The year was 1987. A young and little known scholar had just published his first and only book. Titled “Ally Versus Ally,” the book outlined the Siberian pipeline crisis that, earlier in the decade, had split the North Atlantic Alliance.

Despite working with inferior extraction equipment, austere landscape, below-freezing temperatures, and rivers of mud that carried away infrastructure during spring thaws, Soviet engineers had managed to exploit deposits in Siberia, “a continent-sized landmass floating on a sea of natural gas and oil.”

Their success rent the alliance on a scale not seen since France’s 1966 withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Should Europe — a continent living in the shadow of a superpower with hegemonic ambitions — help the Soviet Union build pipeline infrastructure? Should Europe then import Russian natural gas?

Yes, wrote the young author of “Ally Versus Ally.” Europe should have embraced the Soviet energy project. The book’s author? None other than the Biden administration’s secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken.

A 25-year-old Mr. Blinken took the stance that unity within the NATO Alliance outweighed any danger that Soviet fuel sales to Europe would inject hard currency into the Soviet war machine at a time when communism in Europe was on the decline and America was squeezing Moscow.

In retrospect, Mr. Blinken wrote, “the pipeline dispute was overblown. Both the hopes and fears concerning the project proved to be exaggerated: it neither guaranteed Europe’s energy future nor posed a serious threat to Western security.”

The kerfuffle over the Siberian pipeline differed from other disagreements between NATO members. Instead, this squabble exposed significant differences between European and American priorities for relations between the democratic West and communist east.

It was almost inevitable, natural even, that NATO allies wouldn’t reach a consensus on all issues, Mr. Blinken wrote. After the horror of World War II, the defensive grouping of Europe’s democracies was an “unusual and precious phenomenon” but one with a serious structural shortcoming.

“Differences emerge when a nation pursues its own particular vision of the alliance interest in conflict with the perception of its partners or when it ignores the group interest to serve its own,” Mr. Blinken proposed.

“The very characteristic of the group relationship we most cherish — the sovereignty of each member — tends to emerge as a constant weakness in our competition with the Communist world.”

Unlike the Warsaw Pact, which kept Central and Eastern European capitals behind the Iron Curtain and under Soviet domination through intimidation, “no one” member of NATO “can issue marching orders to the others.” NATO’s Achilles’ heel, though, was also its greatest strength: security through consensus and compromise, not coercion.

To fast-forward to today is to encounter a startling turnaround. In the face of the crisis building in Ukraine today, Mr. Blinken’s position on eastern pipeline projects has been reversed — at least by the United States. Long gone are the views in his 1987 book. Just as startling is the fact one European economic powerhouse seems to have taken a page from Mr. Blinken’s work and embraced Russian gas: Germany.

Just this week, the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, met with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in Moscow in an attempt to diffuse tensions surrounding Ukraine.

The German press lauded Mrs. Baerbock’s steely demeanor next to Russia’s most seasoned diplomat. However, she did not raise the costs the Russian strongman, Vladimir Putin, could expect to incur should he give the go-ahead to the more than 100,000 Russian troops massing at the country’s border with Ukraine.

In a repeat of the Siberian pipeline crisis, NATO stands at a crossroads. Does Germany, NATO’s second-richest member and the most important destination for Russia’s European gas exports, threaten the Kremlin with shutting down the Nord Stream 2 pipeline?

Germany’s new center-left chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and his Social Democrat party say no — the pipeline is an “a-political” issue.

In the late 1980s, it was taken for granted that the West had “the will and the means to counter direct aggression,” Mr. Blinken wrote. Surely the “overriding mutual interest in the survival of our value system” would take precedence over any future “temporary blindness to group interest.”

Mr. Blinken’s book is now largely forgotten, consigned to dusty shelves in a smattering of university libraries scattered throughout the United States. Today, however, the will that Mr. Blinken assured readers would protect the West from Russian aggression appears to have been built on the same muddy Siberian ground that swept away Soviet oil equipment.

One of Mr. Blinken’s earlier admonishments is almost prophetic. “It takes two to trade,” he stated in his book. “For this reason, a dispute within the West is almost certain to arise once again, perhaps over the very next megaproject. But whether it will be contained, as the pipeline crisis was, and at what price, is anyone’s guess.”

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Mr. Larson is the Berlin leg of The New York Sun.

Image: Antony Blinken at the U.S. State Department in Washington, December 21, 2021. Reuters/Evelyn Hockstein/Pool