Pipelines as a Foreign Policy Factor: The Americans Turn Their Attention to Pipelines in Central Asia

Rossiiskiye Vesti - Yuri Yeremin

The United States is playing its own energy game in the Central Asia-Caucasus region - and it doesn't Russia to join in. One of the main objectives is to build pipelines that bypass Russian territory. Russia is taking steps to counter this.

Foreign experts in the energy sector suspect that the United States arranged a series of official meetings with leaders of the Central Asian and Caucasus states as a prelude to development of alternative oil and gas shipment routes from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to Europe bypassing Russia.

Visiting regional capitals, representatives of the US State Department openly admitted that Washington has long-term interests in the Caspian region and promoted diversification of routes intended to abolish Europe's and America's dependence on Russia in so crucial a sphere.

Daniel S. Sullivan, US Undersecretary for Economic, Energy, and Agricultural Affairs, signed an agreement with the Azeri Foreign Ministry on August 16. Washington will provide $1.7 million for the technical and economic assessment of two trans-Caspian pipelines to bring Kazakh oil to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and take Kazakh and Turkmen gas across the Caspian Sea. The agreement on the US grant is supposed to signalize to would-be investors that Washington is prepared to minimize risks in this project. Winner of the grant will be determined in a tender which will apparently be won US companies. Insiders in the Azeri oil industry imply that the US doesn't want Russian involvement in these future pipelines.

Experts point out that President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan visited Kazakhstan on August 6 and 7 (not that long before the signing of the agreement) where he discussed with the Kazakh leadership all nuances of financial and oil cooperation, including interaction in construction of trans-Caspian pipelines.

Seeing the US go active in the Central Asian region, experts draw the conclusion that the US State Department makes an emphasis in relations with Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan on its national interests in the energy and military spheres and that observation of human rights and freedoms has definitely faded into the background. When the 10th annual US-Azeri security conference in Washington on July 9 culminated in the traditional press conference, journalists asked spokesmen for the US State Department what they thought about the state of affairs with human rights in Azerbaijan. Their reply was quite simple: the US State Department acknowledges existence of problems in Azerbaijan in this sphere, but the need to solidify positions in this country and secure better opportunities for American companies was taking precedence.

All these grandiose plans charted by the United States and its allies generate justified fears that this exceptionally expensive colossal transport infrastructure may be rendered obsolete by shortage of hydrocarbons in the region and made a vast heap of scrap metal and an unbearable burden for Central Asian countries. Specialists maintain that neither Turkmenistan nor Azerbaijan have sufficient explored reserves to fill all these pipelines.