by Mike Whitney, The Unz Review:

Washington is positioning its assets at chokepoints across Central Asia to block critical rail corridors that link Beijing to Europe. It’s part of a US plan to isolate China from western markets following an outbreak of hostilities in Taiwan.

The destruction of Nordstream is the key to understanding how Washington plans to deal with China. The pipeline effectively erased the geographic borders between Russia and Germany creating a de facto free trade zone that spanned the continents and increased the prosperity of both trading partners. The arrangement anticipated a much larger commons area that would extend from “Lisbon to Vladivostok”, in fact, that was Vladimir Putin’s explicit goal. Washington saw this as a threat to its regional hegemony and set about to scuttle the partnership and the pipeline. As we pointed out in an earlier article: