Germany and Nato, revisited

I’ve argued before that much of the collapse of Nato is in fact due to Germany, and not Trump.  There is now an update:

Germany and Austria have castigated new American sanctions on Russia that target Moscow’s controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe, describing them as an illegal threat to EU energy security.

Sending a strong message to Moscow, the US Senate on Wednesday voted 97-2 to approve measures that toughen existing sanctions on Moscow and create new restrictions that target companies which support Russian “energy export pipelines”.

In a joint statement on Thursday, Berlin and Vienna said the amendment heralded a “new and very negative quality in European-American relations”.

The Senate move threatens to break a delicate transatlantic consensus on Russia sanctions orchestrated by Chancellor Angela Merkel, which has until now excluded Russia’s export pipelines precisely because they involved key German interests.

Here is the FT article.  How would America have reacted to Russia’s election tampering back say in 1966?  How might Germany have gone along with that response?  How willing was Germany back then to accept such a high percentage of its energy supplies from Russia/USSR?

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