KARABAKH CONFLICT RESTRICTS AZERBAIJAN’S GEOSTRATEGIC ROLE

news.az
May 7 2010
Azerbaijan

Inessa Baban Academic Inessa Baban considers whether Azerbaijan can
move from geostrategic importance to become a geostrategic actor.

Recently Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijan’s consul general Consul in Los
Angeles, quoted in a lecture at Montana State University’s Energy
Institute a story that when Hitler was given a birthday cake during
World War II with a map drawn on it and he was asked what part of
the cake he wanted, he pointed to Azerbaijan.

Located in the South Caucasus, the region that connects Eastern Europe
to Central Asia, Azerbaijan is accordingly to Zbigniew Brzeziznski,
former US national security adviser in Jimmy Carter’s administration,
one of the most significant ‘geopolitical pivots’ of Eurasia. Due to
its geography, Azerbaijan has a ‘sensitive location’ that presents
itself as a ‘defensive shield’ for the Caspian Sea: it opens or
blocks the access to many significant extra-regional actors, oil and
gas thirsty. Baku has a pair of keys to the energy-rich Caspian Sea
region whose place in the global geopolitics of energy is increasing
in proportion to the degree of instability in the Middle East.

Lately the ambitions of Azerbaijan go beyond its limits as a
‘geopolitical pivot’, especially after the construction of the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline in 2005, considered strategic to
the improvement of Euro-Atlantic energy security. Even if this
controversial project has been interpreted by neighbours, such
as Russia and Iran, as the result of American strategy, it helped
Azerbaijan straighten its position and encouraged it to assume the
role of an actor.

Consequently, Baku started to promote its foreign policy’s interests
talking more openly to political actors using the language of energy.

The time is past when Baku had a low geopolitical voice and high
geoeconomic one and sought to use the oil companies to influence the
policies of their mother-countries. Baku has become more conscious
of its role in Euro-Atlantic energy security and learned from some of
its Caspian sea neighbours how to use the energy potential as a tool
of foreign policy, speaking directly to the governments whose actions
or initiatives could damage its national interests. And this tactic is
working as can be seen from a recent episode in which US-Azerbaijani
relations cooled this April.

American attempts to reconcile Turkey and Armenia, whose bilateral
relations have been broken since the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,
displeased Azerbaijan because it was contrary to its strategy and
objectives. Baku connects the normalization of Turkish-Armenian
relations to the solution of the Nagorno-Karabakh issue and
refuses to split Yerevan’s problems with its neighbours into the
Armenian-Azerbaijani and Armenian-Turkish issues. Or Washington pressed
Ankara to ratify the protocol to normalize Armenian-Turkish relations
without any reference to the unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh problem.

This initiative was considered ‘erroneous’ by Azerbaijani officials
who considered ‘re-examining their policy in relations with the US
which could damage some important US-Azerbaijani transnational energy
projects’ (Ali Hasanov, head of the public and political department
of the Presidential Administration, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 4 April 2010).

It was a soft but suggestive remark whose message has been understood
in Washington, as has Azerbaijani’s refusal to take part in joint
military training with the US, scheduled for May, which was postponed
by the Azerbaijani Defence Ministry.

In these circumstances, on 29 April a group of US Congress members
prepared a letter to the US chair of the State and Foreign Operations
Subcommittee requesting the repeal of the Section 907 to the Freedom
Support Act. This act, adopted by the US Congress in 1992, bans any US
aid to the Republic of Azerbaijan in response to Azerbaijan’s blockade
of Armenia after the Nagorno-Karabakh military conflict. [Section 907,
prohibiting direct US aid to the Azerbaijani government and preventing
the development of strategic relations between the countries, has
been waived by the US president since October 2001 but remains on
the statute book.]

The need to re-examine this act nowadays was justified by American
congressmen in terms of the role that Azerbaijan could assume as
a ‘reliable US partner’ in achieving the priorities of the Obama
administration on relations with the Muslim world, energy security and
the struggle against international terrorism (Apa.az, 29 April, 2010).

Actually the US Congress initiative is not new because there are
regularly talks on the subject but significant is the context of
these discussions: the risk of deterioration in Azerbaijani-American
bilateral relations. Even big powers like the US understand the role
that Azerbaijan has already been playing in the regional context and
the possibility of increasing it at the Eurasian level, because it
has a set of natural attributes, including its geography and energy
resources, that recommend it as a ‘geostrategic player’.

Coincidentally or not, the same day, on 29 April, the US charge
d’affaires in Azerbaijan, Donald Lu affirmed in Baku that, ‘We hope
that these exercises will be held in future’ referring to the postponed
US-Azerbaijan military exercises.

Yet, Azerbaijan is not a ‘geostrategic player’, because all its
initiatives in the energy and strategic spheres have been targeted at
internal geopolitical issues concerning Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan
is not seeking to ‘exercise power or influence beyond its borders
in order to alter the existing geopolitical state of affairs’
and it’s not seeking ‘for whatever reason – the quest for national
grandeur, ideological fulfilment, religious messianism, or economic
aggrandisement to attain regional domination or global standing’
(see Zbigniew Brzezinski’s definition of the ‘geostrategic player’
in ‘The Grand Chessboard. American Primacy and Its Geostrategic
Imperatives’, 1997).

Baku uses petroleum politics and pipeline diplomacy in a pragmatic
manner and creates a strategic axis, not in the way that an Offender
as an active ‘geopolitical player’ should be, but as a Defender of
its territorial integrity, hoping to regain the Nagorno-Karabakh
territories, considered ‘occupied’ by Armenia.

The unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh question is the ‘Achilles heel’ of
Azerbaijan that prevents it becoming an active ‘geostrategic player’.

Anatomically the ‘Achilles heel’ refers to the strongest and largest
tendon that connects muscles in the lower leg with the heel bone. No
sportsman could play any sport with a ruptured tendon.

Until Azerbaijan fixes this tendon, it will remain in a volatile
situation between ‘geopolitical pivot’ and ‘geostrategic actor’. This
situation favoyrs its neighbouring ‘geostrategic players’, such as
Iran and Russia, but it may affect the long term interests of some
extra-regional actors, such as the EU which is seeking to have a zone
of stability at its borders and to consolidate its energy security.

Inessa Baban a is PhD fellow at the Sorbonne University in Paris and
visiting scholar at the Azerbaijani Presidential Centre for Strategic.