A Shattered Idol in the Black Garden
Lee on Sep 09 2008 at 1:00 pm | Filed under: Foreign affairs, Lee's Page
(photo: Rahim Alizadeh)
In Verdi’s opera Nabucco –the namesake of the western gas pipeline to Europe that holds the promise of partial independence from Russian energy reliance– the Jewish patriots take the daughter of the Babylonian king hostage, in order to compel his charity for Jerusalem. Today, after the Georgian invasion, Azerbaijan is a victim of a not dissimilar hostage-taking by example, and it’s just as perilous.
So much a captive to the gambit is Azerbaijan, that it had to be seen embarrassingly consulting with the Russian president, while the American vice president was left to rant to reporters in their captial. Cheney wanted a Nabucco pipeline endorsement from Azerbaijan, although he didn’t get the rejection portrayed in the press, he didn’t get approval either. He got the thing Dick hates most: strategic ambiguity.
Sympathy for the Azeri position here is mandatory. Their heart is with the United States, but their survival instinct forces them to withdraw into balance. An overt endorsement of a pipeline under American pressure would have potentially been against every instinct for a country that has been playing the game of pacifying powerful neighbors for far longer than the Americans have even been aware of the region. Any pipeline threaded through Turkey to Central Europe –which Iran has been refused access to, and is designed specifically in order to bypass Russia– has long promised the Azeris hostility from her two invidious and lethally powerful neighbors.
Azerbaijan knows that Russia and Iran are volunteer parasites on her fuel transport, her real customer is Western Europe, strongly allied with Georgia and Turkey in principle as well as interest. But while the Azeris also don’t need to be reminded of the potential rewards of dumping the Russian and Iranian middlemen, omnipresent in their caution is the black garden, Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s South Ossetia. It had to be an unnerving experience when the pro-Moscow separatist leadership there affirmed fealty to the Kremlin, by recognizing the ethnically purified South Ossetian and Abkhazian microstates. There are perhaps elements within the Nagorno-Karabakh which might dream of a second wave of Russian imperial “liberation.” This time in the enclave valleys and tumbling hills of Western Azerbaijan.
The United States and her Western European protectorate has only lately realized in Georgia, the full horror of being chained to energy supplies from a militaristic, cryptofascist petrocracy in Moscow. But Georgia is a conduit state, Azerbaijan’s Caspian basin is the prize. It seems at once both a too early and awfully late date to be putting Baku in this situation. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Azeris act as though they are held hostage by Moscow. After battling ethnic nationalism for years, Russia has learned in Georgia a dangerous but inevitable lesson that it can be manipulated to extort international compliance (as perhaps Iran learned by similar course in Iraq, after another long experience of fighting it).
For impact, this may remind us of the argument which contends the Clinton administration didn’t do enough in the immediate post-Soviet era to integrate Russia into the Western world through trade and institutional inclusiveness. Thereby, so the story goes, the United States forfeited an incomparable opportunity to permanently “normalize” Russia in Kissingerian fashion, through a mutual connectivity of interests. Something it is merely assumed would secure a lasting peace for Eurasia and Europe.
It’s worth asking in counterpoint though, as European energy dependence on Russia has only increased beyond all comprehension over the post-Cold War years (now 25% of all European natural gas imports), whether it is not more likely that too much integration is the real culprit. When a state is willing to risk trade its most important export for a vain war of unnecessary territorial acquisition, the essential global bluff of mutual security through commercial connectivity is exposed. In that context, the real fault of the Clinton administration was perhaps investing so heavily in the belief that Yeltsin’s thaw removed any urgency for integrating the liberal border republics with the West, rather than Russia herself.
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