Conflict threatens U.S. effort to secure access to Central Asian energy

NEW YORK: When the main pipeline that carries oil through Georgia was completed in 2005, it was hailed as a major success in the U.S. policy to diversify its energy supply. Not only did the pipeline transport oil produced in Central Asia, helping move the West off its dependence on the Middle East, but it also accomplished another American goal: It bypassed Russia.

U.S. policy makers hoped that diverting oil around Russia would keep it from reasserting control over Central Asia and its enormous oil and natural gas reserves, and would provide a safer alternative to Moscow’s control over export routes that it had inherited from Soviet days. The tug-of-war with Moscow was the latest version of the Great Game, the 19th-century contest between Imperial Britain and Czarist Russia for dominance in the region.


A bumper sticker that U.S. diplomats distributed around Central Asia in the 1990s summed up Washington’s strategic thinking: “Happiness is multiple pipelines.”

Now energy experts say that the hostilities between Russia and Georgia could threaten U.S. plans to gain access to more of Central Asia’s energy resources in a year when booming demand in Asia and tight supplies helped push the price of oil to records.

“It is hard to see through the fog of this war another pipeline through Georgia,” said Cliff Kupchan, a political risk analyst at Eurasia Group, who was an official at the U.S. State Department during the administration of President Bill Clinton. “Multinationals and Central Asian and Caspian governments may think twice about building new lines through this corridor. It may even call into question the reliability of moving existing volumes through that corridor.”

At the very least, they warn, Russia may figure even more prominently in shaping the region’s energy future.

IHT