Nato & Caucasus/Central Asia Oil

Involved in the reintegration of the territory of the former USSR into world capitalism is the absorption, by massive Western transnational companies, of trillions of dollars in valuable raw materials that are vital to the imperialist powers. The greatest untapped oil reserves in the world are located in the former Soviet republics bordering the Caspian Sea (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan). These resources are now being divided among the major capitalist countries. This is the fuel that is feeding renewed militarism and must lead to new wars of conquest by the imperialist powers against local opponents, as well as ever-greater conflicts among the imperialists themselves.

This is the key to understanding the bellicosity of US foreign policy over the past decade. The bombardment of Yugoslavia is the latest in a series of wars of aggression that have spanned the globe.

Though they had certain regional motivations, these wars have been the US response to the opportunities and challenges opened by the demise of the USSR. Washington sees its military might as a trump card that can be employed to prevail over all its rivals in the coming struggle for resources.

Caspian oil and the new foreign policy debate The Caspian region is one of the largest remaining potential resources of undeveloped oil and gas in the world,” explained one Exxon executive in 1998, adding that the area might be producing as much as 6 million barrels of oil per day by 2020. He expects the oil industry to invest $300-$500 billion in the interim to exploit the reserves. The US Department of Energy estimates that 163 billion barrels of oil and up to 337 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are to be found. If the estimates are borne out, the region will become a petroleum producer comparable in scope to Iran or Iraq.

Western analysts also expect the Caspian region to become a major world gold producer. Kazakhstan, with 10,000 tons, has the second largest reserves in the world. Mining companies from the US, Japan, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Israel are already operating in the region.

Each of the major capitalist countries, and a number of developing regional powers, have their sights set on these resources. There is an acute awareness among the capitalist powers of the objective imperatives to intervene, expand their influence and secure their own interests to the disadvantage of their rivals. These needs are finding growing articulation in major policy journals, government hearings and editorials.

Here the debate within the US ruling elite is the most significant, and ominous. Since 1991, a frank discussion has been taking place among prominent US strategists concerning the country's new place in world affairs. In the absence of the Soviet Union, many have concluded, the US finds itself the master of a new unipolar” world, in which it enjoys, at least for the present, unassailable dominance. What these strategists debate is not whether, but how this advantage can be leveraged.

Noteworthy is an article written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former National Security chief under Carter, which was published in the September/October 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs. It is entitled A Geostrategy for Asia.”

America's status as the world's premier power is unlikely to be contested by any single challenger for more than a generation,” writes Brzezinski. No state is likely to match the United States in the four key dimensions of power—military, economic, technological,and cultural—that confer global political clout.”

Having consolidated its power in its base in the Western Hemisphere, the US, Brzezinski argues, must make sustained efforts to penetrate the two continents of Europe and Asia.

America's emergence as the sole global superpower now makes an integrated and comprehensive strategy for Eurasia imperative.”

After the United States,” Brzezinski writes, the next six largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world's overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the world's population, 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia's potential power overshadows even America's.

Eurasia is the world's axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa.

With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy and historical legacy.”

Because he does not expect the US to dominate Eurasia single-handedly, Brzezinski sees American interests being best served by securing a leading role, while facilitating a balance among the major powers favorable to the US. He attaches an important condition: In volatile Eurasia, the immediate task is to ensure that no state or combination of states gains the ability to expel the United States or even diminish its decisive role.” This situation he describes as a benign American hegemony.”

Brzezinski sees NATO as the best vehicle to achieve such an outcome. Unlike America's links with Japan, NATO entrenches American political influence and military power on the Eurasian mainland. With the allied European nations still highly dependent on US protection, any expansion of Europe's political scope is automatically an expansion of US influence. Conversely, the United States' ability to Project influence and power relies on close transatlantic ties.

A wider Europe and an enlarged NATO will serve the short-term and longer-term interests of US policy. A larger Europe will expand the range of American influence without simultaneously creating a Europe so politically integrated that it could challenge the United States on matters of geopolitical importance, particularly in the Middle East.”

As these lines suggest, the NATO role in Yugoslavia, where it has undertaken offensive military action for the first time since its inception, is clearly seen in US ruling circles as a step which will enhance America's world position. At the same time, NATO expansion into Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic is effectively the expansion of US influence in Europe and the world.

Brzezinski's particular perspective on this region is not entirely novel. He has resurrected, in a form adapted for use by the US under present conditions, the traditional geopolitical strategy of British imperialism, which long sought to secure its interests in Europe by playing one rival on the continent against another.

The first modern Eurasian strategy” for world domination was elaborated in Britain. Foreshadowing Brzezinski, imperial strategist Halford Mackinder, in a 1904 paper, The Geographical Pivot of History,” maintained that the Eurasian land mass and Africa, which he collectively termed the world island,” were of decisive significance to achieving global hegemony. According to Mackinder, the barriers that had prevented previous world empires, particularly the limitations in transportation, had largely been overcome by the beginning of the 20th century, setting the stage for a struggle among the great powers to establish a global dominion. The key, Mackinder believed, lay in control of the heartland” region of the Eurasian land mass—bounded roughly by the Volga, the Yangtze, the Arctic and the Himalayas. He summed up his strategy as follows: Who rules east Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the world-island; who rules the world-island commands the world.”

Notwithstanding assumptions that were later criticized by bourgeois commentators, Mackinder's writings, like Brzezinski's today, were followed closely by the major statesmen of his time and exerted a profound influence in the great power conflicts which shaped the first half of this century.

For reasons both of world strategy and control over natural resources, the US is determined to secure for itself a dominant role in the former Soviet sphere. Were any of its adversaries—or combination of adversaries—to effectively challenge US supremacy in this region, it would call into question the hegemonic position of the US in world affairs. The political establishment in the US is well aware of this fact.

Washington plans for political domination of Central Asia The US House Committee on International Relations has begun holding hearings on the strategic importance of the Caspian region. At one meeting in February 1998, Doug Bereuter, the committee chairman, opened by recalling the great power conflicts over Central Asia during the 19th century, then dubbed the great game.”

In the contest for empire, Bereuter noted, Russia and Britain engaged in an extended struggle for power and influence. He went on to say that one hundred years later, the collapse of the Soviet Union has unleashed a new great game, where the interests of the East India Trading Company have been replaced by those of Unocal and Total, and many other organizations and firms.”

Stated US policy goals regarding energy resources in this region,” he continued, include fostering the independence of the States and their ties to the West; breaking Russia's monopoly over oil and gas transport routes; promoting Western energy security through diversified suppliers; encouraging the construction of east-west pipelines that do not transit Iran; and denying Iran dangerous leverage over the Central Asian economies.”

As Bereuter's comments indicate, Washington foresees substantial conflict with the regional powers in the pursuit of its interests. If considerable friction was initially manifested in gaining access to Caspian oil, an even greater degree of strife has emerged in the maneuvers to bring it to Western markets.

While tens of billions in oil production deals have already been signed by Western oil companies, there has yet to be an agreement on the route of the main export pipeline. For the reasons cited by Bereuter, Washington adamantly insists on an east-west path to avoid Iran and Russia.

This is a matter of concern at the highest levels of US government. Last fall, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson told Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times, We're trying to move these newly independent countries toward the West. We would like to see them reliant on Western commercial and political interests rather than going another way. We've made a substantial political investment in the Caspian and it's very mportant to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right.”

A number of strategists have argued for an aggressive US policy in the region. One, Mortimer Zuckerman, the editor of US News & World Report, warned in a May 1999 column that the Central Asian resources may revert back to the control of Russia or a Russian-led alliance, an outcome he calls a nightmare situation.” He wrote, We had beter wake up to the dangers, or one day the certainties on which we base our prosperity will be certainties no more.

The region of Russia's prominence—the bridge between Asia and Europe to the east of Turkey—contains a prize of such potential in the oil and gas riches of the Caspian Sea, valued at up to $4 trillion, as to be able to give Russia both wealth and strategic opportunity.”

Zuckerman suggests that the new conflict be called the biggest game.” The superlative term is more fitting because today's conflict has worldwide and not just regional consequences. Russia, providing the nuclear umbrella for a new oil consortium including Iran and Iraq, might well be able to move energy prices higher, enough to strengthen producers and menace the West, Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. In the words of Paul Michael Wihbey, in an excellent analysis for the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, the nightmare scenarios of the mid-1970s would reappear with a vengeance'.”

The director of a US think tank bluntly laid out the military implications of the newfound interest in the region. In a 1998 document, Frederick Starr, the head of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University, pointed out that half of the NATO states have a major commercial stake in the Caspian. He then added that the potential economic rewards of Caspian energy will draw in their train Western military forces to protect that investment if necessary.”

The prospect of a military conflict between one or more of the NATO countries and Russia is not simply a matter of speculation. Writes Starr: In no country is NATO membership more assiduously sought than energy-rich Azerbaijan, and nowhere is the possibility of conflict with the Russian Federation more likely than over the export of Azeri resources.” In 1998 the country participated in all of the 144 NATO Partnership for Peace” exercises.

The rationale for war offered in the present campaign against Yugoslavia could easily be reapplied should US ruling circles decide to intervene militarily in Central Asia. There are ethnic conflicts in nearly every country there. The three states through which Washington would like to see the main oil export pipeline pass are exemplary in this regard. In Azerbaijan, military conflict with the Armenian population has continued for more than a decade. Neighboring Georgia has seen sporadic warfare between the government and a separatist movement in Abkhazia. Finally, Turkey, which is to host the pipeline terminal, has waged a protracted campaign of repression against the country's minority Kurd population, who predominate precisely in those regions in the southeast of the country through which the US-backed pipeline would pass.

The point is not lost on the present US administration. In a speech to US newspaper editors last month, Clinton stated that Yugoslavia's ethnic turmoil was far from unique. Much of the former Soviet Union faces a similar challenge,” he said, including Ukraine and Moldova, southern Russia, the Caucasus nations of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, the new nations of Central Asia.” With the opening of these regions, he noted, the potential for ethnic conflict became, perhaps, the greatest threat to what is among our most critical interests: the transition of the former communist countries toward stability, prosperity and freedom.”

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