WHY AZERBAIJAN SHOULD MATTER TO AMERICA
Forbes
June 11 2013
By George Friedman, Founder and Chairman of Stratfor, a geopolitical
intelligence firm
There is a point where three great powers – Russia, Turkey and Persia
– meet: the Caucasus. At the moment they converge in a country called
Azerbaijan. That fact makes Azerbaijan a battleground for these three
great powers, which have competed with each other along various borders
for centuries. Until 1991 Azerbaijan was part of the Soviet Union,
as was the rest of the South Caucasus. But as the Russian border
moved north, Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan were once more unveiled
by history. Of the three, Azerbaijan won the geopolitical prize of
bordering the three great regional powers.
It also emerged as a major energy producer. At the end of the 19th
century, half of the oil in the world was produced in Azerbaijan,
whose oil fields around the capital, Baku, were developed by the Nobel
brothers, famed for dynamite and prizes. This is where they made their
fortune. I had the pleasure of dining at their mansion a few years ago,
a guest of government officials. Whatever others might have thought
in that elegant house, I thought of Hitler urgently trying to reach
Baku and its oil, and the fact that his disaster at Stalingrad was
actually part of his attempt to seize Azerbaijan’s oil fields.
Azerbaijan was once the prize of empire. It is now independent in a
very dangerous place.
The United States: An Adolescent Global Power I have visited
Azerbaijan several times since 2008, when I published a book called
The Next 100 Years, which identified Azerbaijan as geopolitically
critical in the emerging global system. This brought with it an
invitation to visit Azerbaijan and see the place on which my theory
focused. Since I continue to regard Azerbaijan as critical both in
the struggle emerging in the Caucasus and to the United States, I
continue to visit and continue to enjoy dinners that never end and
rounds of toasts that test my liver. But I never forget one thing:
Hitler risked everything to get to Baku and its oil. He failed to
reach it, and the history of our time turns on that fact.
My latest trip had to do with a conference on U.S.-Azerbaijani
relations. There are a small number of people in the United States
who care about Azerbaijan and most of them were there, along with
some congressmen, state representatives and a large numbers of Azeris.
Compared with my first encounter with Azerbaijan, the number of people
interested in the country has risen dramatically.
Conferences on subjects like this are global. You can be in Washington,
Singapore or Baku and it all looks the same. When you are in my
business, you meet the same people several times a year.
Sometimes they have something new to say; sometimes I have something
new to say. It is too infrequent. What is interesting is the people
you don’t normally meet: the local academics, government officials,
businessmen and others. Over time you create a group of friends in the
countries you visit. These are the ones from whom you learn the most.
And in Azerbaijan, you listen to their desire to be friends with the
United States and bewilderment at American indifference.
This is a recurring theme in my travels. Everyone is unhappy with the
United States either for doing something or not doing something. In
either case, they feel let down by the United States, and I am somehow
personally at fault. In general I give as good as I get. But in the
case of Azerbaijan, I’m on the defensive. They feel let down by the
United States, and they are. This isn’t a question of sentiment.
Nations don’t have friends and whatever my friendships in Azerbaijan
– friendships that are real and important to me – the United States
must pursue its interests. My problem in answering is that I believe
that working with Azerbaijan is in the American interest and that
holding back is taking unnecessary risks. I don’t like criticizing
my country in another country, so I try to shift the discussion to
something else. It rarely works.
My own interest in Azerbaijan requires greater explanation. In
The Next 100 Years I forecast a number of events, beginning with
the serious weakening of the European Union and the increase in
relative power of Russia. Russia had its own problems, but between
Europe’s dependence on Russian energy and the fact that Russia had
cash available to buy assets in Europe, the decline of Europe meant a
more powerful Russia. The countries that would feel that power would
be those bordering the former Soviet Union – a line from Poland to
Turkey and then from Turkey to Azerbaijan, the eastern anchor of
Europe on the Caspian Sea.
I wrote that the United States, withdrawing from its wars in the
Islamic world, would be increasingly cautious and uncertain. The
United States would continue to be the dominant power in the world,
economically the most viable and with the most powerful military,
but an adolescent power without foresight or balance in its actions. I
argued that the United States had not been the dominant global power
until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Until then the United
States had shared domination and competed with the Soviet Union in a
Cold War that had been frequently hot and where it wasn’t clear that
the United States would win. Between Korea, Vietnam and some other,
less well-known engagements, nearly 100,000 Americans died in the
“Cold” War – almost as many as died in World War I – a fact that most
people don’t appreciate. And when we look back on Korea and Vietnam,
it is hard to imagine this period as the American age.
The United States won the Cold War because the Soviets knocked
themselves out. But a win is a win and the United States stood alone,
really amazed to be where it was, talking about New World Orders, but
truly clueless as to what it would do later. First it imagined that
war had been abolished and that it was all about making money. Then
it imagined that it would spend the next century with only Islamic
terrorists on its mind. Now it seems to have decided that it will
avoid involvement in the world – although how a country with nearly
25 percent of the world’s gross domestic product and control of the
oceans avoids involvement is beyond me.
Specialists in U.S. foreign policy divide into two camps. One camp
is the realists, who argue that the United States should pursue its
national self-interest. That seems reasonable until you ask them
to define what the national interest is. Another camp consists of
idealists, who want to use American power to do good, whether building
democracy or stopping human rights abuses. It’s a good idea until you
ask them how they intend to do it. Usually the answer is to intervene
but only kill bad people. I assume they will wear signs.
The point is that the United States is the world’s global power but
is lurching from conflict to conflict and from concept to concept. It
takes awhile to understand how to use power. The British had to lose
America before they started to get the idea. The United States is
fortunate. It is rich and isolated, and even if terrorists kill some
of us, we will not be occupied like France or Poland. We have time
to grow up. This makes the rest of the world very uncomfortable.
Sometimes the United States does inexplicable things. Sometimes it
fails to do necessary things. When the United States makes a mistake
it is mostly other countries that suffer or are placed at risk. So
some of the world wishes the United States would disappear. It won’t.
Other parts of the world wish the United States take responsibility
for their security. It won’t.
The Criticality of Azerbaijan This brings us back to Azerbaijan. It
is a country that borders both Russia and Iran. In Russia it borders
Dagestan; in Iran it borders the Iranian Azeri region. The bulk of
Azeris live in Iran, where they are the largest ethnic minority group
in the country (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is an Azeri). Azerbaijan is
a predominantly secular country.
It feels threatened by Iranian Shiite terrorism and by Sunni Islamic
terrorism in the north. Azerbaijan fought a war in the 1990s in
which it lost an area called Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, which was
backed by the Russians. Russian troops are now based in Armenia. A
government that appears to have close ties to Russia has replaced the
formerly pro-American government of Georgia. Azerbaijan finds itself
in a tough place, and the country’s position between Russia and Iran
makes it critical. A secular Muslim state in this region hostile to
both Iran and Russia is not all that common.
Azerbaijan has another strategic virtue from the American point of
view: energy. The Russian strategy has been to maintain and deepen
European dependence on Russian energy, on the theory that this would
both increase Russian influence and decrease the risk to Russian
national security. The second phase of this strategy has been to limit
alternatives for the Europeans, including Turkey. The complex tension
over oil and natural gas pipelines boils down to the fact that the
Russians do not want significant energy sources that are outside of
Russian control to be available to Europe.
It is in the American interest to try to limit Russian influence
around its periphery in order to stabilize the pro-Western states
there at a time when Europe is weak and disorganized. It is also in
the United States’ interest to limit Iranian power projection and to
retain a platform for influencing the Azeri population in Iran. But
there are limits to American power and interest. It cannot go to
war as the first option. The United States can afford to support
only countries that take primary responsibility for their national
security on themselves. The United States cannot be the primary source
of that security.
This is what makes U.S. relations with Azerbaijan interesting.
Azerbaijan is strategically located between two powers antagonistic
to the United States: Russia and Iran. Azerbaijan has served as a
major transshipment point for supplies to Afghanistan. Azerbaijan
wants to be able to buy weapons from the United States. The United
States has deflected that request in most cases. The Azerbaijanis
have turned to the Israelis instead, with whom they have close ties.
Azerbaijan has all the characteristics of a full American ally. It
is strategically located and provides options for both influencing
events in Iran and limiting Russian power in Europe by providing an
energy alternative, including the possibility of a pipeline under
the Caspian Sea to Central Asia. Given its location it needs access
to weapons, for which it is prepared to pay. Yet the United States
limits its access to weapons.
There are two reasons for this. One is the ethnic politics of the
United States. The strong Armenian-American community is hostile to
Azerbaijan because of the dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
The Azerbaijani lobby in the United States has failed to gain the
influence of its Armenian counterpart. Therefore, there is pressure on
Congress to block weapons shipments, and even appointing ambassadors
is difficult. The second reason is more significant. Human rights
advocates, including those in the State Department, have said that
the Azerbaijani government is repressive and corrupt. Therefore,
they have opposed arms sales to Azerbaijan.
I am not in a position to have seen repression or corruption. This
is a country that was a former Soviet republic and that went through
a chaotic privatization program that resulted in inequities like
those in other former Soviet countries. It is also a country where
family and clan are critical, so there is what Westerners would call
cronyism. A Chinese businessman once told me that he thought Americans
were vile and immoral because they would hire strangers over family
merely because the stranger was better qualified. He argued that
valuing merit over blood was the height of immorality. I would not
have liked to build my company on his basis, but his comments reminded
me that our conviction as to how a society should function is neither
universally shared nor admired. I am therefore more cautious in judging
the moral conduct of others. This is not because I don’t think merit
is superior to blood but because I am aware that there are reasonable
people who think my view is vile.
At any rate, a country doesn’t go from being a Soviet republic to
having an economy without corruption in a little more than 20 years.
Nor does it become a full-fledged liberal democracy in that time frame,
particularly when it is surrounded by hostile powers on three sides –
Iran, Russia and Armenia. Looking at the record of other former Soviet
republics, Azerbaijan is not out of the box. It is hard to imagine
what country in the former Soviet Union the United States could be
aligned with if Azerbaijan were off limits.
Another issue troubles me – what I call the “Arab Spring syndrome.”
There is an assumption by human rights advocates that the crowd
opposing a repressive regime will create a less repressive government.
I recall how in 1979, when demonstrations were going on against the
Shah of Iran, the obvious fact that he ran a repressive regime was
combined with a fantasy about what the demonstrators were like –
they were all seen as Western liberal democrats. They weren’t, and
it is difficult to argue from a human rights point of view that the
success of the demonstrators enhanced human rights in Iran.
The same can be said of Azerbaijan. Whatever criticism might be made of
the regime, it is difficult to imagine that the alternative would be
either more liberal or transparent. An Iranian-sponsored alternative
would look like Iran. A Russian-sponsored alternative would look like
Russia. The idea that the United States should not pursue its strategic
interests in a situation where the current regime is morally superior
to a Russian- or Iranian-backed alternative is perverse. It is part
of the immaturity of a global power trying to find its bearings.
Azerbaijan matters to the United States not because of its moral
character. It matters because it is a wedge between Russia and Iran.
Any regime that would follow the current one would likely be much worse
in a moral sense and might be hostile to the United States. The loss of
Azerbaijani oil to either Russia or Iran would increase the pressure
on Turkey and eliminate energy alternatives along the periphery of
Russia. The United States must adopt a strategy of early and low-risk
support for strategic partners rather than sudden, spasmodic military
responses to unanticipated crises. An independent Azerbaijan is a bone
in Russia’s and Iran’s throat and an energy source for Turkey. And
Azerbaijan pays cash for weapons that will be used by Azerbaijani
troops and not by Americans.
It is hard to get attention for seemingly arcane issues in the United
States today. It is not until the arcane becomes the urgent that
the United States responds. I explain this in Baku, and they have
no choice but to put up with it. But the management of massive power
requires prudent management of seemingly arcane threats. As much as
I enjoy Azerbaijani cooking and company, it is the ability of the
United States to create a stable framework for its foreign policy –
neither simplistically realistic nor moralistic – that is being tested
in Azerbaijan.
Both Hitler and Stalin understood that control of Baku meant control
of the Eurasian landmass. The realities of energy have shifted but
not to the extent that Baku doesn’t remain critical. When I go to
Baku and I read my histories, this becomes obvious. Most Americans
don’t go to Baku and too many don’t read histories. It doesn’t take
much to guarantee the security of a critical asset, but it is hard
to get the United States to do much right now.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stratfor/2013/06/11/why-azerbaijan-should-matter-to-america/