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11/25/2004:
"Ukraine and the Caspian A Rand paper from 2000"
An Opportunity for the United StatesOlga Oliker
The United States has said that the Caspian region, and the development of its energy resources, is a key national security interest. It has also made clear its commitment to the independence of Ukraine. But current options for Caspian oil transport are beset with political and logistical problems and, therefore, fall far short of guaranteeing the safe, secure export of Caspian oil in the short or long term. At the same time, Russia's increasing stranglehold on Ukraine's energy imports does not bode well for the smaller country's ability to maintain its hard-won sovereignty, and it increases the risk that Ukraine will call on the United States and its NATO allies to stand behind it against Russia. The development of an export route for Caspian oil through Ukraine is a cheap and effective means of ameliorating both problems, and thus an approach that Washington should support.
CASPIAN OIL, THE UNITED STATES, AND UKRAINE
The Caspian Sea basin has attracted considerable attention in recent years, due largely to speculation as to the potential size of the region's natural gas and oil reserves. While analysts continue to debate whether the resources will ever prove truly significant, states are making policy choices in the apparent belief that they will. The United States is no exception. The potential for energy wealth has already led Clinton administration officials to class Central Asia and the Caucasus as a region "vital" to the United States.[1] Washington hopes that the development of natural gas and oil there will lead to reduced reliance on Middle Eastern suppliers for both the United States and its European allies. It also sees successful exploitation as the key to independence and prosperity for the Caspian states. This independence and prosperity, it is believed, will in turn foster democracy, something Washington has long held as a central policy goal for all of the former Soviet Union.
Because the United States is far from alone in its interest in the region and its resources, however, there is plenty of room for discord. One of the primary points of contention has been the question of how Caspian oil and gas will reach customers. The easiest, most direct route is through Iran, but Washington has been vehement in its opposition to Teheran's involvement in Caspian development. Moscow advocates an expansion of current transport routes--through Russia and over the Black Sea (or, in the case of natural gas, under it). Ankara, while cooperating with Moscow to develop the underwater natural gas pipeline plan, is strongly opposed to its preferred oil route, citing the environmental hazards posed by increased traffic through Turkey's narrow Bosporus Strait. Instead, Ankara supports the Baku-Ceyhan route through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and its own territory.
Full Article: rand.org
The "Great Game" for Caspian Sea Oil
by Andre Gunder Frank
A book OIL AND GEOPOLITICS IN THE CASPIAN SEA REGION [edited by Michael P. Croissant and Bulent Aras, Westport, Conn. & London: Praeger 1999] with a foreword by Pat Clawson of the National Defense University and editor of ORBIS, and dedicated to Ronald Reagan and Turgut Ozal, announces its far-right wing political pedigree and U.S establishment legitimation literally up front. Clawson already explicitly, indeed brutally, lays out the groundwork in his two page foreword: The Caspian Sea region is a world-class oil area with complex econo- and geo-strategic conflicts of interest and corresponding competing policies among surrounding states and the West, particularly the United States. The issues are not only the oil per se, including its low price at the time of publication, but also the related conflicts of interest over pipeline routes and the U.S. intent to deny them to Russia and Iran. The rule of law, democracy and human rights come in at the tail end.
In his chapter on the United States, Stephen Blank has done enough of his homework to bring along multiple strategic [in more senses than one] quotations from the horse's mouth in Washington and at NATO headquarters. The background of it all is of course the ongoing American competition with Russia, now also with the regions under review, among which "the Transcaspian has become perhaps the most important area of direct Western-Russian contention today" [p.250 in the book]. Therefore, the author argues, that the new geo-economic competition cannot be separated out from the old but still ongoing geo-political one. That is, the nineteenth century "Great Game" competition for the control of Central Eurasia is still alive and kicking also in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Blank writes that "Washington is now becoming the arbiter or leader of virtually every interstate and international issue in the area" [254] and indeed also "the main center of international adjudication and influence for local issues" [255]. However in the face of the Russian bear, old style gun-boat diplomacy is too dangerous and is now replaced by its "functional equivalent ... peace operations" [256]. Washington is pursuing these with intense "actual policy making on a daily basis throughout the executive branch" [253] in Washington and by a myriad of "Partnership for Peace" programs of which the Strategic Research Development Report 5-96 of the [U.S] Center for Naval Warfare Studies reports
on activities of these forces that provide dominant battlespace knowledge necessary to shape regional security environments. Multinational excersizes, port visits, staff-to-staff coordination - all designed to increase force inter- operability and access to regional military facilities - along with intelligence and surveillance operations.... [So] forward deployed forces are backed up by those which can surge for rapid reenforcement and can be in place in seven to thirty days [256-257]
-- all as a 'partnership for peace" in - we may understand - Orwellian double-speak. Indeed, U.S. local diplomats and the Clinton administration now regard the Transcapian as a 'backup' for Middle East oil supplies and some insist that the U.S. "take the lead in pacifying the entire area" including by the possible overthrow of inconveniently not sufficiently cooperative governments [258]. The policy and praxis of common military exercises also includes distant Kazakstan. All this and more "reflects a major shift in U.S. policy toward Cental Asia ... coordinated by the National Security Council," as the author quotes from the hawkish U.S. JAMESTOWN FOUNDATION MONITOR. The Security Council's former head and then already super anti-Soviet Russian hawk, Zbigniew Brzezinsky, now promotes a modernized Mackinder heartland vision of a grand U.S. led anti-Russian coalition of Europe,Turkey, Iran, and China as well as Central Asia [253]
Full Article:rrojasdatabank.info
