President Biden’s tetchy disposition has a way of catching up with him — one day he’s calling a Fox news journalist a “stupid son of a bitch” and before you know it he’s referring to Trump supporters as “garbage.” Less well-documented is that time he stood next to a squirming German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, mumbling that if Russia invaded Ukraine he would take out a natural gas pipeline that had cost Germany taxpayers upwards of $11 billion. 

The Nord Stream pipelines that run under the Baltic Sea for 745 miles to Germany from Russia are a joint venture between European — mainly German — energy companies and Russian energy giant Gazprom. They were designed to transport natural gas between Russia, where it is abundant, and Western Europe, where it is not. 

On September 26, 2022, four undersea explosions took three of the four state-of-the-art pipelines out of commission, an action which sent half a billion tons of methane gas into the atmosphere and set up a whodunnit of international proportions. Yet there were clues: Earlier that year, President Biden told reporters that “we will bring an end to Nord Stream 2.” 

Did he? It is no secret that Washington had long been opposed to Germany’s increasing dependence on Russian energy. Seen in that light, the Russian invasion of Ukraine changed the calculus. Journalists found the White House’s reflexive denials of either any involvement or any foreknowledge unconvincing, and a pro forma Swedish investigation was inconclusive.

All that is easy fodder for the view that the Nord Stream explosions were part of a covert naval operation that Mr. Biden seems to have inadvertently exposed. Plus there are the keystone cop-like antics on behalf of German authorities to try to pin the explosions on Ukrainian sabotage.

Were Germany’s half-hearted attempts to track down a would-be Ukrainian saboteur a last-ditch effort save face? Certainly, its independence of action on the global stage has been called into question time and again, particularly with regard to energy issues.

In any case, a physicist and professor emeritus of science, technology, and international security at MIT, Theodore Postol, told the Sun about some of the extraordinary complexity that would perforce go into “destroying sections of an undersea pressurized gas pipeline.”

Given those challenges, it would seem equally remarkable that the major Western intelligence agencies, with their vast budgets, would have no idea about what transpired that September under what are after all relatively shallow waters.

In 2023,  as part of a wide ranging exchange with conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson about how Mr. Biden was already then, as he put it, “failing at a geometric rather than arithmetic rate,” the topic of Nord Stream and Ukraine came up. 

In respect of the Nord Stream undersea pipeline explosions in September 2022, I asked Mr. Hanson why he thought investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s report implicating President Biden met with so much derision and outright hostility from the White House.

“I am confused that no official has offered a point-by-point refutation that demonstrates his exact references to names, dates, and details cannot be accurate,” he tells the Sun.

“While many of our top officials have all but bragged the pipeline would be ended upon a Russian invasion, no one actually believed that the U.S. would do that,” he added, “for to do so would have enormous implications and set precedents.”

Mr. Hanson stated that America and “its NATO partners do not destroy the multibillion-dollar investments of a country with which we are not at war, especially a  nation with some 6,500-7,000 deliverable nuclear weapons, an ailing leader, and an ongoing war on Europe’s doorstep.” 

Why not though? All is not fair in international affairs and there is an awful lot that happens under the radar — that is not exactly a newsflash. In Mr. Hanson’s estimation, however, “If such a surreal story were to be true, it would bring down the Biden administration and discredit all who planned and operated the mission.” 

Could this be the “little secret” to which President Trump recently alluded? Whoever wins the race for the White House on Tuesday will inherit a heap of unanswered questions about arguably the biggest international caper of the 21st century. The Biden administration undercut its own plausible deniability on Nord Stream given the president’s ill-timed gaffes on the topic.

The fact that the Russians blame America is almost beside the point. So is the fact that Congress missed the opportunity to look into the matter. Absent a smoking gun, after all, there is still smoke.

If Mr. Trump wins on Tuesday and picks up this matter as the new president, it could mean that not only Mr. Biden but Vice President Harris — who enjoys reminding Americans of her career as a top state prosecutor — could face questions.