Russia's war for oil

By Alexandros Petersen
Special to the Examiner | 8/18/08 1:02 AM

A regional bully with a bloated military and aspirations to great-power status just invaded a small neighbor to steal its oil. In the process, it has blocked key energy exports to the Western world, dismissed global calls for restraint and flouted international law. As a pretext for invasion, it has questioned its small neighbor’s sovereignty and cooked up cockamamie claims to excuse naked and preplanned aggression.

Unlike Iraq in 1990, however, Russia in 2008 has veto power on the UN Security Council. And, unlike Kuwait, Georgia does not have natural resources of its own, but serves as a strategic conduit for Caspian crude on its way to Europe and the broader West. Both nuances — not to mention Russia’s bloated nuclear arsenal — mean that a wide-ranging U.S.-led coalition is not going to liberate Georgia and punish Moscow with sanctions and no-fly zones.

That said, Russia’s invasion of Georgia should be seen through the lens of energy geopolitics: the great game of strategic pipelines and counterpipelines being played out between the U.S. and Europe, Russia and China in former Soviet Eurasia.

The most famous of those pipelines, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil route, runs through Georgia to Turkey and the Mediterranean, and was deliberately built by a British-led consortium, with major U.S. urging, to avoid Russia to the north and Iran to the south.

Last week, however, the BTC was sabotaged by Kurdish rebels in Turkey and its oil was rerouted through another pipeline that heads straight to Georgia’s Black Sea coast — effectively controlled by Russia, even after the conflict’s ceasefire.

Just after the sabotage, South Ossetian militia attacked Georgian forces, sparking the major conflict witnessed across the country. After Georgian forces had been pushed out of South Ossetia, Russian amphibious troops landed on Georgia’s coast to expand the conflict and grab key energy infrastructure.

As a “precaution,” the replacement pipeline was promptly shut down by its British operators. All oil exported from the Caspian to the Western world is at the moment been blocked by Russian tanks and warships.

Unspecified “security measures” allowed for Russia, and Moscow’s control of Georgia’s breakaway territories afforded under the ceasefire mean that Russian forces will be able to threaten the flow of Caspian oil at their whim — or block it in a matter of hours.

The BTC was built to increase the energy security of Europe and to bring more oil to world markets — directly benefiting the U.S. The second-longest pipeline ever built, it broke Russia’s monopoly over Caspian energy resources and paved the way for an energy and transport corridor that opened up the vast reserves and economic potential of Central Asia to Western investors.

Naturally, Russia was not pleased. Both Presidents Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev have pursued strategies to undermine the link: strong-arming suppliers in Central Asia and providing competing pipelines for Europe.

Until now, however, this East-West wrangling had been confined to political pressure and business deal one-upmanship. With the invasion of Georgia and the blocking of Western oil supplies, Russia has taken the great game to a whole new level.

No longer will the West be able to rely on the goodwill of regional governments eager to shake off the Russian yoke. No longer will NATO and the European Union be able to exert mere “soft power” to achieve access to Eurasia.

The long-term solution to the Georgian conflict and the West’s energy security woes is a major European peacekeeping presence, backed up by high-level permanent diplomats, in the region.

At the moment, Russia is much more serious about this game than is the West. But the U.S. and its European allies have much more to lose than Moscow. If Russia controls Europe’s energy supplies, Moscow can divide the continent into energy-dependent and energy-hungry states.

Those that choose dependence will be forced to weaken their ties with the U.S. Those that choose independence will be few and far between. Georgia is just Russia’s first step.

Alexandros Petersen is an Adjunct Fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

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