EDITORIAL The Caspian diplomatic vacuum

Iraqi crude moves once again through Turkey to the Mediterranean, and plans advance for export routes across the Caucasus for Caspian Sea oil. Isolated developments? They are as far as U.S. foreign policy is concerned. Yet they are related in ways that governments should not ignore.

Dec. 23, 1996

4 min read

From the perspective of the U.S., the restart of limited Iraqi oil exports relates to politics in the Middle East. By contrast, arrangements for pipeline movement of crude oil westward from Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan fall within the realm of the former Soviet Union (FSU). As far as policy goes, the developments might as well have occurred on separate planets.

Discrete goals

Viewing the regions as distinct, U.S. policy applies disparate standards in pursuit of discrete goals. In the Middle East, it seeks peace between Israel and its neighbors, containment of regional mavericks, and security for the world's largest concentration of crude oil reserves. In the FSU, it mainly seeks room for an old antagonist to stagger in the general direction of democracy.

While the goals may be proper, the split approach raises problems for reasons that go beyond the regions' juxtaposition. The Caspian and its seaboards represent world-scale oil-producing potential held dormant in the Soviet era. Free of Communist shackles, the area represents a vital northern adjunct to the Middle East's hydrocarbon bounty. Concern by the world's largest consuming nation for secure oil trade should blend Caspian and Middle Eastern issues in U.S. foreign policy.

The bifurcated U.S. approach, moreover, creates blind spots. In the Middle East, unlike in the FSU, the U.S. embraces friends and shuns enemies. So Iran joins Iraq as a target for U.S. "containment"-a country not to be dealt with. This year, Turkey edged toward similar status by electing a Muslim party prime minister, Necmettin Erbakan, who promptly warmed up to Iran, Iraq, and Libya. Apparently hoping Erbakan's weak coalition government won't survive, the U.S. retreated into aggressive indifference.

Yet Iran and Turkey are too important to ignore. Turkey has strong ethnic and linguistic influence along the FSU's southern tier. It controls the vital Bosporus and Dardanelle Straits through which tankers from the FSU pass en route from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. And as the newly reopened pipeline from Iraq makes clear, Turkey's position as the bridge between Asia and Europe is as crucial now as ever.

Iran performs comparable geographic service between the Middle East and the Caucasus-Caspian region and also has ethnic and religious ties to Central Asia. Its importance as an oil exporter and gas producer is well-established. And U.S. commercial snubs have not kept it from asserting its economic interests. The Islamic republic is close, for example, to signing a swap arrangement providing an export outlet for as much as 120,000 b/d of crude from Kazakhstan.

If the U.S. is to wield influence in the Caucasus-Caspian region, it must be engaged with the nations there, even if terms are less than friendly. To deliberately create diplomatic vacuums in a region so potentially important and rapidly changing is self-defeating.

Different standards

The U.S. hasn't felt obliged to disengage diplomatically or commercially from Moscow over Russia's ravaging of Chechnya and bullying of the former Caucasus and Caspian members of its collapsed empire. Why should different standards apply in the Middle East?

Commerce and politics are strengthening the links between the Middle East and states to the north. Yet the U.S. threatens to isolate itself from the region in self-righteous irrelevance. Oil and gas companies denied access to emerging opportunities can surely count themselves among the victims of this mistake. But so, eventually, might U.S. energy consumers, whose supply security increasingly depends on uninterrupted trade in oil.

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