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This proposed strategy is utterly moronic and I really don't see how you can think this is a viable approach at all. What, exactly, is the carrot being offered to keep the Eurozone outside Russia and China's sphere of influence when the American offer is just "if you want an economy more advanced than the middle ages we are going to bomb your infrastructure back to the stone age"? The US military is not going to have nearly as easy a time operating in Europe when they're enforcing a zero-development policy against the wishes of the EU.
For Europe, the only alternative to Russian energy is deprivation - remember that Biden just turned off the LNG exports designed to cover the shortfall in order to get back at Texas. You can't have a modern first world economy (or a modern first world welfare state for that matter) without copious amounts of fossil fuels. Green and renewable energy cannot make up for the shortfall, and neither can nuclear. There is no alternative to Russian fossil fuels - right now Europe is still using them, they just have to pay a big premium to India in order to get around US sanctions and pipeline bombing. I was one of the people who thought the sanctions would have caused massive problems in Europe last winter, I just didn't think the US would accept such an obvious and naked end-run around their sanctions.
It isn't just an enormous lift - the calculations on exactly when the transition process has to start in order to avoid severe involuntary reductions in societal complexity have been done, and the answer was several decades ago. Switching to a new energy source is going to be a massive, society-wide challenge WITH Russian fossil fuels. Without them? lol
The moment the US switches to an approach of "You are going to stay poor, cold and freezing because we want to hurt the people you buy gas from, and we are not going to make up for the shortfall in the way we promised because our own states are rebelling and need to be punished" the Europeans are going to just welcome the Russians in through open doors. Of course, now that I think about it, that doesn't really seem that unrealistic given the fecklessness of the current administration.
There's only 20 something oil pipes from Russia to Europe and 3 have already been bombed. Call it dumb and correctly point out the negative consequences. But if Europe is in real danger of being dominated by Russia because of oil then any nation with a naval diving team can anonymously bomb a few more sections of pipe. Or like how the CIA likely destroyed a section of Rusdian gas pipe in 1982 by engineering a computer ""accident"". The leaked Pentagon documents include Zelensky discussing bombing Russian pipes to get back at Hungary.
I'm not saying it is a good thing. I'm saying it already has happened a few times and will keep happening if need be. And it can be done anonymously and Europeans can be left speculating who blew up the pipes.
Sweden imports a single digit percentage of their fossil fuel from Russia. If they were cut off from Russia they wouldn't suffer. It is possible to be a modern Western nation and not hopelessly dependent on Russian fuel. Sweden chose this. Germany did not. Rather than shut down nuclear power plants in order to replace them with even more imported Russian fuel, Germany could have built more and then have imported less Russian fuel.
This trick might work on internet arguments when you can just say "Well there's no clear and undeniable photographic evidence of it happening so we can just never know" but there's no way that it will be taken seriously wrt geopolitical concerns like this. There's no need for speculation, and there wasn't even any need for speculation with the Nordstream bombing either - it was extremely obvious who did it and why, and the only reason there was any confusion was the people who did it also have substantial influence over the western media. In this hypothetical scenario where the EU moves out of the US orbit and into the Russian one, the ability of the US to just surreptitiously blow up pipelines and commit acts of actual war against the EU will be substantially degraded. When the US is forced to just go out into the open and admit that they're keeping Europe poor because otherwise Russia would benefit, what do you think that's going to do to the political situation there? Nationalist parties are on the rise already, and this would just give them substantially more power.
Not for long, and especially not if you're Germany (Norway can get away with it for obvious reasons). Fossil fuels are the bedrock of any advanced economy and there is no viable replacement or alternative. The shortfall created by denying Europe access to Russian gas cannot be filled by nuclear or renewables - not only is there not enough time to spin them up, it is doubtful that they can cover the gap and impossible for them to replace the other uses of fossil fuels.
Of course, the other aspect to this problem is that Russia doesn't have any problem finding other buyers for their fossil fuels. Sure, they might make a bit less money selling them to China, but that'll serve as a nice little boost to the Chinese economy and military. These moves don't just hurt America's putative allies, but actually strengthen their enemies. Of course that's not to say the US wouldn't do it - the war in Iraq was a transparently terrible idea with millions of negative outcomes people correctly foresaw and warned about in advance, but that didn't do anything to stop it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:Energy_mix_in_Germany.svg
If you think that building a few more nuclear plants would have obviated the need to import Russian fuel I do not think you have a very good grasp of just how much energy nuclear or fossil fuels provide. You would have to multiply their nuclear power generation capacity by close to an order of magnitude to cover the fossil fuel shortfall. This is just not a serious proposal.
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