New Washington Team and a Fresh Game in Russia, Iran and the Caspian

After much gnawing over the notion, the Bush administration decided last year to issue a White House invitation to Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. That was wise -- this trained dentist is one of a handful of indispensable players in Eurasian energy.

Alas, the invitation was also late -- geopolitical rival Vladimir Putin had marked up a several-year-long head start of mutual state visits between Moscow and Ashgabat. And it was clumsy: the Turkmen leader was asked to come after the November presidential election. In other words, after Bush was officially a lame duck.

Understandably, Berdymukhamedov declined.

Today, the Obama administration is trying to lower the temperature in U.S. relations with Russia, what it calls a "reset." In two weeks, President Obama will meet with President Medvedev in London. As part of the warming-up exercise, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is cobbling together a basic agreement for the presidents' perusal on replacing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expires in December.

At the same time, the administration is forming its foreign policy team for Eurasia, the former Soviet Union, and energy. Russia has largely regained the upper hand in Central Asia and the Caucasus, which Washington had treated as a region of U.S. strategic interest since it backed construction of the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline connecting the Caspian and Mediterranean seas in the 1990s. Washington called it the East-West Energy Corridor.

Will the Obama administration get its timing better in terms of inviting Berdymukhamedov to the White House? If so, he might become friendlier toward the parade of U.S. diplomats and oil company executives who call and email me and others regularly with tales of woe regarding their reception in Ashgabat.

Members of the new team include Mike McFaul, the long-time Russia hand who co-wrote a prescient analysis of the Russian economy in Foreign Affairs a year ago. McFaul is running the Russian and Eurasian Affairs desk at the National Security Council. Also at the NSC is Liz Sherwood-Randall, a key architect of the U.S. embrace of Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov in a stint at the Pentagon during the Clinton administration, who will watch the rest of the former Soviet Union. The talk is that NSC chief James Jones will also establish a new NSC slot for global oil, but I've heard the names of no firm candidates. At the State Department, the administration is losing Steven Mann, the ultra-experienced Coordinator for Eurasian Energy Diplomacy, who was offered various posts, but instead is leaving to go into the private sector. Stepping back into Eurasian energy is Dick Morningstar, who served as Caspian czar during the 1990s before leaving to teach law at Harvard and Stanford.

In addition, there's talk in Washington of deputizing Vice President Joe Biden as a direct, regular interlocutor with Putin, along the lines of the Al Gore-Viktor Chernomyrdin Commission of the 1990s, which scored numerous successes on political and commercial issues.

In terms of energy itself, the Obama administration has signaled a break with previous administrations by naming a team focused on climate change and alternative fuels. But, in the case of Eurasia, policy can't be one-size-fits-all. Fossil fuels are king there, and Putin has recently handily bested U.S. diplomacy in that sphere. The final act of his triumph was the five-day Russian-Georgian war last August, which revived Russia's premier great power status throughout the former Soviet Union.

Recently, the U.S. has struck back with an West-East corridor. Turning the trans-regional corridor into a two-way route, West-East is a railroad route to supply U.S. troops in Afghanistan with non-lethal commercial supplies -- food, toilet paper and the like. Want to sell something that the troops can use? This is the way to get it there.

The context is the apparent U.S. loss of the Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, and the uncertainty of the overland supply route from Pakistan through the Khyber Pass.

After Russia helped to persuade the Kyrgyz to eject Manas, it told Washington that it was willing to pick up some of the slack. (One alternative overland route starts in the Baltics, runs through Russia, and on through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to Afghanistan; traffic on this route could be expanded, Russia points out).

But the last 16 years in the region have been all about the uncanny power of alternative routes on geopolitics. So the U.S. appears to have politely declined and, in addition to the trans-Russia route, begun to run the West-East corridor through Georgia and Azerbaijan, across the Caspian to the Kazakhstan port of Aktau, then on to the Uzbekistan city of Termez and Afghanistan.

The ultimate game-changer in the region would be a U.S. diplomatic breakthrough with Iran. Clinton has tried to set the stage by inviting Iran to a March 31 conference in The Hague on Afghanistan to be attended by her and ministerial-level officials from some 75 countries.

As part of the attempted thaw with Moscow, Clinton is also trying to get Russia to help forge a breakthrough with Iran. There's talk of an Obama trip to Moscow in July.

Though Clinton is focused on other benefits to be gained by normalized relations with Iran -- mainly a better chance for Middle East peace -- such a change would also open up a new source of oil and natural gas. And that would change the geopolitics of Europe by diversifying its natural gas supply. That makes the Iran policy in part a new Russian policy.

Baku oil legend Nikolai Baibakov Dies at 98

As readers of O and G know, many historians think the second half of the 20^th century would have been dramatically different had Hitler’s troops reached Baku. Hitler needed Baku’s oil to fuel his war machine, and when his army failed to penetrate the Caucasus after its 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, it was the beginning of the end for Nazi-era Germany.

Just in case Hitler’s troops were not stopped before they reached Baku, Stalin entrusted one man with making sure that the Nazis could not avail of the city’s legendary oil. This man, who ordered the fields plugged up with cement, was Nikolai Baibakov, who died yesterday in Moscow at the age of 98.

Baibakov – Stalin’s oil commissar and for two decades the director of Soviet economic planning – was born in the Baku oilfield of Sabunchi; his father had worked in the Baku oilfields before him. So he knew intuitively what Stalin was so worked up about. A superlatively colorful actor in the biggest events of recent history, Baibakov recalled with black humor some of his encounters with the murderous Stalin.

In a 1998 interview with The Petroleum Economist, Baibakov said Stalin pointed two fingers at his head and said, “If you fail to stop the Germans getting our oil, you will be shot. And when we have thrown the invader out, if we cannot restart production, we will shoot you again.”

Those were the tenor of the times. Oil engineers from Baku, accused of crimes such as being the relative of the Czarist-era oil barons, were loaded into railcars with their families like cattle and shipped to Siberia to start new oilfields.

A New York Times obituary quotes Baibakov's reply as to whether his fellow oil officials were shot during those days: “Yes, several.”

Then, as now, Russia’s entire economy was dependent on oil and the revenue from oil exports

Guest columnist: Lawrence Sheets on Uranium Smuggling

Apologies to O and G readers for the long absence. I've been trying to finish up the Russia book. That's no excuse, so here we go.

We have as a guest Lawrence Scott Sheets, who will be taking any questions on a piece he's got on uranium smuggling in next month's Atlantic magazine, called "A Smuggler's Story." The story isn't posted yet, but Atlantic has put up an interview with Sheets on its web site. The theme is the back story to a scoop that Sheets broke in The New York Times a few months back about a hair-raising scheme to sell weapons-grade uranium from former Soviet Georgia. This is a story of the highest order.

I've known Sheets for some fifteen years, since both of us were Tbilisi-based correspondents covering the Georgian-Abkhazian civil war, he for Reuters, and I for Newsweek and The Washington Post. At a time and place when there simply was no infrastructure -- everything in the Caucasus seemed to have fallen apart -- Sheets demonstrated a superlative ability to make his bureau work. He went on to become NPR's Moscow correspondent, and is now working on what appears likely to be a classic, book-length account of his couple of decades in the former Soviet Union.

Here is how The Atlantic leads into the interview with Sheets:

Uranium on the Loose

When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in December 1991, the United States could claim victory in the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama could declare the end of history, and some 280 million people could look forward to a liberated future. But in fact the Soviet Union left its 15 successor states to navigate their own way to democracy and a market economy. And with some 22,000 tactical nuclear weapons—along with perhaps 1,200 tons of bomb-grade uranium—scattered under uncertain ownership and questionable supervision, the securing of the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear materials became a matter of pressing concern.

Over the past decade and half, with extensive help from the United States, Russia has tried to lock down this atomic detritus, at great expense. But the task is a massive one, and as of 2008, the two nations face nuclear concerns that scarcely registered during the upheaval of the 1990s. Seven years after 9/11, Russia has become something of a terrorists’ nirvana—with 12,500 miles of borders, a military so corrupt its members have sold weapons to their battlefield enemies, and vast networks of poorly safeguarded nuclear facilities.

Russia is likely the only place in the world where a man like Oleg Khintsagov, an ordinary, destitute, and dimwitted hustler, can pick up weapons-grade uranium and try to hawk it from his pockets. Khintsagov, along with two other smugglers of similar means and aptitude—Garik Dadayan and Tamaz Dimitradze—are the subject of “A Smuggler’s Story,” Lawrence Scott Sheets’ piece in the April issue of The Atlantic. To a man, the couriers Sheets describes are poorly prepared for their missions, yet they have their hands on potentially catastrophic atomic ingredients. The story Sheets tells is of a society in collapse in the face of separatist anxieties, ethnic animosities, and ambiguous borders—and of impoverished people seeking to feed their families in a radioactive land.

Read interview

Guest Column: Wine and National Security

By Sasha Meyer

Wine is important. The drink can be a major source of revenue. For example, in Moldova winemaking accounts for 15% of the economy. It can even become a national security issue. Georgia, where wine is the third-largest export, has suffered a major blow since Vladimir Putin banned its wine imports.

Since then, Tbilisi has been trying to diversify its wine exports. Georgia has shown creativity, for instance by offering Jennifer Lopez half a million dollars to promote its wine (an offer the Hispanic celebrity declined). Overall, Georgia has been incrementally successful, getting its wines into some shops in Europe and North America. But a breakthrough has been elusive thus far.

Peculiarities of the wine market and emerging uses for grapes may offer Tbilisi a new opportunity. A study published in Wine Economics Journal found that getting on the radar of wine critics is a key. (The importance of gurus is corroborated by other sources, for instance in Robert M. Parker Jr.’s influence on patterns of wine consumption and the creation of new segments in the market.)

The study also concludes that continued critical coverage is useful, even if unfavorable at times. In other words, sending a bottle of Kindzmarauli for a review to Eric Azimov, Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher and others could, in the long run, achieve as much as a pop star's expensive endorsement.

There’s also a new, emerging market for grapes. Resveratrol is a new health craze in the West. It’s extracted from grape seeds, skin and juice. Research shows that resveratrol can help delay many age-related diseases. Today, jars of resveratrol are in health stores in Europe, North America and online, where it retails for $20 each.

The market appears set only to grow: An American company is testing a resveratrol-based pill to fight diabetes. In Georgia, the loss of its biggest market combined with a bumper crop is forcing many to cut their vineyards, raising fears that the winemaking tradition could be lost. But resveratrol production could absorb some of the excess grape supply, make profitable use of residual byproducts of winemaking, and bring much-needed hard currency into Tbilisi's coffers.

Photo: ritingon
Rights: Creative Commons

Becoming Quieter on the Caspian

The prize in the Pipeline War is Turkmenistan. Russia and China -- especially the former -- are far ahead of the West in the contest. One reason has been their willingness to look the other way on the issues of human rights, rigged elections and presidents for life.

Chris Chivers of The New York Times weighed in over the weekend on the American response, which is to lower the volume on the moralizing.

There has been a U.S. policy shift on the Caspian, and that's to tell the presidents that they don't have to be like Norway to get along with Washington. As long as they stay on the good-behavior -end of the spectrum of the generally badboy former Soviet states, they're all right.

Some quiet diplomacy is needed in the region. The U.S. is right to give the benefit of the doubt, for instance, to Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov as long as he continues to methodically dismantle the legacy of his predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov.

The aim of the U.S. policy is to help to continue to carve out some long-term breathing room for the region from Russia by championing the trans-Caspian and Nabucco natural gas pipelines to Europe. So far, Turkmenistan has been more favorable toward Russia's competing system, the Nord Stream and South Stream pipelines.

Yet there's a line not to be crossed.

One is pandering. Chivers provides an astonishing public remark by Julie Finley, U.S. ambassador to the OSCE. Speaking to Kazakhs in Europe a couple of years ago about their seizure of unflattering newspapers, Finley said, “Maybe you saved some readers some waste of time, anyway.”

And a second is Uzbekistan. Chivers describes a recent visit to Tashkent by the apparently irrepressible Admiral William Fallon, commander of the U.S. Central Command. Fallon is seeking to help thaw currently frozen relations with Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov, who holds the distinction of being the former Soviet Union's most brutal dictator.

“I told them that we couldn’t do much about the past, but that we could look at the future,” Fallon said of his discussion with the Uzbeks.

With respect, that's incorrect, Admiral Fallon. There is no respectable future relationship with Karimov until, for starters, he proves that he has stopped torturing and killing his people.

Unlike some of the region's other leaders, Karimov took no road to post-Soviet ruthlessness. He began there. My own initial sign of that was back in January 1992, two weeks after the Soviet collapse, when I crossed the street from the Hotel Uzbekistan to talk to the Pulatov brothers at Birlik, the then-Tashkent-based opposition group whose office was across the street. At the bottom of the stairs was a pool of blood. Inside, I learned from the more active of the two Pulatovs -- Abdumanop -- that his brother Abdurahim had been knocked on the head with a pipe by an unknown assailant.

The situation has declined since. Karimov regards entreaties by westerners such as Fallon not as an opportunity to re-open a perhaps positive economic path for his people, but a display of weakness, evidence that he still calls the shots in the dance with the foreigners.

It will probably require Karimov going the way of Niyazov before normal relations with the West can resume.

Photo: saidanddone
Rights: Creative Commons

A Precedent for Real Elections

Georgia's Mikheil Saakashvili appears to have won his big gamble today. An exit poll shows him winning re-election as president and averting a runoff with 53% of the vote, according to Bloomberg's Seb Alison.

Saakashvili stepped down as president when opposition protesters poured into the streets, demanding his resignation. He had been roundly criticized by the West for sending forces into the street to thump heads.

But if the results are confirmed in the actual count, it will validate a strategy that we've seen in no other country in the twelve members of the Commonwealth of Independent States save Ukraine.

That is -- a president who has stepped down and put himself to the voters in a more or less contested election.

I won't hold my breath waiting for others to follow, but Saakashvili has made a gratifying precedent.

Photo: AudreyH
Rights: Creative Commons

Rivalry of Dictators

No world leader, genuinely elected or not, is wholly free of self-proclaimed omniscience, but it's an especially interesting time to observe the autocrats afflicted with this delusion.

They are playing a strong hand, and it's not at all clear that their ostensibly democratic opponents have right on their side.

In Pakistan, it's now two decades since the first time Benazir Bhutto treated us to the spectacle of her massive popularity -- supporters lining the streets in Lahore, Karachi and elsewhere as she decries military dictators.

Only now we have the benefit of her decade of active politics (1989-1999). Bhutto is no democrat. As prime minister and out-of-power opposition leader, she compiled a record of intolerance of dissent, failure to attack the tax-free land-owning feudalism that's Pakistan's core problem, and pocket-lining corruption.

What's really going on in Pakistan is a contest between two dictators. In my view, Pervez Musharraf is more likable if only because he at least doesn't pretend interest in sharing power. He's a man who, though he came to power in a coup, is under fire by people claiming surprise by his declaration of emergency rule on the eve of a possible Supreme Court decision invalidating his right to remain president another five years.

In Georgia, which actually is a comparative democracy, Mikheil Saakashvili has out-smarted street-bound opponents by declaring a snap presidential election in January. These suspicious demonstrations, financed by Boris Berezovsky's former business partner, Badri Patarkatsishvili, now must turn to straight-forward campaigning.

While I was in California on my book tour the last two days, academic experts told me that Saakashvili's reaction to the demonstrations -- sending out police with batons and tear gas -- has ruined Georgia's chances to join NATO and the European Union.

But I think that case is premature. Saakashvili has chipped away at the opprobrium by inviting as many election monitors as anyone wishes to send.

If Saakashvili were more mature and less imperious, he would have avoided this crisis entirely by courting opponents.

But -- like autocratic brethren from Russia to Azerbaijan, from Kazakhstan to Pakistan, and Armenia to Uzbekistan -- Saakashvili isn't an intellectually modest man.

On the plus side, all these countries actually do have a deep bench of politicians, technocrats and businessmen entirely qualified to step into the executive chair. If the autocrats were truly wise, they would court and cultivate them.

Photo: Maulleigh
Rights: Creative Commons

Georgia and Russia: The Bigger Battle to Come

The Economist is in a snit that the OSCE white-washed over Georgia's missile row with Russia. A studiously neutralist RFE/RL interview with the author of the offending OSCE report ends up making the Vienna-based mini-U.N. organization look egregiously non-judgemental.

The pieces are must-reading. Edward Lucas, the author of the Economist piece, is legitimately outraged. But the OSCE -- the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe -- was right to punt. The incessant friction between Russia and Georgia over border incursions is a diversion from the main issue, which is getting Georgia ready for full NATO membership.

The two neighbors are not going to become friends any time soon. The Kremlin's loyal spokesmen say that the Georgians' main foreign policy is irritating their northern neighbor. The Georgians in turn ascribe most of their ills to malign conspiracies from Moscow.

These competing claims informed their most recent series of disputes, in which Georgia accused Russian military jets of illegally penetrating Georgian airspace, and firing a missile that allegedly missed its intended target, a radar installation. In the most recent flare-up, Georgia said it had possibly shot down an invading Russian jet.

The record in general supports Georgia's assertions. Since the 1991 Soviet breakup, Georgia has been the victim of repeated aggressive acts from the north -- the dismemberment of the country through military support of Abkhazia; the severing of natural gas and electricity supplies; and the cutoff of trade and air service between the countries.

Yet Russia and Georgia themselves have seemed to try to cool the flareup. Neither has raised the issue of the apparent crash of the errant jet recently, for instance. That is wise from Georgia's standpoint when it has much work to do to achieve its ultimate foreign policy aim, which is tying itself formally to the West through NATO and EU membership.

The West has a long-standing interest in making Georgia's NATO membership happen; the EU portion will happen far down the road if at all.

Here is where it makes sense not to get too involved in these predictable sibling squabbles. Russia will accuse NATO of encirclement. The West will have to forcefully argue that it has a legitimate interest in Georgia's independence and stability. That will be a battle writ large.

The Caucasus Three Years After Beslan

Three years after the siege of Beslan, in which some 334 people were killed at a schoolhouse, Russia’s Caucasus belt belies President Putin’s claim to bringing peace to the country.

Chechnya itself is comparatively peaceful after two ferocious wars over the last 13 years. But now the republics to either side of Chechnya are the scene of routine bombings, ambushes and murder.

In the latest incident, a car bomb today killed four policemen in Ingushetia, west of Chechnya. Read The AP story

Steve's comment: Perhaps no one could pacify the northern Caucasus. But there is little evidence that Putin, who prides himself on ultra-competence, has attempted anything more than the usual -- the appointment of governors whose prime qualification is loyalty to him.

Today's car bomb is a prism into the highly complex nature of the region's turbulence. The unrest in Ingushetia goes back at least to the 1940s and Stalin's expulsion of the Ingush to Kazakhstan and Siberia. Ever since the Ingush were permitted back, there has been a struggle over territory with the Ossetians next door. It erupted into outright warfare in 1992, a civil conflict that I witnessed. Russia as usual is caught in the middle, but principally sides with the Christian North Ossetians.

The bomb today was aimed at Ingush policemen nominally allied with Russia. It is possible therefore that it was aimed at intimidating Moscow and pro-Russian locals.

In a nice piece a week ago, Chris Chivers did a good job of connecting the dots of the unrest in Dagestan and Ingushetia to Chechnya.

One may argue with the approach, but the last time Russia attempted to find a middle ground with the Caucasus populations was a decade ago. Tomorrow, relatives of the 186 Beslan school children who died alongside their parents, teachers and friends will say again that the government could have done more to save lives.