Books
Great Expectations on the Caspian:
Can US Policy Live up to Them?
by Anthony Richter
Anthony Richter is the director of the Open Society Institute''s Central Eurasia Project.
The views expressed here are his alone.Summary
The US and NATO have been increasing their military cooperation with the Caspian states in recent years. These steps have inflated hopes in the region of more significant US military involvement in the future, especially in the light of the Kosovo intervention. These hopes are most unlikely to be realized. In the meantime, NATO''s actions have alarmed Russia and Iran, and may potentially serve to strengthen anti-democratic trends within the countries of the region. Western military assistance to the Caspian states should be put under great scrutiny and debate from the broader policy community to ensure that we are not contributing to the instability we are ostensibly trying to prevent.* * *
With the Russian military pounding Chechnya, the United States and NATO members are following events in the Caucasus more intently, albeit more quietly than in 1994. By now, the fifth anniversary of Russia''s first Chechen war (and the "Deal of the Century" regarding Azerbaijani oil), American and European commercial and political interests have become involved in the Caucasus region to an unprecedented degree. BP Amoco, Exxon, Statoil, Elf Aquitaine, and Chevron have invested billions of dollars, committing the countries and companies of the North Atlantic to the Caucasus and Caspian region for the long haul.
Over the past several years the US has expanded and deepened its activity on several fronts in and around the Caspian. The strongest push has been in energy and commerce where the US has gone all out for the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline and for US commercial interests more broadly. Second, the US has increased sanctions on trading with Iran, while responding ambivalently to positive changes there. Third, US diplomatic activity has increased, particularly in the attempt to find a solution to the Karabakh conflict. Finally, transition assistance to the new states of the region, including military to military contacts has reached a considerable level. The US is offering substantial foreign aid "bonuses" to the warring parties in case there is a resolution in either the conflict in Abkhazia or Karabakh.
This dramatic upsurge in activity has given cause to those who foresee a day in the next 5-10 years when the United States and even NATO could play an ever more significant role in the region''s economy and security. This has produced hopes (from many Caspian states) and fears (on the part of Russia and Iran) that the United States seeks to replace Russia as the major regional power.
Enough is known about the actual amount of oil in the Caspian and the expense of transporting it out to raise serious questions about whether a deep engagement with the region is merited on grounds of energy security. Whether a strong US presence must be established in the region - even at the expense of cooperation with Russia - is debatable. Are commercial interests leading the US to overlook strategic political considerations, such as the prospect of good relations with Russia? Or is the objective of securing a US foothold in the region so important that it does not matter how little and costly the oil there actually is, or what the implications are for the Russia relationship?
Looking ahead, the United States needs to think carefully about what its long term interests are in the region and how best to achieve them. To leave the matter up in the air can lead to a misalignment of expectations, miscalculations, and further instability in the region, which under any scenario would harm US interests there.
The Case of Military Cooperation in the Caspian
Along with the commercial investments, the Caucasus and Caspian Basin have received all kinds of foreign aid, partially in an effort to win over these new states to the US-backed Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. Despite considerable efforts to change the policy, the Government of Azerbaijan is still largely prevented from receiving US assistance by Article 907 of the Freedom Support Act. Of particular concern, the US and NATO have sponsored a broad new array of programs to engage the militaries of the new independent states of the region. In spite of the limited scope and cost of these programs in overall US assistance to the region, I focus on them here because they are beginning to take on a disproportionate significance because of their content. In the periodical press of the region, the comings and goings of NATO are reported conspicuously and considerable attention is accorded every training and joint exercise. Military cooperation, despite all the good it does, highlights the capacity of regional players to interpret or misunderstand, at times willfully, US motives.
On the US bilateral side these programs include International Military Exchanges and Training, counter-proliferation measures, the Warsaw Initiative, Military Technical Cooperative Efforts, and the largest program - Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR), more popularly known as Nunn-Lugar. Around the Caspian, Nunn-Lugar has delivered invaluable programs for US vital security interests like the denuclearization of Kazakhstan, and efforts such as Project Sapphire, which in 1994 spirited hundreds of kilos of bomb-quality uranium out of that country. It is hard to overestimate the achievements of the Defense Department in this regard under the leadership of William Perry and Ashton Carter.
Since the departure of Perry and Carter, the policy of contacts and training programs has marched on robustly. US funds, facilities, and advisors are now being used to train officers from places like Uzbekistan. Under President Eduard Shevardnadze Georgia has continued to enhanced its special relationship with the US, and has become an enthusiastic participant in the Pentagon''s program of military to military contacts. Its defense minister has received training in the US, and US military experts are training the Georgians, from marines to Special Forces. The Coast Guard has donated boats to the Georgians. There are signs that US defense planners have begun to look at the region differently. For example, in 1998 strategic planning maps were redrawn by the Pentagon so that US European Command (EuCom) and US Central Command (CentCom) include the Caucasus and Central Asia, respectively. In May 1999 General Anthony Zinni, who commands CentCom, made a first formal tour of the region, visiting heads of state and the defense establishment to discuss peacekeeping operations and other cooperative programs. True, many of the assistance programs to this region are not what the Pentagon considers hardcore. There is a lot of border patrol training, search and rescue operations, and one must imagine, a fair amount of friendly kebabs and vodka, and opportunities for officers simply to get to know one another better. A constant theme of this defense policy is that military to military contacts is the surest way to prevent conflict between and among states. In terms of multilateral military cooperation, the main vehicle is NATO''s Partnership for Peace (PfP). The US and NATO see the current post-communist period as a golden opportunity to assist in the creation of new, civilian-led military bureaucracies; to help the new militaries of the region define their threat perceptions; and to influence the overall development of the security architecture among the Newly Independent States. A policy of engagement, training, and institution-building is underway. As part of so-called "enhanced" PfP, NATO is supporting the development of regional cooperation among PfP participants. Hence the development of he CentrAsBatt and the prospect of military cooperation within GUUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Moldova) have both enjoyed NATO encouragement and cooperation. There is talk that these structures could provide the military capacity needed to replace Russian peacekeepers patrolling conflict zones in the southern tier. With its training program and talk of "interoperability" PfP is intended to create what one NATO official has called "a ''razor-thin'' difference between membership and Partnership in many areas of cooperation that nations are seeking." It is not hard to understand what heady stuff this is for the leaders of small emerging countries bedeviled by ethnic conflict. Great Expectations
The US and NATO say that their policy objectives are intended to develop market economies, functioning democracies, and, through defense cooperation, stable militaries under civilian control. These are fine goals. The US and NATO have repeatedly made it clear that they do not consider these countries NATO membership material at present. But the unflagging pursuit by the US of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline and the concurrent development of PfP contacts in the Caspian cause leaders and analysts in the region to conclude the aims are larger. No matter what NATO may say, the coming of NATO is debated in political and journalistic circles of the region as something just short of inevitable. One typical newspaper account in Azerbaijan recently speculated on the US and NATO''s next steps:
"…the direction recent processes in the Caucasus region have taken coincides with NATO''s special interest in our country. The West, especially the USA, is displaying remarkable restraint [italics added] about the accusations leveled against Azerbaijan by the Russian capital and about the special attention paid by Russia to the South Caucasus while Russia carries out a war with Chechens and Dagestani militants. The fact that the USA, which is the leading country in NATO, is patiently watching how Russia is attempting to foist its strategic interests in the South Caucasus can more or less be explained by the following. By biding its time, waiting until the situation in the Caucasus is exacerbated to the maximum degree, and expecting the possibility of a Russian intervention in Azerbaijan in order "to introduce proper order," the USA is looking for a suitable moment to penetrate the region by means of NATO. In deploying a military base in Azerbaijan, NATO can explain its policy - aimed at thwarting Russia''s desire to restore its previous influence in the Caucasus - by saying that it wishes "to guarantee the balance of forces in the region." 525 gazeta, 2 October 1999.
Whether intentionally or not, the US policy of cooperation in the security sphere is contributing undeniably to a stark misalignment of expectations between the donors of the military assistance, the recipients, and powerful states in the region. At first, in places like Baku, Azeri officials spoke in private of a "Croatian" solution to their Karabakh problem, referring to US military advice to Zagreb in their successful recapture of the breakaway Serb-occupied region of Krajina in 1995. Lately, the region''s requests for intensified military cooperation have become bolder and more open. In spring 1999 Vafa Guluzade, then foreign affairs advisor to President Heydar Aliev, began to speak of a possible NATO base on the Apsheron peninsula, or making its airfields available to craft from either Turkey or NATO. Prompted by a visit of Armenian President Robert Kocharian, NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana made it clear that NATO had no intention of sending its troops to the southern Caucasus. "Armenian agency says NATO rules out Karabakh role," Snark News Agency, Yerevan, 24 June 1999. Nonetheless, the notion has taken on a life of its own. In the past few months more signals have been sent. Both Georgia and Azerbaijan have sent peacekeepers to Kosovo (under Turkish control) as part of KFOR. When, during the recent NATO 50th Anniversary celebrations in Washington, GUAM admitted Uzbekistan as a fifth member it served to increase the military aura to the grouping. The fact that Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan at about the same time announced that they were leaving the collective security pact signed by the Commonwealth of Independent States in 1992 was interpreted as the death knell of the CIS. Increasingly the former Soviet space seemed to be splitting into a Russian (Eurasian) sphere and a sphere with stronger links to the United States and the Atlantic alliance.The implications for the United States of the NATO intervention in Kosovo have yet to be fully assessed. But in the Caspian and in Russia, Kosovo has been a turning point, that has made manifest all of the latent trends, ambiguities, suspicions, and hopes associated with an activist US posture in the Caspian. Public figures and politicians in the Caucasus have begun thinking and speaking of Kosovo as a precedent for NATO intervention in there. While this seems entirely unlikely in the West, US policy in the region has given these countries reason to hope that their pleas will be heard. If the intervention in Kosovo relied on a humanitarian and human rights rationale, one can hardly blame countries like Georgia and Azerbaijan seeing themselves fit those criteria? Inspired by NATO''s intervention in Kosovo, Georgian politicians traveled to Belgium in the summer of 1999 to promote the idea of NATO involvement in Abkhazia. Russia itself sees the Kosovo model being discussed in the Caucasus and has mobilized against the idea. Declaring that "Russia is a Caucasian State," Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov made a sudden visit to all three states in early September 1999. After quarreling with the Azeris, Ivanov remarked in Georgia "It makes no sense to use the Kosovo model to settle problems in the Caucasus." Interfax News Agency, 4 September 1999. What danger from US engagement?
In the context of US and Western energy, commerce, and diplomatic activism in the Caspian region, an intensification of military-to-military cooperation may engender at least two sets of risks. The first danger is a domestic phenomenon, and might be called the Latin American scenario, though there are plenty of other examples. An unfortunate but undeniable fact of life in and around the Caspian is the emergence of weak democratic institutions. In the majority of countries, flawed democracies and corrupt economies are now the rule. In pursuing its commercial and security policy objectives in the Caspian the US might become hostage to one or another of the more repressive regimes in the region. It might as a result have to accommodate or turn a blind eye to that regime''s corruption or repression, whether the common objective is peacemaking (as in Karabakh) or cooperation against a common enemy (Islamic terrorism, or drug and weapons smuggling). It could also be the result of the country offering its support for a US commercial or strategic interest such as the export pipeline. In exchange, the US might be inclined to look with greater understanding at the democratic and market shortcomings practiced by the regime. The government would feel freer to suppress free expression, human rights, and political opposition. The US would be implicated in the repression and corruption of the regime. Inevitably this will lead in the long term to domestic instability which would hurt US interests, however broadly or narrowly they are defined. A second danger of deep US engagement is that the US and its new proteges in the Caspian can incur the hostility or provoke destabilizing behavior by regional powers, Iran, Russia, and China. This misunderstanding can exacerbate suspicions about the ultimate purpose of US involvement in the Caspian. The very presence - not to mention the activism - of the United States in the Caspian Basin raises the stakes of local conflicts by raising the possibility of the conflicts becoming international ones. As the US and NATO become more active there has been increased attention to the formation of new power blocs: Russia-Iran-Armenia (even China) is seen arrayed against Israel-Turkey-Azerbaijan. There is an associated risk that the new states will begin to conduct their foreign policy in such a way as to aggravate China, Russia, and Iran (which have entirely legitimate interests in the region). In this way, Azerbaijan''s open flirtation with NATO might be leading to Russia''s increased threat perception, pushing it to resolve its Chechnya problem aggressively, and with great urgency. In this way, US activism can be seen creating instability rather than foster peace and cooperation, the ostensible goals of US policy in the region.Conclusion
Will the current expansion of military assistance to the Caspian help create unstable conditions that will draw the US into a political and military engagement in the region? It need not, and such an outcome is highly unlikely. But the prospect of these dangers has grown because of the context in which it is formulated, namely US commercial and diplomatic activism in a region that is not vital to American interests, but very important to other powers that suspect US intentions. Second, our opposite political numbers in the new independent states of the Caucasus and Caspian Basin have entirely different expectations from military contacts than does the West. In the broad pattern of cooperation with the West, countries such as Georgia and Azerbaijan see the hope of being delivered from Russian dominance if not directly, then by triangulation and balancing Russian interests against Western ones.Since NATO is not prepared to admit the Caucasus and Central Asian countries and offer them collective security, the West must try to treat Russia more as a partner than a rival in the Caspian Basin. The Partnership for Peace was conceived with active Russian involvement in mind. Unfortunately Russia has not been as enthusiastic as other states. Absent enthusiastic Russian involvement, the pursuit of "enhanced" PfP in the Caspian appears to be creating a dangerously ambiguous situation. Without a transparent and fully multilateral approach, the Western policy of strengthening the militaries of these states can send the wrong political message. To avoid assisting the militaries of corrupt or undemocratic (and unstable) regimes, perhaps benchmark criteria should be more assiduously enforced as a condition of participation. Given NATO''s politico-military mission of building the rule of law, this would be appropriate.There is no hint today of US or NATO involvement in the current hostilities in the Caucasus. But, without careful thought and planning, five or ten years from now the situation might turn out to be different. Western military assistance to the Caspian states should be put under great scrutiny and debate from the broader policy community to ensure that we are not contributing to the instability we are ostensibly trying to prevent, or worse, allowing the United States to somehow get dragged into it. If US policy towards the Caspian is to be driven by considerations of energy security then one may ask whether there is enough oil and gas in and around the Caspian to warrant a deeper engagement. If US policy is to be driven by the need to establish itself ever more securely in the Caspian then the must be willing to trade off a good working relationship with Russia and postpone a rapprochement with Iran. But one must ask whether the reward is worth this price.