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The West about Its Interests in the Caucasus

Ariel Cohen, the leading analyst of the Heritage Foundation (USA), was quoted as saying (Rosiiskaya Gazeta, 28/11/99, "Conflicts in the Caucasus Threaten US Interests") that the Caucasus is the geo-strategic crossroads of the interests of the USA, Europe, Russia, Iran and Turkey. It will soon play a key role in the restoration of the Great Silk Way, which had linked Central Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The giant oil and gas pipelines should channel vast energy resources from Kazakhstan and the Caspian basin to the world markets, Cohen writes. The US interests in the Caucasus boil down to providing guarantees of independence and territorial integrity to Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan; controlling Iran and any signs of Islamic fundamentalism; ensuring access to energy resources; and precluding the possible revival of Russia's imperial ambitions in the region, he claims.

According to Cohen, the USA should protect the spheres of their strategic interests from possible threats by strengthening the civilian institutes and economic markets of the three Transcaucasian republics and developing the coalition of Georgia and Azerbaijan, supported by Turkey and Israel. These measures are designed to guarantee US power-engineering companies the possibility to build Westbound oil and gas pipelines via the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, instead of the proposed northern (through Russia) or southern (through Iran) routes. To ensure its interests in the Caucasus, the USA should do the following:

- Give more political support for the pipeline project from Baku (Azerbaijan) to Ceyhan (Turkey). Otherwise the northern or the southern routes would give Russia or Iran a possibility to control a considerably larger part of the energy market. The USA should use its influence on the governments of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to ensure the construction of the pipeline across the Caspian Sea, as a link of the Baku-Ceyhan project, and in this way raise the economic expediency of the project.

- Promote the development of security collaboration with Georgia, which is the key ally of the USA in the region, but it is not strong enough even to protect its own borders. This weakness inspires the Moscow-supported separatists. The USA should help Georgia to strengthen its armed forces.

- Lift sanctions from Azerbaijan. They were introduced during the Karabakh conflict under Article 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act. In 1994, the warring sides signed a ceasefire agreement, but the sanctions have not been lifted, which undermines the role of the USA as an objective intermediary in the settlement of the Karabakh conflict and blocks the provision of assistance to the Azerbaijani government. High-ranking officials from the Clinton administration had spoken for lifting sanctions and the allocations committee of the House of Representatives voted for lifting them on 10 September 1998.

- Hint to Moscow that its continued support for separatists in the Southern Caucasus would mean the end of the US assistance. In view of the dramatic economic situation in Russia, the Kremlin would be interested in getting more financial and economic assistance from the USA and international financial organisations, such as the IMF and the World Bank. But the trouble is that Moscow continues to support separatists in Abkhazia and Armenians in Karabakh in their struggle with Tbilisi and Baku. Washington should clearly state that any assistance to Russia, and help in lobbying Russian interests in international financial institutes should be suspended until Russia stops its efforts to destabilise the situation in the Caucasus.

- Begin talks with the leaders of the North Caucasian ethnic groups. The North Caucasus is a boiling pot of ethnic contradictions, which is nearing its melt-downs. The USA should build up its information and analytical possibilities in the region and establish dialogue with the leaders of the North Caucasian autonomies. This will guarantee stability, mutual understanding and peace.

Zbigniew Bzhezinski, former national security adviser to President Carter and now a consultant of the Centre of Strategic and International Studies, has a chapter called "Eurasian Balkans" in his sensational book, The Chessboard (that chapter was published in the Baku-based publication, Aina-Zerkalo, on 10/04/99). 

In Europe, the word "Balkans" evokes associations with ethnic conflicts and the rivalry of great powers. Eurasia has its Balkans, too, but the Eurasian Balkans is a much larger, more densely populated and much more ethnically diverse region. It includes parts of South East Europe, Central and South Asia, the Gulf and the Middle East. Its political subjects are unstable and tempting the interference of their more powerful neighbours, each of them resolved to resist the dominating role of other neighbours. Bzhezinski specially points to "the historical ambitions" of three adjacent and most powerful neighbours - Russia, Iran and Turkey. He also believes that China is showing a growing political interest in the region, too.

He thinks the Eurasian Balkans includes nine countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Afghanistan, with two potential candidates being Turkey and Iran. The latter two countries are much more viable than others from the political and economic viewpoints, and both are actively fighting for regional influence in the Eurasian Balkans and hence are major geo-strategic players in that region.

According to Bzhezinski, Azerbaijan is the fulcrum of that vast region. It can be called the vital "stopper" for the "bottle" containing the riches of the Caspian basin and Central Asia. He assigns an important role to Azerbaijan in the new political line-up. An independent Turkic state, with oil pipelines running across it into Turkey (an ethnic relation that provides political assistance), Azerbaijan should hinder Russia's monopoly access to the region and hence deprive Moscow of its main instrument of influence on the policy of the newly-free Central Asian states.

Bzhezinski predicts that Ukraine, Pakistan, India, China and even the far-away USA might join, although in a smaller degree, the current rivalry of Russia, Turkey and Iran for the European Balkans. He points to the special ambitions of Moscow, which rest on the fresh imperial reminiscences and the desire of the Kremlin to regain the status of a great power. As Bzhezinski sees it, Moscow regards the entire territory of the former Soviet Union as the sphere of its special geo-strategic interests, where any external political (and even economic) influence is inadmissible.

As for the USA, it is greatly interested not only in the development of the Caucasian resources, but also in precluding Russia's geopolitical domination in the region. The USA proclaimed its major strategic goals in Eurasia and its economic interests, and well as the interests of Europe and the Far East, in getting unlimited access to this so far closed region.

Bzhezinski concludes that the basic subject of rivalry is access to the region. The pipelines are of vital significance for the future of the Caspian basin and Central Asia. If the main pipelines in the region run across Russia towards Russian terminals in Novorossiisk on the Black Sea coast, the political consequences would be felt without an open flexing of Russia's military muscle at that. The region would remain politically dependent, while Moscow would hold a strong position and independently decide how to divide the new riches of the region. But if a pipeline runs across the Caspian Sea bed to Azerbaijan and on to the Mediterranean via Turkey, and another pipeline runs across Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea, there will be no such domination in regards to access to the region.

Hence one can conclude that the US objective in the region is to create a situation where no single power would control the given geopolitical space, while the international community would have free financial and economic access to it. Geopolitical plurality would become a lasting reality only when a network of oil pipelines and transport routes would directly link the region with the world economic centres via the Mediterranean and the Arabian seas, as well as on land. Consequently, Russia's efforts to monopolise access to the region must be resisted as being harmful to the region's stability.

Zbigniew Bzhezinski believes that the USA should grant its geopolitical assistance to Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and (beyond the region) Ukraine, all of them being geopolitical centres. The role of Kiev is reinforced by the fact that Ukraine is a key state insofar as it concerns the future evolution of Russia. Kazakhstan (in view of its scale, economic potential and geographically important location) also deserves to get reasonable international assistance and long-term economic aid. In due time, the economic revival of Kazakhstan would bridge the ethnic split, which currently makes this Central Asian "shield" so yielding to the Russian pressure.

The USA has common interests in the region with the stable pro-Western Turkey, as well as Iran and China. A gradual improvement of US-Iranian relations would considerably broaden global access to the region, or more precisely, reduce the direct threat to the survival of Azerbaijan. The growing economic presence of China in the region and its contribution to regional independence suits US interests, too. China's support for the actions of Pakistan in Afghanistan is a positive factor, since closer Pakistani-Afghan relations would make international access to Turkmenistan more probable, thus helping to strengthen both Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan (in case Kazakhstan continues to vacillate in the face of the Russian pressure).

Zbigniew Bzhezinski, James Baker, Margaret Thatcher and other prominent Western politicians continue to take a direct part in the formulation and fulfilment of the Western strategic tasks with regard to Russia and the newly-independent states on the post-Soviet space.

Aleksandr Mosyakin writes in his article, "The Bzhezinski Arc: Who Pours Oil into the Caucasian Fire" (Business & Baltics, Riga, 22/09.99), that it was Bzhezinski, a director of the Amoco company (now called British Petroleum - Amoco) and Chevron's chief adviser on "post-Soviet affairs," who formulated the US oil geopolitics in the Caspian-Central Asian region. 

Ex-Secretary of State James Baker, a personal friend of Eduard Shevardnadze, is a director of another US oil company playing in this field. The idea of "the silk road," providing for the transportation of energy resources from the Caspian-Central Asian region via the Transcaucasus and bypassing Russia, was advanced by Bzhezinski and personally discussed and approved by Eduard Shevardnadze and James Baker. Geidar Aliyev subsequently discussed it with US leaders and the Turkish president when he went abroad for heart surgery. The result of their close talks was not just the idea of a new "Silk Road," but also the possibility of establishing US and Turkish military bases in Azerbaijan.