The threat of sanctions never was going to stop Nord Stream 2

The Europeans do business with the Russians for the same reason we do. But what should most concern Washington is not the relationship between Berlin and Moscow or Brussels and Moscow — it is the relationship between Brussels and Washington and the relationship between Brussels and Beijing. The next several decades will see the emergence of a new international order that will be in the largest part shaped either by the interests and values of the People’s Republic of China or by the interests and values of the liberal democracies. Neither the United States alone, nor the United States plus its English-speaking allies, nor the European Union has the power to secure a liberal-democratic future on its own. This will be a joint effort, or it will be a failed effort. The United States does not have the power to force the other nations of the world to adhere to its interests and values on its own. It never has — including at the height of its power and prestige in the immediate postwar years. But rather than recognize the facts on the ground and organize its diplomatic business accordingly, the United States has in recent years lurched from absurdity to absurdity and from crisis to crisis, now aping the crude nationalism of Beijing, now striking a grandiose Wilsonian pose — while at almost all times and on almost all occasions making foreign policy an instrument of short-term domestic politics, subordinate to short-term political calculation.