The 'Great Game' for Caspian Sea Oil

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                 ANDRE  GUNDER  FRANK

         1601 SW  83rd Avenue, Miami, FL.  33155 USA
      Tel: 1-305-266  0311   Fax:  1-305  266 0799
                E-Mail :  franka@fiu.edu
   Web/Home Page:  http://csf.colorado.edu/archive/agfrank
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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].

This is where the NATO  connection comes in.  Former U.S. Secretaries of
State and of Defense Christopher and Perry stated in 1997 that  "the
danger to security ... is not primarily potential aggression  to their
collective [NATO]  territory, but threats to their collective interests
beyond their territory....To deal with such threats alliance members need
to have a way to rapidly form military coalitions that can accomplish
goals beyond NATO territory" [252]. Note that this was two years before
"humanitarian" NATO aid to 'out of area' Kosovo. Also, U.S. Central Asia
experts  met at NATO headquarters and discussed extensive U.S. interests
in Caspian basin energy deposits. Not to be outdone, Javier Solana, the
former Defense Minister in the 'Socialist' Party government of Spain,
become Secretary-General of NATO  also during its war against Jugoslavia,
and now promoted to czar of European Union [EU] foreign policy,
pronounced himself at a Washington conference on NATO enlargement to say
that Europe cannot be fully secure without bringing the Caucasus into its
security zone [250].  U.S. Ambassador Nathan Nimitz agrees: "PAX NATO is
the only logical regime to maintain security in the traditional
sense... [and] must recognize a need for expansion of its stabilizing
influence in adjacent areas, particularly in Southeastern Europe, the
Black Sea region (in concert of course with the regional powers...) and in
the Arabian/Persian Gulf. The United States must continue to play the
major role in this security system" [252].  This statement is not only a
guide to policy making in Washington and NATO headquarters in
Brussels. The  policy is in fact already being   implemented on the ground
in that the  U.S. has been assiduously using economic,diplomatic and
military carrots to engage more and more 'regional powers' to play
assigned roles in this 'concert' under its own regional direction. These
countries include  especially  Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan on the
western wing to distant  Kazakstan and Kyrgyztan  on the eastern one of
this American and NATO PfP concert hall. All of these states, whether in
the oil business or not, happen to be former Soviet republics on the
underbelly of Russia.
 
All this was written and begun to be implemented  already in 1997 and
earlier. well before the NATO  war against Jugoslavia that was allegedly
fought to defend 'human rights in Kosovo,' which along with the  new NATO
'out of area' south-eastward projection toward the oil producing countries
can now be better seen in the light of the above considerations.  Indeed,
"NATO's  regional involvement, especially through PfP [referring to the
above mentioned "Partnership for Peace"] is intensifying on a yearly
basis. Military excersizes also already in 1997 were supposed to show that
"U.S. and NATO forces could be deployed anywhere" [266]. "The obvious
implication of current policy is that NATO, under U.S. leadership, will
become an international policeman and hegemon in the Transcaspian and
define the limits of Russian participation in the region's expected oil
boom" [267]. Now  the precedent of "humanitarian defense of human
rights" in Kosovo also embellishes the "Partnership for Peace" in the
Caspian Sea Basin, where it alone  might otherwise  not evoke enough
popular political support from the folks back home.  So now in Orwellian
language again, not only "War is Peace," but now it also is highly
"humanitarian." Preferably that is also placed under a mantle of
'legitimation' by United Nations, as now is the NATO military occupation
of Kosovo after the war ended. But if that is not available to make war
itself, as it was not against Jugoslavia, then 'legitimation'  may at
least sought by the agreement of the "International Community," whose
states [mis]represent at most 15 percent of humanity, but whose  bombs
spoke so eloquently in 1999 over Jugoslavia. Where will they fall next -
yet farther south-east ? 

"It is highly unlikely that Russia will accept such a position 'lying
down'," writes Blank,   especially in its own  Caucasian and Caspian
underbelly.  Thus, he outlines four main reasons why he regards this
U.S. policy not only misguided but also counterproductive:

1. Structural conditions. Military forces will be deployed in the guise of
the now sanctioned 'peacekeepers' or 'peace enforcers,' as Kosovo has
begun to confirm since he wrote. But that can mean also overextending
these forces beyond domestic acceptance. [Contrary to the propaganda, NATO
bombs did NOT bring Milosevic to heel and ground troops would have been
necessary, had not Russia  eventually withdrawn its support from
Milosevic, which is what really obliged him to accept Western terms that
by then were far less than those for which it had gone to war]. But what
if Russia no more plays along at all? U.S. policy and praxis over
Jugoslavia and in formerly Soviet Central Asia and the Caspian Sea area
has already shifted the Russian political center of gravity towards
sharpened nationalism and a renewedly increase in the influence of the
military. Yet, already before that, Blank wrote that "Russia will
resolutely contest the United States' expanded presence" [263], which can
drive Russia into the arms of China and India as "Kosovo" already did,
even if it does not threaten a Third World War, as it well may.
 
2. This U.S. policy also drives Russia to cooperate with Iran, which is
certainly not in the interest of current  American policy. 3. "It is
impossible to discern any strategic context for the Clinton
administration's Russia policy...[which] only enhance Russia's sense of
regional threat and propensity to reply in kind, while not preventing it
from doing so" [262]. 4. For all the power at the disposal of the U.S.,
Washington "remains singularly unable to use such instruments to obtain a
comprehensive and insightful understanding of regional trends and their
implications" [262]. Kuwait, Somalia, and Iraq - since then also Kosovo -
"suggest that this is a structural failing of U.S. policy" [262]. 


Thus, the U.S. is enlarging its commitment absentmindedly, Blank writes,
in the contemporary continuation  of the nineteenth century "Great
Game"  in Central Eurasia -- with still the same major players, excepting
the replacement of erstwhile Great [now small] Britain by the United
States. 

EPILOGUE

The US also wants to use NATO's Partnership for Peace alliance, which
includes the Central Asian Republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and
Kyrgyzstan as part of any multilateral force....However, Uzbek sources
note the considerable cooling of official Tashkent's relations with Moscow
in the sphere of military cooperation and at the same time the unusually
extensive plans for joint Uzbek-US actions and projects.

from
CENTRAL ASIA Online # 109
November 25 ? December 1, 2000