by F. William Engdahl
July 17, 2009
One of his first
foreign visits as new President took Barack Obama to Ankara for a
high-profile meeting with Prime Minister Recep Erdogan and other
leading Turkish officials. Obama engaged in classical “horse
trading” wheeling and dealing. “I give you support for Turkey’s EU
membership; you open the diplomatic door to Armenia,” appears to
have been the core of the deal. What other inducements the US
President gave in the case of Turkish influence within NATO and
such is secondary. Obama’s goal was to break a political deadlock
in Turkey to construction of a major gas pipeline to Germany and
other EU countries in direct opposition to Russian Gazprom’s South
Stream pipeline.
Nabucco is an integral
part of a US strategy of total energy control over both the EU and
all Eurasia. On July 13 with a Nabucco signing ceremony in Ankara
the first fruits of the Obama soft diplomacy appeared to be bearing
fruit. The question remains if it will be bitter fruit.
Leading Republican Party foreign policy figure, Senator
Richard Lugar, went as the Obama Administration’s representative to
Ankara on July 13 for the signing ceremony approving the
controversial Nabucco project. EU
Commission President Barosso was also present along with heads of
government of Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary and Austria.
The Nabucco project
when and if finished would take gas from the Caspian region, Middle
East via Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary with Austria and
further on with the Central and Western European gas markets. It
would run some 3,300 km, starting at the Georgian/Turkish and/or
Iranian/Turkish border respectively, leading to Baumgarten in
Austria, costing at least $8 billion. The project is parallel to
the existing Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum pipeline and could transport 20
billion cubic meters of gas a year. Two-thirds of the pipeline will
pass through Turkish territory.
Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran and
Iraq are being touted as potential suppliers.
Until the Obama-Erdogan talks Nabucco had been stalled
largely by Turkish lack of interest. Now that all appears to be
changing and Washington has scored a minor coup over Moscow in the
new Great Game over Eurasian energy control. At least on the
surface. The reality is far more complex.
Sensitive geopolitics
The importance of Nabucco to Washington ranks high on the
list. The US Senate just held hearings on how the control of energy
supplies influences global affairs, something that has been at the
heart of US foreign policy since at least the time Woodrow Wilson
ordered the US Fleet into VeraCruz Mexico to defend the interests
of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in 1913.
At their hearing in Washington, the august Senators were
especially interested in the planned Nabucco gas pipeline. Senator
John Kerry, chairman of the influential Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, commented in the hearings, with definite understanement
"There is a striking overlap between the world's sources of energy
and the world's sources of instability, and we need to take note of
that carefully. Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Russia, the Caucasus, Nigeria,
Venezuela are all on the frontlines of our energy supply
challenges, but also the fault lines of our
geopolitics."
What the Democrat Senator did not mention is that those
countries were on the “faultlines of our geopolitics” because US
foreign policy since the end of the Cold War had made them into
faultline states in order to increase Washington control over the
economic future of Eurasia including both China and Russia, as well
as over the energy-dependent European Union. For Washington, that
control has been THE central preoccupation of all
US foreign policy since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November
1989.
Gas for Nabucco?
The major problem with Nabucco now is not the willingness
of Turkey to build the longest part of the pipeline to Bulgaria.
That has been agreed. What remains however is a huge problem of who
will fill that pipeline with ample volumes of natural gas to make
it economically practical. Here is where it gets dicey.
Until now the main gas supply for Nabucco should be
Azerbaijan, source of large oil reserves to fill another
Anglo-American-backed pipeline run by a British Petroleum
consortium to bring Baku oil from the Caspian Sea to the west
independent of Russia. That Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline was
the real reason Washington backed the 2004 Georgian “Rose
Revolution” that put the erratic dictator Mikhail Saakashvili into
power, pushing out veteran Soviet-era fox Edouard Shevardnadze, who
had become too friendly with Moscow for the likes of Bush-Cheney
oil geopolitics.
But now Azerbaijan
may have problems providing enough gas to make Nabucco
feasible. In June, Azerbaijan signed with Russia’s Gazprom
for gas from Stage 2 of the Shah Deniz field -- the same field
Nabucco hopes to tap for its pipeline.
The Gazprom-Azeri deal
states that other purchasers must outbid Gazprom, giving Russia a
possible lever to stall or even to kill the Nabucco project, (which
is intended to decrease Europe’s reliance on Russia’s gas), by
pushing the price of gas from Shah Deniz up too high to make
Nabucco profitable on commercial terms as a rival to Russia’s South
Stream. Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev seems to be playing a
cat-and-mouse game with both Russia and the EU-Washington, to play
one off against the other for the highest price. Gazprom agreed to
pay an unusually high price of $350 per thousand cubic meters for
their Shah Deniz gas, a clear political not economic decision by
Moscow which owns controlling interest in Gazprom.
To keep hopes alive for
the completion of a viable Nabucco, Washington has few cards to
play. Even were Azerbaijan to agree to sell gas and Nabucco to buy
it on competitive terms to Gazprom, industry sources say the Azeri
gas would alone not suffice to fill the pipeline. Where could the
remaining gas come?
One possible answer is
Iraq; the second is Iran. Both are with huge geopolitical problems
for Washington to put it mildly.
Senator Lugar, just back from his trip to
Ankara to observe the Nabucco signing, told his Senate colleagues
the answer to the Nabucco gas supply problem might lie in Iraq,
which he claimed could supply up to half of the gas for Nabucco.
"Ideally, in the way of the world, the natural gas - and maybe in
due course oil supplies - coming out of a united Iraq might provide
this kind of capital, which would be a miraculous happening and a
wonderful ending to a very tragic period in their history," Lugar
said. Ideally it sounds nice. Practically is another question, even
with the US retaining its vast network of permanent US military
bases across Iraq. Iraqui gas to Turkey would pass through Kurdish
areas providing the Kurds with a lucrative new revenue stream,
something not too devoutly desired in Ankara.
The second option,
which also happens to hold the world’s second largest reserves of
identified natural gas next to Russia, is Iran.
Uuuuuuhaaa. Ouch!
That doesn’t quite fit into the geopolitically correct map used in
Washington these days.
Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan invited both Russia and Iran to join
the Nabucco project, RIA Novosti reported. He stated, “We want Iran
to join the project when conditions will allow, and also hope for
Russia’s participation in it.”
For its part,
Teheran is enjoying the cat-and-mouse game: "European companies
understand the fact that the project will be economically justified
in case Iran is the supplier,"" Seyyed Reza Kasaiizadeh, National
Iranian Gas Export Company’s managing director told press on the
day of the Ankara Nabucco signing. He claimed, rightly, that
supplying the Nabucco pipeline with Iran's gas is the most
economical alternative. “Despite political oppositions, Iran sees
itself as s potential supplier of the project,” he added. That
didn’t go down well in Washington.
Richard Morningstar, the
State Department's Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy, told the
Senate that Iran should not benefit from Nabucco until Tehran
agrees to resolve the dispute over its nuclear program. "This would
be the absolute worst time to encourage Iran to participate in a
project in Nabucco, when we have received absolutely nothing in
return," he said. Significantly, he noted that Nabucco could be
used as an incentive to get Iran to better cooperate and engage
with the international community.
Why
Armenia?
The natural route to
bring Iranian gas to Europe via Nabucco goes through Armenia, the
small and fiercely independent nation sandwiched between Iran,
Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey. In early 2007 a small pipeline
opened bringing Iranian gas to Armenia. A second pipeline, if
built, would potentially allow Iran to bring its gas via Turkey and
Nabucco to European markets. This begins to explain why Obama made
the issue of Turkish reconciliation of the long-standing tensions
between Ankara and Armenia over the Armenian charges of genocide
during World War I a priority in his April talks with Prime
Minister Erdogan.
It seems Obama’s
advisers are playing a far more subtle geopolitical game than did
Cheney and Bush. By holding out several juicy financial carrots, to
Turkey, to Armenia, even to Teheran if it were to abandon its
nuclear ambitions, Washington hopes to throw a giant monkey wrench
into the attempt of Moscow to retain a significant control over
Eurasian energy supplies to the EU, a major lever to ensure more
stable EU-Russian relations amid growing threats to Russia’s
security from Washington’s misnamed missile defense shield being
built in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Notably, on the
latter point, it is worth noting that Obama refused to give an inch
during the recent summit talks in Russia. That’s because
Washington’s agenda of geopolitical control over the Eurasian
Continent is the only lever of maintaining the hegemony of a
failing American Century at this point. Full Spectrum Dominance or
none seems to be the motto.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14412
