Putin's Show: An Opening on the Caspian

Yesterday's Caspian Sea summit in Tehran was decidedly the Vladimir Putin show, but the ostensible common front oddly enough seems to have revealed an opening for a spoiler. The West ought to climb through.

The main news of course was the states' rejection of being used as a staging ground to attack Iran. That's a very real issue, as the word has been on the street for almost a year that U.S. offensive plans against Iran included possible land attacks from both Azerbaijan and Afghanistan. If true, it would be downright unneighborly not to go along with Putin's proposed declaration against such an attack; Azerbaijan's Ilham Aliyev specifically couldn't disrupt the bonhomie and say, "Sorry, fellas, but we have to punch Mahmoud's lights out."

Yet, given Russia's similar peacenik act in Serbia in 1999, Putin's reach for the moral high ground this time wasn't all that surprising.

The more interesting topic I think regarded the issue of controlling activities on the Caspian. In the guise of environmentalism, Russia has long urged that all five Caspian states be vested with a veto against any work on the sea by any of its neighbors.

The actual reason for Moscow's supposed concern for sturgeon and seals is control of the region's oil and natural gas -- as long as no pipeline is built across the sea, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are effectively bottled up, and subject to a Russian stranglehold on energy exports.

Tehran was no different. Putin told the other presidents, "Projects that may inflict serious environmental damage to the region cannot be implemented without prior discussion by all five Caspian nations." Read AP account.

Yet, according to the AP account, his fellow former Soviet leaders were noticeably non-commital on the topic. Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev, for example, said only that "pipeline routes need to be coordinated with nations whose territory they cross." That logic would not preclude building a cross-sea line, say, from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan, as long as both agreed.

Russia, of course, expresses no such ecological concern when it regards Nord-Stream, its natural gas pipeline project across the Baltic Sea.

This is a hunch, but it could be that Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are a bit fed up with, and not a little suspicious over, Putin's turns of glad-handing and subtle pressure to consign their energy future -- and independence -- to Russia.

As it stands, the eastern Caspian states are effectively in Russia's pocket because of the absence of trans-Caspian pipelines west to export their oil and especially natural gas free of Moscow's interference.

It's long been in their interest to commit to construction of that route. And it's in the West's interest -- particularly Europe's -- to make it happen once that commitment is made.