Is There Political Will on the Caspian?

The presidents of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are in New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly. While together in a neutral environment, they could take the first step to resolving the pipeline morass that has bedeviled their half of the Caspian Sea for fifteen years. That would mean getting out of their luxury hotel suites, dispensing with the hallowed meetings with oilmen lining up to kiss the presidential ring, and announcing that they intend to build a joint oil and natural gas pipeline system across the Caspian to Baku.

Why should they take a rest from such accouterments and risk the predictable firestorm with Russia? Because it’s the only way they will finally obtain a measure of true political independence. Once they make that commitment, oil companies and western governments can help realize it.

Since the Soviet breakup, Russia has wielded what a former National Security Council officer named Sheila Heslin called its “iron umbilical cord” to hold the Caspian republics in check. Heslin’s term referred to the former Soviet energy pipeline system, which channels almost all the region’s oil and natural gas exports through Russia. When it is so moved, Russia just switches off the spigot.

In just one recent example of what it means to be reliant on the Russian system, Chevron and Exxon Mobil last week were effectively forced to agree to a large tariff increase for an oil pipeline that runs from Kazakhstan through Russia, even though it’s private and not ostensibly under Russian state control. The tariff increase is part of a Russian squeeze before it agrees to the companies’ plan to double the pipeline’s capacity and export more oil from Kazakhstan’s supergiant Tengiz oilfield.

In Turkmenistan’s case, it has its hopes pinned on a Chinese pledge to link the countries through a $26 billion natural gas pipeline. If it's actually built, the pipeline will be crucial to Central Asia’s economic and thus political independence. But this is the same China that has vowed for a decade to build a much cheaper oil pipeline to Kazakhstan, a pipeline that has yet to be finished. If it takes comparatively long in Turkmenistan, the line should be finished by mid-century.

In the mid-1990s, Azerbaijan and Georgia decided to reject Russia’s energy stranglehold, and spearhead the construction of an oil pipeline to Turkey, avoiding Russia entirely. With then-Azerbaijan leader Heydar Aliyev taking the lead locally, the Clinton administration backed the line on the world stage, and pushed the oil companies to build and finance it. A year ago, the first oil began moving through the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, and natural gas will come, too.

But Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan cut themselves off from the East-West link by refusing to concretely back a trans-Caspian spoke to the Baku hub.

The Kazakh and Turkmen presidents may think that such a pipeline will simply be built, and that then they will use it. But the countries have it reversed – they themselves must take charge of their future.