Oct ober 7, 2008
The Great Game in the Caucasus:
Bad Moves by Uncle Sam
By CONN HALLINAN
The tale of what the Bush Administration is up to in the Caucasus is
slowly filtering out, although the U.S. press has largely deep-sixed
the story. The recent Georgia-Russia war was just one move in a chess
game aimed at cornering the energy reserves of Central Asia, extending
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to Moscow’s vulnerable
southern border, and ending Russia’s control of the Black Sea. Georgia
was just a pawn – an expendable one at that – in a high stakes game.
While the White House and some in the European Union (EU) represent
the recent war as one between an increasingly powerful Russia
reasserting itself in its former empire versus a small, democratic
nation trying to recover two of its former provinces, that story is
fraying a bit. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was recently
condemned by the EU’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human
Rights for undemocratic practices, and a recent NATO analysis of the
war supports the Russian charge that Tbilisi started the whole affair.
The maneuvers that led to the war, however, have gone largely
unreported.
Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. moved
into Kazakhstan, Central Asia’s richest energy producer. U.S. oil
companies, including Chevron, showed up in an effort to pry Kazakhstan
away from its leading partners, China and Russia. Kazakh President
Nurusultan Nazabayev was wined and dined, campaigning to get his
country to send its oil through the trans-Caucasus Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan
(BTC) pipeline, thus bypassing Russia and putting China’s energy
jugular in Western hands.
The U.S. put a full-court press on oil-rich Azerbaijan as well.
Georgia was on the chess board because the BTC runs thorough that
country’s south. The U.S. cemented control over the pipeline by
helping to sponsor the "Rose Revolution" that brought Saakashvili to
power in 2003.
But there was more than oil at stake in all this.
Starting almost a decade ago, the U.S. began pressuring fellow NATO
member Turkey to modify or abrogate a rather obscure treaty called the
Montreux Convention, a 1936 agreement that gives Turkey the right to
restrict the passage of warships through the Bosporus Straits and the
Dardanelles. The Convention has allowed Turkey and Russia to control
the Black Sea and to prevent any foreign power from establishing a
major presence there.
The U.S., which was not a party to the original treaty, has pressed
Turkey to let it turn the Black Sea into a NATO lake. Turkey is a NATO
member, as are Bulgaria and Rumania. The U.S. already has military
bases in Romania. If the Bush Administration had succeeded in bringing
the Ukraine and Georgia into the Alliance, NATO would have checkmated
the Russian fleet at Sevastopol, restricting its access to the
Mediterranean and isolating it from the Middle East.
However, the Americans play a lousy game of chess, particularly if
some of the pieces on its side of the board have different agendas.
Take Turkey, for instance.
Ankara has not only shown no inclination to dump the Montreux
Convention, it has proposed a "Caucasus Stability and Cooperation
Pact" that would sideline NATO in favor of a settlement by regional
powers. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan presented the
proposal to Moscow shortly after the war.
"The chief value in the Turkish initiative," said Russian Foreign
Minster Sergei Lavrov, is that it is "common sense" and assumes that
"countries belonging to the region themselves should decide how to
conduct affairs there."
Lavrov went on to add two other "regional" issues that could be dealt
with using a similar framework: Iraq and Iran.
That the Turkish proposal caught the Americans by surprise is an
indication of how the U.S. failed to understand how complex the game
of chess is in that region of the world. Turkey is indeed a member of
NATO, but it also has its own national interests to consider.
While Turkish trade with Georgia is $1 billion a year, it’s almost $40
billion with Russia. Turkey also gets 70 per cent of its natural gas
from Russia. Turkey and Russia have long dominated the Black Sea, and
both see it as central to their economic and security interests. If
the U.S. moves large numbers of warships into the area, it won’t just
be the Russians who lose control of that body of water.
Neither are the Turks eager to modify international treaties like the
Montreux Convention. Doing so, writes M.K. Bhadrakumar, a career
diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service and a former ambassador in the
region, "would open a Pandora’s Box. It might well turn out to be a
step towards reopening the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, the cornerstone
which erected the modern Turkish state out of the debris of the
Ottoman Empire."
According to Bhadrakumar, the U.S. plan was to bring Kazakhstan into
NATO as well. The Kazakh-Russian border is the longest land border
shared by any two nations in the world. "It would be a nightmare for
Russian security if NATO were to gain a foothold in Kazakhstan," he
says.
In short, what the U.S. is up to is the 21st century’s version of the
"Great Game," the competition that pitted 19th century imperial powers
against one another in a bid to control Central Asia and the Middle
East.
The move to surround Russia and hinder China’s access to energy is
part of the Bush Administration’s 2002 "West Point Doctrine," a
strategic posture aimed at preventing the rise of any economic or
military competitors.
When U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently said that
Russia was facing international isolation over the Georgia war, she
was whistling past the graveyard. Rather than being isolated, the
Russians have been lining up allies among the very states the U.S. had
hoped would join it in ringing the Russians with newly recruited NATO
allies.
During the recent meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO) in the Tajikistan capital of Dushanbe, Kazakh President
Nurusultan Nazarbayev assured the Russians they could rely on
Kazakhstan for support. "I am amazed that the West simply ignored the
fact that Georgian armed forces attacked the peaceful city of
Tskhinvali," said Nazarbayev, "Kazakhstan understands all the measures
that have been taken [by Russia] and supports them."
The SCO is made up of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
Azerbaijan, another major target for the U.S., has kept quiet on the
Georgian War, but announced that it was reducing the amount of oil and
gas it was shipping through the BTC pipelines and increasing its
shipments through Russia and Iran. "We knew there was a risk of
political turmoil in Georgia, but we did not expect war," Elhar
Nasirov, vice-president of Azerbaijan’s state oil company, Socar, told
the Financial Times. "It’s not a good idea to have all your eggs in
one basket, especially when that basket is so fragile."
If both Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan balk at using the BTC, it could not
only derail U.S. strategy in the region, but the pipeline itself.
While NATO has tried to put up a united front on Georgia, the Alliance
is deeply split between the U.S., Britain, Poland and the Baltic
States on one side, and France, Germany, Italy, and Spain on the
other. In part, the reluctance of the latter group to join
Washington’s crusade against Moscow is based on self-interest. Russia
is an important trading partner and provides Europe with much of its
energy.
But a number of European countries are also having serious doubts
about Georgia’s leader. According to Der Spiegel, NATO intelligence
sources back the Russian account of the war, not Georgia’s. "Five
weeks after the war in the Caucasus the mood is shifting against
Georgian President Saakashvilli," the newspaper wrote on Sept. 15.
This shift in sentiment has even been voiced in the U.S. Congress,
although it has yet to be reported in any major U.S. media. Addressing
the Senate Armed Services Committee Sept. 9, Senator Hillary Clinton
said it was not "smart" to isolate Russia over the war and pointedly
asked, "Did we embolden the Georgians in any way?" Clinton called for
a commission to look into the origins of the war, echoing a similar
call by Europe’s foreign ministers meeting in the French city of
Avignon.
At a meeting of the EU’s inter-governmental commission in the Black
Sea resort of Sochi, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said it was
important to "strengthen the partnership between the European Union
and Russia, and France and Russia."
While a Harris Poll shows that some Europeans are now "more concerned"
with Russia than they were before the war, the same poll shows the
U.S. is still considered a far more serious "threat to global
stability." The poll also indicates overwhelming opposition in
Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Britain to increasing military
spending in the aftermath of the Georgian war. Indeed, any government
that presses for a more aggressive posture toward Russia, or knuckes
under to Washington’s pressure to increase military spending, is
likely to find itself out of power.
The Georgian war, like the Iraq war, were disasters brought on by a
combination of imperial arrogance and fundamental cluelessness. The
U.S. now finds itself locked into a military stalemate in Iraq and
Afghanistan, increasingly isolated in the Middle East and Central
Asia, and enmeshed in one of the greatest financial meltdowns in its
history.
Check.
This is how empires end.
Hallinan can be reached at [email protected]