american fossil fuels. so by doing this, they shot price of oil back up and natural gas. what does that do? it makes russia rich again. russia needs a lot of money to continue to fight this war, and the other reason is this pipeline wasn t useful to them. it wasn t operational, and russia s already sold all all that oil and natural gas to china, to india, to turkey. so it was a no-brainer, i think, from their perspective. will: so i didn t ask you this in our last conversation when you gave me this plausible theory in order to increase the price, why the need for hem to sabotage, to blow up the pipeline. couldn t they have just turned off the gas to germany and had the same effect of constricting global supply and, thus, rising prices? yeah, but there are other motives at play here. yes, they could have done that, and they could have done a cyber attack. but what does this do? it sends a warning shot to the your europeans. it shows them, look, we can blow
up these gas pipelines, what s right next to them? fiber optic cables. we can shut down your communication system. you may not want to support yaron, europe, if this is the ukraine, europe, if this is the price you have to pay. by having this attack in such a dramatic way, president putin can go to his own people and say, see, i told you, this was america who did this, this wasn t russia. this wasn t anybody else. this was america, and america s out to get us, america s attacking us. and that gives him the rally round the flag motive that he needs domestically. he s fighting a war that s not popular at home, and he s had to call up 300,000 reservists, biggest military a draft call-up since world war ii. he s got a lot of explaining to do to his own people. will: i understand that one. i understand sell the war to your domestic population, show it as an act of aggression from america. i ve also heard the argument as well this is a better way to fracture nato.
but what do i do, kt, with, for example, joe biden and victoria nuland s echoing of joe biden s threat to he s a little abstract or vague about a it, you know? nord stream 2 will not happen. he said that back in february. if russia invades ukraine, nord stream 2 will not happen. this seems to be a fulfillment of that threat. yeah. but let s think that one lu for a minute. first of all, joe biden finish. [inaudible] number two, if they really wanted to take it offline, they could have done a cyber attack. number three, this is an administration that prides itself on its environmental concerns. why should they create an environmental disaster in doing this? look, to me, what s so frustrating about this, will, the answer is so easy. we don t need to go to war with russia. take away russia s ability to make war, and that s because they re rich now because of high energy prices. every time russia s been rich in the last 50 years it invades its