The Emerging Russian Giant Plays its Cards
Strategically
by F. William Engdahl
GlobalResearch.ca
The September 2006 summit in Paris between
Russia?s Vladimir Putin, French President
Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Angela
Merkel, underscored the re-emerging of
Russia as a major global power. The new
Russia is gaining in influence through a
series of strategic moves revolving around
its geopolitical assets in energy?most
notably its oil and natural gas. It?s doing
so by shrewdly taking advantage of the
strategic follies and major political
blunders of Washington. The new Russia also
realizes that if it does not act decisively,
it soon will be encircled and trumped by a
military rival, USA, for which it has little
defenses left. The battle, largely unspoken,
is the highest stakes battle in world
politics today. Iran and Syria are seen by
Washington strategists as mere steps to this
great Russian End Game.
The formal Paris summit agenda included
French investment in Russia and the issue of
Iran?s (Russian-built) nuclear program.
Notably, however, it also included the
question of future Russian energy supplies
to the European Union, notably, Germany. It
was an indication of the new strength of
Putin?s Russia. Putin told the German
Chancellor that Russia would ?possibly?
redirect some of the future natural gas from
its giant Shtokman field in the Barents Sea.
The $20 billion project is due to come
online 2010 and had been slated to provide
liquified natural gas to United States
terminals.
Since the devastating setbacks two years ago
from the US-sponsored ?color revolutions? in
Georgia, and then Ukraine, Russia has begun
to play its strategic energy cards extremely
carefully, from nuclear reactors in Iran to
military sales to Venezuela and other Latin
American states, to strategic market
cooperation deals in natural gas with
Algeria.
At the same time, the Bush Administration
has dug itself deeper into a geopolitical
morass, through a foreign policy agenda
which has reckless disregard for its allies
as well as its foes. That reckless policy
has been associated with former Halliburton
CEO, Dick Cheney, more than any other figure
in Washington.
The ?Cheney Presidency,? which is what
historians will no doubt dub the George W.
Bush years, has been based on a clear
strategy. It has often been misunderstood by
critics who had overly focussed on its most
visible component, namely, Iraq, the Middle
East and the strident war-hawks around the
Vice President and his old crony, Defense
Secretary Don Rumsfeld.
The ?Cheney strategy? has been a US foreign
policy based on securing direct global
energy control, control by the Big Four US
or US-tied private oil giants– ChevronTexaco
or ExxonMobil, BP or Royal Dutch Shell.
Above all, it has aimed at control of all
the world?s major oil regions, along with
the major natural gas fields. That control
has moved in tandem with a growing bid by
the United States for total military primacy
over the one potential threat to its global
ambitions?Russia. Cheney is perhaps the
ideal person to weave the US military and
energy policies together into a coherent
strategy of dominance. During the early
1990?s under father Bush, Cheney was also
Secretary of Defense.
The Cheney-Bush administration has been
dominated by a coalition of interests
between Big Oil and the top industries of
the American military-industrial complex.
These private corporate interests exercise
their power through control of the
government policy of the United States. An
aggressive militaristic agenda has been
essential to it. It is epitomized by
Cheney?s former company, Halliburton Inc.,
at one and the same time the world?s largest
energy and geophysical services company, and
the world?s largest constructor of military
bases.
To comprehend the policy it?s important to
look at how Cheney, as Halliburton CEO,
viewed the problem of future oil supply on
the eve of his becoming Vice President.
?Where the Prize Ultimately Lies?: Cheney?s
1999 London speech
Back in September 1999, a full year before
the US elections which made him the most
powerful Vice President in history, Cheney
gave a revealing speech before his oil
industry peers at the London Institute of
Petroleum.. In a global review of the
outlook for Big Oil, Cheney made the
following comment:
“By some estimates there will be an average
of two per cent annual growth in global oil
demand over the years ahead along with
conservatively a three per cent natural
decline in production from existing
reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on
the order of an additional fifty million
barrels a day. So where is the oil going to
come from? Governments and the national oil
companies are obviously controlling about
ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains
fundamentally a government business. While
many regions of the world offer great oil
opportunities, the Middle East with two
thirds of the world?s oil and the lowest
cost, is still where the prize ultimately
lies. Even though companies are anxious for
greater access there, progress continues to
be slow. It is true that technology,
privatisation and the opening up of a number
of countries have created many new
opportunities in areas around the world for
various oil companies, but looking back to
the early 1990?s, expectations were that
significant amounts of the world?s new
resources would come from such areas as the
former Soviet Union and from China. Of
course that didn?t turn out quite as
expected. Instead it turned out to be deep
water successes that yielded the bonanza of
the 1990?s.”
The Cheney remarks are worth a careful
reading. He posits a conservative rise in
global demand for oil by the end of the
present decade, i.e. in about 4 years. He
estimates the world will need to find an
added 50 million barrels of daily output.
Total daily oil production at present hovers
around the level of some 83 million barrels
oil equivalent. This means that to avert
catastrophic shortages and the resultant
devastating impact on global economic
growth, by Cheney?s 1999 estimate, the world
must find new oil production equal to more
than 50% of the 1999 daily global output,
and that, by about 2010. That is the
equivalent of five new oil regions equal to
today?s Saudi Arabian size. That is a
whopping amount of new oil.
Given that it can take up to seven years or
more to bring a new major oilfield into full
production, that?s also not much time if a
horrendous energy crunch and sky-high oil
and gas prices are to be averted. Cheney?s
estimate was also based on an overly
conservative estimate of future oil import
demand in China and India, today the two
fastest growing oil consumers on the planet.
A second notable point of Cheney?s 1999
London comments was his remark that, ?the
Middle East with two thirds of the world?s
oil and the lowest cost, is still where the
prize ultimately lies.? However, as he
revealingly remarked, the oil ?prize? of the
Middle East was in national or government
hands, not open to exploitation by the
private market, and thus, hard for Cheney?s
Halliburton and his friends in ExxonMobil or
Chevron or Shell or BP to get their hands
on.
At that time, Iraq, with the second largest
oil reserves after Saudi Arabia in the
Middle East, was under the rule of Saddam
Hussein. Iran, which has the world?s second
largest reserves of natural gas, in addition
to its huge oil reserves, was ruled by a
nationalist theocracy which was not open to
US private company oil tenders. The Caspian
Sea oil reserves were a subject of bitter
geopolitical battle between Washington and
Russia.
Cheney?s remark that ?Oil remains
fundamentally a government business,? and
not private, takes on a new significance
when we do a fast forward to September 2000,
in the heat of the 2000 Bush-Cheney election
campaign. That month Cheney, along with Don
Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and many others
who went on to join the new Bush
Administration, issued a policy report
titled, ?Re-building America?s Defenses.?
The paper was issued by an entity named
Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
Cheney?s PNAC group called on the new US
President-to-be to find a suitable pretext
to declare war on Iraq, in order to occupy
it and take direct control over the second
largest oil reserves in the Middle East.
Their report stated bluntly, ?While the
unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the
immediate justification (sic), the need for
a substantial American force presence in the
Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of
Saddam Hussein …?
Cheney signed on to a policy document in
September 2000 which declared that the key
issue was ?American force presence in the
Gulf,? and regime change in Iraq, regardless
whether Saddam Hussein was good, bad or
ugly. It was the first step in moving the US
military to ?where the prize ultimately
lies.?
No coincidence that Cheney immediately got
the task of heading a Presidential Energy
Task Force review in early 2001, where he
worked closely with his friends in Big Oil,
including the late Ken Lay of Enron, with
whom Cheney earlier had been involved in an
Afghan gas pipeline project, as well as with
James Baker III.
Buried in the debate leading to the US
bombing and occupation of Iraq in March 2003
was a lawsuit under the US Freedom of
Information Act brought by Sierra Club and
Judicial Watch., initially to find data on
Cheney?s role in the California energy
crisis. The suit demanded that Vice
President Cheney make public all documents
and records of meetings related to his 2001
Energy Task Force project.
The US Commerce Department in summer 2003
ultimately released part of the documents,
over ferocious Cheney and White House
opposition. Amid the files of the domestic
US energy review was, curiously enough, a
detailed map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines,
refineries and terminals, as well as two
charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects,
and ?Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield
Contracts.? The ?foreign suitors? included
Russia, China and France, three UN Security
Council members who openly opposed granting
the US UN approval for invading Iraq.
The first act of post-war occupation by
Washington was to declare null and void any
contracts between the Iraqi government and
Russia, China and France. Iraqi oil was to
be an American affair, handled by American
companies or their close cronies in Britain,
the first victory in the high-stakes quest,
?where the prize ultimately lies.?
This was precisely what Cheney had alluded
to in his 1999 London speech. Get the Middle
East oil resources out of independent
national hands and into US-controlled hands.
The military occupation of Iraq was the
first major step in this US strategy.
Control of Russian energy reserves, however,
was Washington?s ultimate ?prize.?
De-construction of Russia: The ?ultimate
prize?
For obvious military and political reasons,
Washington could not admit openly that its
strategic focus, since the fall of the
Soviet Union in 1991, had been the
dismemberment or de-construction of Russia,
and gaining effective control of its huge
oil and gas resources, the ?ultimate prize.?
The Russian Bear still had formidable
military means, however dilapidated, and she
still had nuclear teeth.
In the mid-1990?s Washington began a
deliberate process of bringing one after the
other former satellite Soviet state into not
just the European Union, but into the
Washington-dominated NATO. By 2004 Poland,
the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania,
Slovakia and Slovenia all had been admitted
into NATO, and the Republic of Georgia was
being groomed to join.
This surprising spread of NATO, to the alarm
of some in western Europe, as well as to
Russia, had been part of the strategy
advocated by Cheney?s friends at the Project
for the New American Century, in their
?Rebuilding America?s Defenses? report and
even before.
Already in 1996, PNAC member and Cheney
crony, Bruce Jackson, then a top executive
with US defense giant, LockheedMartin, was
head of the US Committee to Expand NATO,
later renamed the US Committee on Nato, a
very powerful Washington lobby group.
The US Committee to Expand NATO also
included PNAC members Paul Wolfowitz,
Richard Perle, Stephen Hadley and Robert
Kagan. Kagan?s wife is Victoria Nuland, now
the US Ambassador to NATO. From 2000 - 2003,
she was a foreign policy advisor to Cheney.
Hadley, a hardline hawk close to Vice
President Cheney, was named by President
Bush to replace Condoleezza Rice as his
National Security Adviser.
The warhawk Cheney network moved from the
PNAC into key posts within the Bush
Administration to run NATO and Pentagon
policy. Bruce Jackson and others, after
successfully lobbying Congress to expand
NATO to Poland, the Czech Republic and
Hungary in 1999, moved to organize the
so-called Vilnius Group that lobbied to
bring ten more former Warsaw Pact countries
on Russia?s periphery into NATO. Jackson
called this the ?Big Bang.?
President Bush repeatedly used the term ?New
Europe? in statements about NATO
enlargement. In a July 5, 2002 speech
hailing the leaders of the Vilnius group,
Bush declared, ?Our nations share a common
vision of a new Europe, where free European
states are united with each other, and with
the United States through cooperation,
partnership, and alliance.?
Lockheed Martin?s former executive, Bruce
Jackson, took credit for bringing the Baltic
and other members of the Vilnius Group into
NATO. Testifying before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee on April 1, 2003,
Jackson claimed he originated the ?Big Bang?
concept of NATO enlargement, later adopted
by the Vilnius Group of Baltic and Eastern
European nations. As Jackson noted, his ?Big
Bang? briefing ?proposed the inclusion of
these seven countries in NATO and claimed
for this enlargement strategic advantages
for NATO and moral (sic) benefits for the
democratic community of nations.? On May 19,
2000 in Vilnius, Lithuania, these
propositions were adopted by nine of
Europe’s new democracies as their own. It
became the objectives of the Vilnius Group.?
Jackson could also have noted the benefits
to US military defense industry, including
his old cronies at Lockheed Martin, with the
creation of a vast new NATO arms market on
the borders to Russia.
Once that NATO goal was reached, Bruce
Jackson and other members of the NATO
eastern expansion lobby, closed the US
Committee on Nato in 2003, and, seamlessly,
in the very same office, re-opened as a new
lobby organization, the Project on
Transitional Democracies, which according to
their own statement was ?organized to
exploit the opportunities to accelerate
democratic reform and integration which we
believe will exist in the broader
Euro-Atlantic region over the next decade.?
In other words, to foster the series of
Color Revolutions and regime change across
Russian Eurasia. All three principals of the
Project on Transitional Democracies worked
for the Republican Party, and Jackson and
Scheunemann have close ties with major
military contractors, notably Lockheed
Martin and Boeing.
Jackson and other PNAC and U.S. Committee on
NATO members also created a powerful lobby
organization, the Committee for the
Liberation of Iraq (CLI). CLI’s advisory
panel included hardline Democrats such as
Rep. Stephen Solarz and Sen. Robert Kerrey.
It was dominated by neo-conservatives and
Republican Party stalwarts like Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Robert Kagan, Richard Perle,
William Kristol, and former CIA Director,
James Woolsey. Serving as honorary co-chairs
were Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and John
McCain (R-AZ). Jackson related that friends
in the White House had asked him to create
the CRI in 2002 to replicate the success he
had had pushing for NATO expansion through
his US. Committee on NATO by establishing an
outfit aimed at supporting the
administration’s campaign to convince
Congress and the public to support a war.
??People in the White House said, ?We need
you to do for Iraq what you did for NATO’,?
Jackson told American Prospect magazine in a
January 1, 2003 interview.
In brief, NATO encirclement of Russia, Color
Revolutions across Eurasia, and the war in
Iraq, were all one and the same American
geopolitical strategy, part of a grand
strategy to ultimately de-construct Russia
once and for all as a potential rival to a
sole US Superpower hegemony. Russia– not
Iraq and not Iran– was the primary target of
that strategy.
During a White House welcoming ceremony to
greet the ten new NATO members in 2004,
President Bush noted that NATO?s mission now
extended far beyond the perimeter of the
alliance. ?NATO members are reaching out to
the nations of the Middle East, to
strengthen our ability to fight terror, and
to provide for our common security,? he
said. But NATO?s mission now would extend
beyond even global security. Bush added, ?We?re
discussing how we can support and increase
the momentum of freedom in the greater
Middle East.? Freedom, that is, to come into
the orbit of a Washington-controlled NATO
alliance.
The end of the Yeltsin era put a slight
crimp in the US plans. Putin began slowly
and cautiously to emerge as a dynamic
national force, committed to rebuilding
Russia, following the IMF-guided looting of
the country by a combination of Western
banks and corrupt Russian oligarchs.
Russian oil output had risen since the
collapse of the Soviet Union to the point
that, by the time of the 2003 US war on
Iraq, Russia was the world?s second largest
oil producer behind Saudi Arabia.
The real significance of the Yukos Affair
The defining event in the new Russian energy
geopolitics under Vladimir Putin took place
in 2003. It was just as Washington was
making it brutally clear it was going to
militarize Iraq and the Middle East,
regardless of world protest or UN niceties.
A brief review of the spectacular October
2003 arrest of Russia?s billionaire
?oligarch? Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and state
seizure of his giant Yukos oil group, is
essential to understand Russian energy
geopolitics.
Khodorkovsky was arrested at Novosibirsk
airport on October 25, 2003, by the Russian
Prosecutor General’s office on charges of
tax evasion. The Putin government froze
shares of Yukos Oil because of tax charges.
They then took further actions against Yukos,
leading to a collapse in the share price.
What was little mentioned in Western media
accounts, which typically portrayed the
Putin government actions as a reversion to
Soviet-era methods, was what had triggered
Putin?s dramatic action in the first place.
Khodorkovsky had been arrested just four
weeks before a decisive Russian Duma or
lower house election, in which Khodorkovsky
had managed to buy the votes of a majority
in the Duma using his vast wealth. Control
of the Duma was to be the first step by
Khodorkovsky in a plan to run against Putin
the next year as President. The Duma victory
would have allowed him to change election
laws in his favor, as well as to alter a
controversial law being drafted in the Duma,
?The Law on Underground Resources.? That law
would prevent Yukos and other private
companies from gaining control of raw
materials in the ground, or from developing
private pipeline routes independent of the
Russian state pipelines.
Khodorkovsky had violated the pledge of the
Oligarchs made to Putin, that they be
allowed to keep their assets–de facto stolen
from the state in the rigged auctions under
Yeltsin–if they stayed out of Russian
politics and repatriated a share of their
stolen money. Khodorkovsky, the most
powerful oligarch at the time, was serving
as the vehicle for what was becoming an
obvious Washington-backed putsch against
Putin.
The Khodorkovsky arrest followed an
unpublicized meeting earlier that year on
July 14, 2003 between Khodorkovsky and Vice
President Dick Cheney.
Following the Cheney meeting, Khodorkovsky
began talks with ExxonMobil and
ChevronTexaco, Condi Rice?s old firm, about
taking a major state in Yukos, said to have
been between 25% and 40%. That was intended
to give Khodorkovsky de facto immunity from
possible Putin government interference by
tying Yukos to the big US oil giants and,
hence, to Washington. It would also have
given Washington, via the US oil giants, a
de facto veto power over future Russian oil
and gas pipelines and oil deals. Days before
his October 2003 arrest on tax fraud
charges, Khodorkovsky had entertained George
H.W. Bush, the representative of the
powerful and secretive Washington Carlyle
Group in Moscow. They were discussing the
final details of the US oil company share
buy-in of Yukos.
Yukos had also just made a bid to acquire
rival Sibneft from Boris Berezovsky, another
Yeltsin-era Oligarch. YukosSibneft, with
19.5 billion barrels of oil and gas, would
then own the second-largest oil and gas
reserves in the world after ExxonMobil.
YukosSibneft would be the fourth largest in
the world in terms of production, pumping
2.3 million barrels of crude oil a day. The
Exxon or Chevron buy-up of YukosSibneft
would have been a literal energy coup d?etat.
Cheney knew it; Bush knew it; Khodorkovsky
knew it.
Above all, Vladimir Putin knew it and moved
decisively to block it.
Khodokorvsky had cultivated very impressive
ties to the Anglo-American power
establishment. He created a philanthropic
foundation, the Open Russia Foundation,
modelled on the Open Society foundation of
his close friend George Soros. On the select
board of Open Russia Foundation sat Henry
Kissinger and Kissinger?s friend, Jacob Lord
Rothschild, London scion of the banking
family. Arthur Hartman, a former US
Ambassador to Moscow, also sat on the
foundation?s board.
Following Khodorkovsky’s arrest, the
Washington Post reported that the imprisoned
Russian billionaire had retained the
services of Stuart Eizenstat - former deputy
Treasury Secretary, Undersecretary of State,
Undersecretary of Commerce during the
Clinton Administration - to lobby in
Washington for his freedom. Khodorkovsky was
in deep with the Anglo-American
establishment.
Subsequent western media and official
protest about Russia?s return to communist
methods and raw power politics, conveniently
ignored the fact that Khodorkovsky was
hardly Snow White himself. Earlier,
Khodorkovsky had unilaterally ripped up his
contract with British Petroleum. BP had been
a partner with Yukos, and had spent $300
million in drilling the highly promising
Priobskoye oil field in Siberia.
Once the BP drilling had been done,
Khodorkovsky forced BP out, using gangster
methods that would be unlawful in most of
the developed world. By 2003 Priobskoye oil
production reached 129 million barrels,
equivalent to a value on the market of some
$8 billions. Earlier, in 1998, after the IMF
had given billions to Russia to prevent a
collapse of the Ruble, Khodokorvosky?s Bank
Menatep diverted an eye-popping $4.8 billion
in IMF funds to his hand-picked bank
cronies, some US banks among them. The howls
of protest from Washington at the October
2003 arrest of Khodorkovsky were
disingenuous, if not outright hypocritical.
As seen from the Kremlin, Washington had
been caught with its fat hand in the Russian
cookie jar.
The Putin-Khodorkovsky showdown signalled a
decisive turn by the Putin government
towards rebuilding Russia and erecting
strategic defenses from the foreign
onslaught led by Cheney and friend Tony
Blair in Britain. It took place in the
context of a brazen US grab for Iraq in 2003
and of a unilateral Bush Administration
announcement that the USA was abrogating its
solemn treaty obligations with Russia under
their earlier Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM)
Treaty, in order to go ahead with
development of US missile defenses, an act
which could only be viewed in Moscow as a
hostile act aimed at her security.
By 2003, indeed, it took little strategic
military prowess to realize that the
Pentagon hawks and their allies in the
military industry and Big Oil had a vision
of a United States unfettered by
international agreements and acting
unilaterally in its own best interests, as
defined, of course, by the hawks. Their
recommendations were published by one of the
many Washington hawk conservative
Think-Tanks. In January 2001 The National
Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) issued
Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear
Forces and Arms Control, just as the
Bush-Cheney Administration began. The
report, demanding a unilateral US end to
nuclear force reduction, was signed by 27
senior officials from past and current
administrations. The list included the man
who today is Bush?s National Security
Adviser, Stephen Hadley; it included the
special assistant to the Secretary of
Defense, Stephen Cambone, and it included
Admiral James Woolsey, the former head of
CIA and chairman of the Washington NGO,
Freedom House. Freedom House played a
central role in Ukraine?s US-sponsored
?Orange Revolution? and all other ?Color
Revolutions? across the former Soviet Union.
These events were soon followed by the
Washington-financed series of covert
destabilizations of a number of governments
in Russia?s periphery which had been close
to Moscow. It included the November 2003
?Rose Revolution? in Georgia which ousted
Edouard Shevardnadze in favour of a young,
US-educated and pro-NATO President, Mikheil
Saakashvili. The 37-year-old Saakashvili had
conveniently agreed to back the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that would
avoid Moscow pipeline control of
Azerbaijan?s Caspian oil. The United States
has maintained close ties with Georgia since
President Mikheil Saakashvili has come to
power. American military trainers instruct
Georgian troops and Washington has poured
millions of dollars into preparing Georgia
to become part of NATO.
Following its Rose Revolution in Georgia,
Woolsey?s Freedom House, the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), Soros
Foundation and other Washington-backed NGOs
organized the brazenly provocative November
2004 Ukraine ?Orange Revolution.? The aim of
the Orange Revolution was to install a
pro-NATO regime there under the contested
Presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, in a land
strategically able to cut the major pipeline
flows from Russian oil and gas to Western
Europe. Washington-backed ?democratic
opposition? movements in neighboring Belarus
also began receiving millions of dollars of
Bush Administration largesse, along with
Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan and more remote former
Soviet states which also happen to form a
barrier between potential energy pipelines
linking China with Russia and the former
Soviet states like Kazkhstan..
Again, energy and oil and gas pipeline
control lay at the heart of the US moves.
Little wonder, perhaps, that some people
inside the Kremlin, notably Vladimir Putin,
began to wonder if Putin?s new born-again
Texan partner-in-prayer, George W. Bush, was
in fact speaking to Putin with forked
tongue, as the Indians would say.
By the end of 2004 it was clear in Moscow
that a new Cold War, this one over strategic
energy control and unilateral nuclear
primacy, was fully underway. It was also
clear from the unmistakeable pattern of
Washington actions since the dissolution of
the Soviet Union in 1991, that End Game for
USA policy vis-?-vis Eurasia was not China,
not Iraq, and not Iran.
The geopolitical ?End Game? for Washington
was the complete de-construction of Russia,
the one state in Eurasia capable of
organizing an effective combination of
alliances using its vast oil and gas
resources. That, of course, could never be
openly declared.
After 2003 Putin and Russian foreign policy,
especially energy policy, reverted to their
basic response to the ?Heartland?
geopolitics of Sir Halford Mackinder,
politics which had been the basis of Soviet
Cold War strategy since 1946.
Putin began to make a series of defensive
moves to restore some tenable form of
equilibrium in face of the increasingly
obvious Washington policy of encircling and
weakening Russia. Subsequent US strategic
blunders have made the job a bit easier for
Russia. Now, with the stakes rising on both
sides?NATO and Russia?Putin?s Russia has
moved beyond simple defense to a new dynamic
offensive, to secure a more viable
geopolitical position, using its energy as
the lever.
Mackinder?s Heartland and Brzezinski?s Chess
Game
It?s essential to understand the historic
background to the term geopolitics. In 1904,
an academic British geographer named Halford
Mackinder made an address before the Royal
Geographic Society in London which was to
change history. In his speech, titled, ?The
Geographical Pivot of History,? Mackinder
sought to define the relation between a
nation?s or region?s geography?its
topography, relation to the sea or land, its
climate?with its politics and position in
the world. He posited two classes of powers:
sea powers including Britain and the United
States as well as Japan; and he posited the
large land powers of Eurasia, which, with
development of the railroad, were able to
unite large land masses free from dependency
on the seas.
For Mackinder, an ardent Empire advocate,
the implicit lesson for continued hegemony
of the British Empire following the
1914-1917 World War, was to prevent at all
costs a convergence of interests between the
nations of East Europe?Poland,
Czechoslovakia , Austria-Hungary–and the
Russia-centered Eurasia ?Heartland? or
?pivot? land,as he termed it. After the
Versailles peace talks, Mackinder summed up
his ideas in the following famous dictum:
Who rules East Europe commands the
Heartland;
Who rules the Heartland commands the
World-Island;
Who rules the World-Island commands the
world.
Mackinder’s Heartland was the core area of
Eurasia, and the World-Island was all of
Eurasia, including Europe, the Middle East
and Asia. Great Britain, never a part of
Continental Europe, he saw as a separate
naval or sea-power. The Mackinder
geopolitical perspective shaped Britain?s
entry into the 1914 Great War, it shaped her
entry into World War Two. It shaped
Churchill?s calculated provocations of an
increasingly paranoid Stalin, beginning
1943, to entice Russia into what became the
Cold War.
From a US perspective, the 1946-1991 Cold
War era was all about who shall control
Mackinder?s World-Island, and, concretely,
how to prevent the Eurasian Heartland,
centered on Russia, from doing just that. A
look at a polar projection map of US
military alliances during the Cold War makes
the point: The Soviet Union had been
geopolitically contained and prevented from
any significant linkup with Western Europe
or the Middle East or Asia. The Cold War was
about Russian efforts to circumvent that
NATO-centered Iron Curtain.
Former US National Security Adviser,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, writing in the
post-Soviet era in 1997, drew on Mackinder?s
geopolitics by name, in describing the
principal strategic aim of the United States
to keep Eurasia from unifying as a coherent
economic and military bloc or counterweight
to the sole superpower status of the United
States.
To understand US foreign policy since the
onset of the Bush-Cheney Presidency in 2001,
therefore, it?s useful to cite a revealing
New York Council on Foreign Relations
Foreign Affairs article by Brzezinski from
September/October 1997:
“Eurasia is home to most of the world’s
politically assertive and dynamic states.
All the historical pretenders to global
power originated in Eurasia. The world’s
most populous aspirants to regional
hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia,
as are all the potential political or
economic challengers to American primacy.
After the United States, the next six
largest economies and military spenders are
there, as are all but one of the world’s
overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the
covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75 percent
of the world’s population, 60 percent of its
GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources.
Collectively, Eurasia’s potential power
overshadows even America’s.
Eurasia is the world’s axial supercontinent.
A power that dominated Eurasia would
exercise decisive influence over two of the
world’s three most economically productive
regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A
glance at the map also suggests that a
country dominant in Eurasia would almost
automatically control the Middle East and
Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the
decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no
longer suffices to fashion one policy for
Europe and another for Asia. What happens
with the distribution of power on the
Eurasian landmass will be of decisive
importance to America’s global
primacy…?(emphasis added-w.e.)
If we take the words of Washington
strategist Brzezinski and understand the
axioms of Halford Mackinder as the driving
motive for Anglo, and later, American
foreign policy for more than an entire
century, it begins to become clear why a
reorganized Russian state under the
Presidency of Vladimir Putin has gone into
motion to resist the overtures and overt
attempts at deconstruction being promoted by
Washington in the name of democracy. How has
Putin acted to shore up Russian defenses? In
a word: energy.
Russian energy geopolitics
In terms of the overall standard of living,
mortality and economic prosperity, Russia
today is not a world class power. In terms
of energy, it is a colossus. In terms of
landmass it is still the single largest
nation in land area in the world, spanning
from the Pacific to the door of Europe. It
has vast territory, vast natural resources,
and it has the world?s largest reserves of
natural gas, the energy source currently the
focus of major global power plays. In
addition, it is the only power on the face
of the earth with the military capabilities
able to match that of the United States
despite the collapse of the USSR and
deterioration in the military since.
Russia has more than 130,000 oil wells and
some 2000 oil and gas deposits explored of
which at least 900 are not in use. Oil
reserves have been estimated at 150 billion
barrels, similar perhaps to Iraq. They could
be far larger but have not yet been
exploited owing to difficulty of drilling in
some remote arctic regions. Oil prices above
$60 a barrel begin to make it economical to
explore in those remote regions.
Currently Russian oil products can be
exported to foreign markets in three routes:
Western Europe via the Baltic Sea and Black
Sea; Northern route; Far East to China or
Japan and East Asian markets. Russia has oil
terminals on the Baltic at St. Petersburg
for oil and a newly expanded oil terminal at
Primorsk. There are added oil terminals
under construction at Vysotsk, Batareynaya
Bay and Ust-Luga.
Russia?s state-owned natural gas pipeline
network, its so-called ?unified gas
transportation system? includes a vast
network of pipelines and compressor stations
extending more than 150,000 kilometers
across Russia. By law only the state-owned
Gazprom is allowed to use the pipeline. The
network is perhaps the most valued Russian
state asset outside the oil and gas itself.
Here is the heart of Putin?s new natural gas
geopolitics and the focus of conflict with
western oil and gas companies as well as the
European Union, whose Energy Commissioner,
Andras Piebalgs, is from new NATO member
Latvia, formerly part of the USSR.
In 2001, as it became clear in Moscow that
Washington would find a way to bring the
Baltic republics into NATO, Putin backed the
development of a major new oil port on the
Russian coast of the Baltic Sea in Primorsk
at a cost of $2.2 billion. This project,
known as the Baltic Pipeline System (BPS),
greatly lessens export dependency on Latvia,
Lithuania and Poland. The Baltic is Russia?s
main oil export route, carrying crude oil
from Russia’s West Siberian and
Timan-Pechora oil provinces westward to the
port of Primorsk in the Russian Gulf of
Finland. The BPS was completed in March 2006
with capacity to carry more than1.3 million
barrels/day of Russian oil to western
markets in Europe and beyond.
The same month, March 2006, former German
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was named
chairman of a Russian-German consortium
building a natural gas pipeline going some
1,200 km under the Baltic Sea. Majority
shareholder in this North European Gas
Pipeline (NEGP) project, with 51%, is the
Russian state-controlled Gazprom, the
world?s largest natural gas company. The
German companies BASF and E.On each hold
24.5%. The project, estimated to cost ?4.7
billion, was started late 2005 and will
connect the gas terminal at the Russian port
city of Vyborg on the Baltic near St.
Petersburg with the Baltic city of
Greifswald in eastern Germany. The
Yuzhno-Russkoye gas field in West Siberia
will be developed in a joint venture between
Gazprom and BASF to feed the pipeline. It
was Gerhard Schroeder?s last major act as
Chancellor, and provoked howls of protest
from the pro-Washington Polish government,
as well as Ukraine, who both stood to lose
control over pipeline flows from Russia.
Despite her close ties to the Bush
Administration, Chancellor Angela Merkel has
been forced to swallow hard and accept the
project. Germany?s industry is simply
dependent on the Russian energy import.
Russia is by far the largest supplier of
natural gas to Germany.
The giant Shtokman gas deposit in the
Russian sector of the Barents Sea, north of
the Murmansk harbor, will ultimately also be
a part of the gas supply of the NEGP. When
completed in two parallel pipelines, NEGP
will supply Germany up to 55 billion cubic
meters more a year of Russian gas.
In April 2006 the Putin government announced
the first stage of construction of the East
Siberia-Pacific Ocean Pipeline (ESPO), a
vast oil pipeline from Taishet in the
Irkutsk Region near Lake Baikal in East
Siberia, to Perevoznaya Bay on Russia?s
Pacific Ocean coast, to be built at a cost
of more than $11.5 billion. Transneft, the
Russian state-owned pipeline company will
build it. When finished, it will pump up to
1.6 million barrels/day from Siberia to the
Russian Far East and from there on to the
energy-hungry Asia-Pacific, mainly to China.
The first stage is due to be completed by
end of 2008. In addition, Putin has
announced plans to construct an oil refinery
on the Amur River near the China border in
Russia?s Far East to allow sale of refined
product to China and Asian markets.
Presently the Siberian oil can only be
delivered to the Pacific via rail.
For Russia, the Taishet to Perevoznaya route
will maximize its national strategic
benefits while taking oil exports to China
and Japan into account at the same time. In
the future, the country will be able to
export oil to Japan directly from the
Nakhodka Port. Oil-import-dependent Japan is
frantic to find new secure oil sources
outside the unstable Middle East. The ESPO
can also supply oil to the Republic of Korea
and the Democratic People?s Republic of
Korea through building from Vladivostok
branch lines leading to the two countries
and to China via a branch pipe between
Blagoveshchensk and Daqing. The Taishet
route provides a clear roadmap for energy
cooperation between Russia and China, Japan
and other Asia-Pacific countries.
Sakhalin: Russia reins in Big Oil
In late September 2006 a seemingly minor
dispute exploded and resulted in the
revocation of the environmental permit for
Royal Dutch Shell?s Sakhalin II Liquified
Natural Gas project, which had been due to
deliver LNG to Japan, South Korea and other
customers by 2008. Shell is lead energy
partner in an Anglo-Japanese oil and gas
development project on Russia?s Far East
island of Sakhalin, a vast island north of
Hokkaido Japan.
At the same time, the Putin government
announced environmental requirements had
also not been met by ExxonMobil for their De
Kastri oil terminal built on Sakhalin as
part of its Sakhalin I oil and gas
development project. Sakhalin I contains an
estimated 8 billion barrels of oil and vast
volumes of gas, making the field a rare
Super-Giant oil find, in geologists?
terminology.
In the early 1990?s the Yeltsin government
made a desperation bid to attract needed
investment capital and technology into
exploiting Russian oil and gas regions at a
time the government was broke and oil prices
very low. In a bold departure, Yeltsin
granted US and other western oil majors
generous exploration rights to two large oil
projects, Sakhalin I and Sakhalin II. Under
a so-called PSA or Production Sharing
Agreement, ExxonMobil, lead partner of the
Sakhalin I oil project, got tax-free Russian
concessions.
Under the terms of the PSA?s, typical
between major Anglo-American oil majors and
weak Third World countries, Russia?s
government would instead get paid for the
oil and gas rights in a share of eventual
oil or gas produced. But the first drops of
oil to Russia would flow only after all
project production costs had first been
covered. PSA?s were originally developed by
Washington and Big Oil to facilitate
favorable control by the oil companies of
large oil projects in third countries. The
major US oil giants, working with the James
Baker?s James Baker Institute, which drafted
Dick Cheney?s 2001 Energy Task Force Review,
used the PSA form to regain control over
Iraq?s oil production, hidden behind the
fa?ade of an Iraqi state-owned oil company.
Shortly before the Russian government told
ExxonMobil it had problems with its terminal
on Sakhalin, ExxonMobil had announced yet
another cost increase in the project.
ExxonMobil, whose attorney is James Baker
III, and which is a close partner to the
Cheney-Bush White House, announced a 30%
cost increase, something that would put even
further off any Russian oil flow share from
the PSA. The news came on the eve of
ExxonMobil plans to open an oil terminal at
De Kastri on Sakhalin. The Russian
Environment Ministry and the Agency for
Subsoil Use suddenly announced the terminal
did ?not meet environmental requirements?
and is reportedly considering halting
production by ExxonMobil as well.
Britain?s Royal Dutch Shell under another
PSA holds rights to develop the oil and gas
resources in Sakhalin II region, and build
Russia?s first Liquified Natural Gas
project. The $20 billion project, employing
over 17,000 people, is 80% complete. It?s
the world?s largest integrated oil and gas
project, and includes Russia?s first
offshore oil production, as well as Russia?s
first offshore integrated gas platform.
The clear Russian government moves against
ExxonMobil and Shell have been interpreted
in the industry as an atttempt by the Putin
government to regain control of Russian oil
and gas resources it gave away during the
Yeltsin era. It would cohere with Putin?s
emerging energy strategy.
Russia-Turkey Blue Stream gas project
In November 2005 Russia?s Gazprom completed
the final stage of its 1,213 kilometer $3.2
billion Blue Stream gas pipeline. The
project brings gas from its gas fields in
Krasnodar, then by underwater pipelines
across the Black Sea to the Durusu Terminal
near Samsun inon the Turkish Black Sea
coast. From there the pipeline supplies
Russian gas to Ankara. When it reaches full
capacity in 2010 it will carry an estimated
16 billion cubic meters gas a year.
Gazprom is now discussing transit of Russian
gas to the countries of South Europe and
East Mediterranean, including based on new
contracts and new volumes of gas. Greece,
South Italy and Israel all are in some form
of negotiation with Gazprom to tap gas from
the Blue Stream pipeline across the
territory of Turkey. A new route for the gas
supply is being developed now - the one via
the countries of East and Central Europe.
The interim title of the project is the
South-European Gas Pipeline. The main issue
here is to establish a new gas transmission
system, both from Russian origin and from
the third countries
In sum, not including the emerging
potentials of Gazprom?s entry into the
fast-developing Liquified Natural Gas
markets globally, energy, oil and gas and
nuclear, is firmly at the heart of Russian
attempts to build new economic alliance
partners across Eurasia in the coming
showdown with the United States.
US plans for ?Nuclear Primacy?
The key to the ability of Putin?s Russia to
succeed is its ability to defend its
Eurasian energy strategy with a credible
military deterrent, to counter now-obvious
Washington military plans for what the
Pentagon terms Full Spectrum Dominance.
In a revealing article titled ?The Rise of
US Nuclear Primacy,? in the March/April 2006
Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the New
York Council on Foreign Relations, authors
Kier Lieber and Daryl Press made the
following claim,
?Today, for the first time in almost 50
years, the United States stands on the verge
of attaining nuclear primacy. It will
probably soon be possible for the United
States to destroy the long-range nuclear
arsenals of Russia or China with a first
strike. This dramatic shift in the nuclear
balance of power stems from a series of
improvements in the United States’ nuclear
systems, the precipitous decline of Russia’s
arsenal, and the glacial pace of
modernization of China’s nuclear forces.
Unless Washington’s policies change or
Moscow and Beijing take steps to increase
the size and readiness of their forces,
Russia and China — and the rest of the world
— will live in the shadow of U.S. nuclear
primacy for many years to come.?
The US authors claim, accurately, that since
the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
Russia?s strategic nuclear arsenal has
?sharply deteriorated.? They also conclude
that the United States is and has been for
some time, intentionally pursuing global
nuclear primacy. The September 2002 Bush
Administration National Security Strategy
explicitly stated that it was official US
policy to establish global military primacy,
an unsettling thought for many nations today
given the recent actions of Washington since
the events of September, 2001.
One of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld?s priority
projects has been the multi-billion dollar
construction of a US missile defense. It has
been sold to American voters as a defense
against possible terror attacks. In reality,
as has been openly recognized in Moscow and
Beijing, it is aimed at the only two real
nuclear powers, Russia and China.
As the Foreign Affairs article points out,
?the sort of missile defenses that the
United States might plausibly deploy would
be valuable primarily in an offensive
context, not a defensive one — as an adjunct
to a U.S. first-strike capability, not as a
stand-alone shield. If the United States
launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or
China), the targeted country would be left
with a tiny surviving arsenal — if any at
all. At that point, even a relatively modest
or inefficient missile-defense system might
well be enough to protect against any
retaliatory strikes, because the devastated
enemy would have so few warheads and decoys
left.?
In the context of a United States which has
actively moved the troops of its NATO
partners into Afghanistan, now Lebanon, and
which is clearly backing the former USSR
member Georgia, today a critical factor in
the Caspian Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Turkey oil
pipeline, in Georgia?s move to join NATO and
push Russian troops away, it is little
surprise that Moscow might be just a bit
uncomfortable with the American President?s
promises of spreading democracy through a
US-defined Greater Middle East. The invented
term, Greater Middle East is the creation of
various Washington think-tanks close to
Cheney including his Project for the New
American Century, to refer to the non-Arabic
countries of Turkey, Iran, Israel, Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Central Asian (former USSR)
countries, and Azerbaijan, Georgia and
Armenia. At the G-8 Summit in Summer 2004
President Bush first officially used the
term to refer to the region included in
Washington?s project to spread ?democracy?
in the region.
On October 3, the Russian Foreign Ministry
warned that Russia would ?take appropriate
measures? should Poland deploy elements of
the new US missile defense system. Poland is
now a NATO member. Its Defense Minister,
Radek Sikorski was a former Resident in
Washington at Richard Perle?s hawkish AEI
think-tank. He was also Executive Director
of the New Atlantic Initiative, a project
designed to bring the former Warsaw Pact
countries of eastern Europe into NATO under
the guise of spreading democracy. The United
States is also building, via NATO, a
European Missile Defense System.
The only conceivable target of such a system
would be Russia in the sense of enabling a
US first strike success. Completion of the
European missile defense system, the
militarization of the entire Middle East,
the encirclement of Russia and of China from
a connected web of new US military bases,
many put up in the name of the War on
Terror, all now appear to the Kremlin as
part of a deliberate US strategy of Full
Spectrum Dominance. The Pentagon refers to
it also as ?Escalation Dominance,? the
ability to win a war at any level of
violence, including a nuclear war.
Moscow?s military status
Moscow has not been entirely passive in the
face of this growing reality. In his May
2003 State of the Nation Address, Vladimir
Putin spoke of strengthening and modernizing
Russia?s nuclear deterrent by creating new
types of weapons, including for Russia?s
strategic forces, which will ?ensure the
defense capability of Russia and its allies
in the long term.? Russia stopped
withdrawing and destroying its SS-18 MIRVed
missiles once the Bush Administration
unilaterally declared an end to the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and its de
facto annulling of the Start II Treaty.
Russia never stopped being a powerful entity
that produced state-of-the-art military
technologies — a trend that continued from
its inception as a modern state. While its
army, navy and air force are in derelict
conditions, the elements for Russia’s
resurgence as a military powerhouse are
still in place. Russia has been consistently
fielding top-notch military technology at
various international trade shows, and has
been effective in the demonstration of its
capabilities.
In spite of financial and economic
difficulties, Russia still produces
state-of-the-art military technologies,
according to a 2004 analysis by the
Washington-based think tank, Power and
Interest News Report (PINR). One of its best
achievements after the dissolution of the
Soviet Union has been its armored fighting
vehicle BMP-3, which has been chosen over
Western vehicles in contracts for the United
Arab Emirates and Oman.
Russia’s surface-to-air missile systems, the
S-300, and its more powerful successor, the
S-400, are reported to be more potent than
American-made Patriot systems. The
once-anticipated military exercise between
the Patriot and the S-300 never
materialized, leaving the Russian complex
with an undisputed, yet unproven, claim of
superiority over the American system.
Continuing this list is the Kamov-50 family
of military helicopters that incorporate the
latest cutting-edge technologies and
tactics, making them an equal force to the
best Washington has. European helicopter
industry sources confirm this.
In recent joint Indo-American air force
exercises, where the Indian Air Force was
equipped with modern Russian-made Su-30
fighters, the Indian Air Force
out-maneuvered American-made F-15 planes in
a majority of their engagements, prompting
US Air Force General Hal Homburg to admit
that Russian technology in Indian hands has
given the US Air Force a ?wake-up call.? The
Russian military establishment is continuing
to design other helicopters, tanks and
armored vehicles that are on par with the
best that the West has to offer.
Weapons export, in addition to oil and gas,
has been one of the best ways for Russia to
earn much-needed hard currency. Already,
Russia is the second-largest worldwide
exporter of military technology after the
United States. As reported in various
magazines, journals and periodicals, at
present, Russia’s modern military technology
is more likely to be exported than supplied
to its own armies due to the existing
financial constraints and limitations of
Russia’s armed forces. This has implications
for America’s future combat operations since
practically all insurgent, guerrilla,
breakaway or terrorist armed formations
across the globe — the very formations that
the United States will most likely face in
its future wars — are fielded with Russian
weapons or its derivatives.
Russian nuclear arsenal has played an
important political role since the end of
the Soviet Union, providing fundamental
security for the Russian state. After a
bitter intra-services fight within the
Russian General Staff which lasted from 1998
to 2003, the General Staff realized along
with the Defense Ministry that a further
policy of neglect of nuclear forces in favor
of funding rebuilding conventional forces in
the face of tight budget constraints, was
not tolerable. In 2003 Russia had to buy
from Ukraine strategic bombers and ICBMs
warehoused there. Since then strategic
nuclear forces have been a priority. Today,
the finances of the Russian state, thanks
largely to high prices of oil and gas
exports, are on a strong footing. The
Russian Central Bank has become one of the
five largest dollar reserve holders with
reserves of more than $270 billions.
The material foundation of the Russian
military is its defense industry. After 1991
the Russian Federation inherited the bulk of
the Soviet defense industrial complex.
Today, with little fanfare, the US is
building up its influence and military
presence in the Middle East despite a
general draw-down in its military
commitments and expenditure. Why? Oil is
certainly a large part of the answer. But in
geopolitical terms, it is also to the
Eurasian land power, Russia from access to
the seas - just as Mackinder argued had to
be done. The push for a US ?nuclear primacy?
over Russia is the factor in world politics
today which has the most potential for
bringing the world into a nuclear
conflagration by miscalculation.
The basic argument of the Mackinder?s
geopolitics is still relevant: ?The great
geographical realities remain: land power
versus sea power, heartland versus rimland,
centre versus periphery…? This Russia
understands every bit as Washington.
