialism, I think a good chunk are gonna get MAGA’d and it’s gonna further divide us, and there they can keep us tied to America.
The issue was the suddenness, yes. It would have gone more smoothly had we reacted in time.
For Americas concern, we probably never should have gotten Russian gas to begin with, there really wasn’t any change to that ever. But this only happened when finally everyone in Europe also got the message, that despite the cheap rates it still wasn’t worth it.
Had we started earlier, we probably could have worked out some agreement, played ball with Putin, and gotten a supply to allow a slow and efficient phase-out.
In 2022 thought, Russia was already pressuring nations with the pipeline. Pipelines in eastern Europe had been dry for months, with Russia trying to instead pressure the opening of nordstream 2. Likely for the same reason, nordstream 1 had also been running slower and slower for a while, with Gasprom making dobious claims of technical issues. The implied political message there was gas would resume only if nordstream 2 went live or sanctions were reduced. nordstream was completely offline for a month before the detonation.
Basically the only way any gas would have ever made it through nordstream at that point was if Russia had gained some political concessions. I am glad this did not happen, and the detonation basically just took one fear off of me at the time, since then we no longer had to ignore this pressure, but knew for certain we could no longer cave, and the only way forward was to bite the bullet and move on to other sources, with all the associated costs.
There are for sure attempts to propagandize the EU population. Recently I have noticed short form video being weaponized for this for example. The YouTube recommendation algorithm has also seemed suspicious since some time last year, in pushing a lot of videos in the span from US state aligned news to Maga-aligned conspiracy theorists.
We’ll see how effective that is in the longer run, but I don’t think a year or two of just that is sufficient, especially when there are still somewhat functional local news, covid is over and people talk a bit more again, and there is awareness of the US doing precisely this sort of influencing.
PS:
It’s not as simple as building solar and wind to replace gas. That would be way too naive.
The issue is the function gas has in the grid. The EU only had like 20% contribution of gas to the grid before 2022. Simply using the reserve capacity and reigning in the biggest wastes of power for a bit could have seen complete elimination of gas use within days if it was that easy.
Gas is used to buffer out the shorter-term fluctuations of renewables. If you take down gas, you also take down most green energy and with that like half the total capacity. Most fossil power-plants take a while to spin up. Nuclear takes even longer. Gas though can act within minutes or seconds, since it is burned in turbines.
To replace the position of gas in the grid, the most feasible move is to overbuild on renewables capacity, and then add some batteries. Renewables are insanely cheap, so it is worth it to build more panels than you could ever use at max capacity, just so it takes a bigger drop to eat into the batteries. Batteries then have to take up the remainder, and batteries are still not cheap, and were even worse in 2022. The knowhow was hardly even there in the EU.
Renewables have been greatly built up since 2022, providing this overcapacity, and thus reducing the gas needed to fill the gaps. And now in 2025 I finally saw significant construction of battery storage in the central EU.
All this needed knowhow, heaps of hardware, construction of tons of new infrastructure like entirely new hv lines to balance the changed flows of electricity, …
Wow again, thanks for the informative and balanced reply. I’m sorry I’ve nothing to add, but I couldn’t just upvote the comment and leave like a thief, lol. Hopefully I’ll see you around! 👍