US STRATEGY OF TOTAL ENERGY CONTROL OVER THE EUROPEAN UNION AND EURASIA
by F. William Engdahl
Center for Research on Globalization
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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.
F. William Engdahl is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global
Research Articles by F. William Engdahl
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
