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I don’t care either way who blew up the pipeline but to me the biggest glaring reason why I don’t think it’s the US is because Russia did not retaliate in any meaningful way.

Us peons are clueless about what happened but Russia knows and they would know if it was them. If it wasn’t them then it’s obvious who did It and escalating the war would be justified. The fact this didn’t happen to me suggests it was Russia all along.

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Russia would only retaliate in a visible way if they played a tit-for-tat strategy. But that's not the only option. That's only how Americans think ("something HAS to be done right now, it doesn't matter if we end up punishing the wrong guy or the wrong country").

From the point of view of Russia, this is just yet another move in the much larger scale game of energy geopolitics. Russia's answer might not be to blow up some random pipeline in Alaska but to do many other things that will secure their energy contracts elsewhere, while harming its adversaries in the process.

This goes both way, however. If Russia used the incident as a justification for retaliation, they would make it easy for the US to play the innocent one and point the political finger to old enemy Russia - a believable story the rest of the west would have to support.

The Defense industry profits either way.

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