The Biden administration walked back the Trump policy of sanctioning anybody who did work on the NS2 pipeline. Russia was able to use this as an implied bargaining chip against German support for Ukraine.
Who benefits from blowing up a Russian pipeline in The Baltic Sea? Russia? The country that was planning on using this as leverage? Who could have just as easily simply turned the supply off?
The idea that anybody ever bought that is embarrassing.
Now Germany is also signaling that they aren't on board with the idea of economic sanctions against China: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-02-18/China-to-expand-mutual...
Germany is trying to avoid WW3 here, which I think is signaled by their initial reaction to the war, and now signaled again with their response to the idea of economic sanctions against China. In pursuit of that, they didn't want to support the war in Ukraine, for what I think should now be obvious reasons. The US was worried that they wouldn't be willing to risk their population freezing to death this winter, so we blew up the gas pipeline and took the option away from them.