Metacomment on speculations on who might have sabotaged NordStream.
It seems like people here mostly implicitly treat possible state actors as coherent, unified agents. But maybe it wasn’t any particular state acting as a whole but rather some small group within that state that decided to do it on their own. Even if they considered it likely to be identified after the fact, the subgroup may have judged the sabotage to be in the interest of the whole nation or maybe that particular subgroup.
(I don’t know how much fragmentation of that sort there is in any given country but I think it’s at least plausible)
There are intelligence services of countries that sometimes operate without the mandate of the government. The whistleblower Annie Machon for example suggests that MI6 was funding an assassination attempt on Gaddafi without asking or informing the rest of the government.
Metacomment on speculations on who might have sabotaged NordStream.
It seems like people here mostly implicitly treat possible state actors as coherent, unified agents. But maybe it wasn’t any particular state acting as a whole but rather some small group within that state that decided to do it on their own. Even if they considered it likely to be identified after the fact, the subgroup may have judged the sabotage to be in the interest of the whole nation or maybe that particular subgroup.
(I don’t know how much fragmentation of that sort there is in any given country but I think it’s at least plausible)
There are intelligence services of countries that sometimes operate without the mandate of the government. The whistleblower Annie Machon for example suggests that MI6 was funding an assassination attempt on Gaddafi without asking or informing the rest of the government.