European objections helped derail the South Stream pipeline project that Moscow was hoping to use to move Russian gas to southeastern Europe via Bulgaria – and now the United States is telling Greece to say no to Turkish Stream, a project that Gazprom and Turkey reached agreement on this week.

Turkish Stream would pipe Russian gas through Turkey to the Greek border, and the New York Times says Greece’s foreign minister, Alexis Tsipras, has “confirmed his country’s readiness to participate in the construction of a Greek pipeline to transfer Russian natural gas from the Greece-Turkey border to Europe.”

Bad idea, U.S. special enboy Amos J. Hochstein told the Greeks in Athens on Friday.

“Diversification is ultimately the best way to create security of supply,” Hochstein said, according to the Associated Press. “And that means that you should be allowed to bring in other sources of gas that are non-Russian, just to have competition.”

While the Greeks are focused on revenue possibilities of a pipeline deal, the U.S. and the rest of Europe are “wary of Russia’s clout in the European gas market as well as its tactics of using deals to win political influence,” as the Financial Times put it.

The U.S. is insisting that the long-planned Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), part of an initiative called the Southern Gas Corridor, would not only give Europe more diverse gas sources, but allow Greece to draw investment to develop its own offshore gas resources, according to the Times.

The project would open up more competition to Gazprom in the form of gas from Azerbaijan. Gas would flow through the Trans Anatolian Pipeline to the Greek-Turkish border, then cross northern Greece, Albania and the Adriatic Sea before coming ashore in Southern Italy to connect to the Italian natural gas network.