I feel like I’m missing something here. US doing that would have made them much stronger against China. I mean just imagine how much more robust the European economy would be if all the gas going to China was going right to Europe.
Though in typing that out I may have answered my own question. Is it really just because US wanted to European market to themselves? This seems incredibly short sighted.
Simple, Russia was never seen as an equal. The plan was to take Russia apart and exploit it the way Latin America, Africa, and other Global South nations have been. The west was going to put in a puppet regime that would sell off all the resources to western corps, and then use cheap domestic labour to mine these resources and send them to the west.
And this was working pretty well under Yeltsin, but then Putin got in power and put a stop to all that and the west never forgave the fact that Russia managed to retain sovereignty.