Joe Biden's been "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades," as Bob Gates wrote in his memoir, so here we go again.

This time, he sanctioned the wrong country, giving Vladimir Putin a pass on his energy pipeline to Europe, while sanctioning America's pipeline from Canada.  Only bad guys get sanctions, see, so guess who Biden's bad guy is.

According to Axios:

The Biden administration will waive sanctions on the corporate entity and CEO overseeing the construction of Russia's Nord Stream 2 pipeline into Germany, according to two sources briefed on the decision.

Why it matters: The decision indicates the Biden administration is not willing to compromise its relationship with Germany over this pipeline, and it underscores the difficulties President Biden faces in matching actions to rhetoric on a tougher approach to Russia.

Driving the news: The State Department will imminently send its mandatory 90-day report to Congress listing entities involved in Nord Stream 2 that deserve sanctions. Sources familiar with the drafting of the report tell Axios the State Department plans to call for sanctions against a handful of Russian ships.

As Axios noted: 

This planned move seems at odds with Secretary of State Antony Blinken's statement, made during his confirmation hearing: "I am determined to do whatever we can to prevent that completion" of Nord Stream 2.

Number one, I doubt it was planned, given the New York Times' reporting on senile Joe's foggy decision-making style, with its long ditherings punctuated by flashes of furious impulse.

More to the point, it's inchoate as foreign policy goes. 

Axios believes that the idea is to keep our ally Germany, a country that squelched its own nuclear power industry with the idea of "going green," and then found itself in Putin's palm for its bona fide energy needs, happy.

Biden's call is also going to make Putin happy, snickering to himself that Biden is powerless to stop his plan to get Germany on Russia's string for energy.  Axios notes that Putin has a history of cutting off energy to countries that don't play ball with it on other issues, as has done on numerous occasions to Ukraine.  What Putin did to Ukraine with its energy shutoffs, it will now be empowered to do to Germany, too.

And by empowering Russia as an energy petro-tyrant with America's critical ally in Germany, it certainly brings up questions as to what Putin, through his still-world class intelligence agencies, might have on Biden, given the grotesque dribs and drabs of corruption involving foreigners just in his son Hunter's abandoned laptop.  Hunter's laptop could be the tip of an iceberg based on all the evidence out there of House Biden corruption.

It's certainly been noticed in Congress.

A week after Russian hackers shut down a U.S. pipeline, President Biden lifted sanctions on a Russian pipeline.

What does Vladimir Putin have on President Biden??

— Jim Banks (@RepJimBanks) May 18, 2021

Here's a third thing: it certainly makes Iran happy, too, given that Biden's favor to Putin signals that he's getting Russia on his good side in order to lay the groundwork for restarting the hideous Iran deal.  That empowers both Iran and Russia (historic allies) at the expense of America, Israel, and the decent Arab states in the region.

Geopolitics aside, it's not gone unnoticed that as Biden waves through Russia's pipeline project with Germany, he's squelched America's pipeline project with Canada, which, like the Nord Stream project, has been years in the planning and making.  Some 10,000 jobs are expected to be lost with this one, with Joe telling the workers to go get work capping wells, installing Chinese-made solar panels made with slave labor, or learning to code.

This comes at a time when Biden's greenie nonsense against America is causing it to lose its pre-eminence as an energy exporter, and making America, too, like Germany, now dependent on foreign petro-tyrants for its energy needs, all in the name of going green.  As Biden shuts down America's pipelines from its good ally Canada (which has zero history of cutting off energy to its neighbors over foreign policy disputes), it gives the green light to Putin to go ahead.

This comes at a bad time.  A critical U.S. pipeline was subject to a ransomware attack by dark-web thieves, possibly Russian gangsters, who got away with it.  They were last heard from planning more attacks.

The U.S., meanwhile, has lost its potential leverage over neighbors as an energy-exporter, should it want to do that, by Biden's war on energy-producers, shutting down not just the Keystone XL pipeline with Canada, but drilling on federal lands.  The Axios piece talks of Biden retaining "leverage" with Germany by retaining the threat of sanctions, as if he were some great strategic thinker, but this is bee ess in light of Biden's self-disarmament of America's own energy leverage in his pipeline shutdowns.  What a master strategic thinker!

Call it an America-last, Putin-first foreign policy.  The Russians must be laughing.  Bob Gates, despite what he's said recently, must be nodding ruefully, too.  Pipeline for thee, but not for me — what a winner this clown in the White House has come up with.

Image:  Screen shot from a camera aimed at a television set during a network broadcast, filtered with FotoSketcher.