Azerbaijan held a presidential election this month. Predictably, incumbent leader Ilham Aliyev won his fourth consecutive term with a Kim dynasty-esque 86% of the votes.

International monitors for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) stressed “widespread disregard for mandatory procedures, numerous instances of serious irregularities and lack of transparency”; the Azeri electoral commission replied that such observations were “unfounded”.

Much has to do with the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, facilitated by the late Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski during the first Bill Clinton administration to bypass Iran. The BTC de facto unleashed the energy chapter of the New Great Game that I have called Pipelineistan.

Now, Baku is harboring great hopes for its new port at the desert wasteland of Alat (“Your hub in Eurasia!”), simultaneously connected to the West (Turkey and the European Union), the South (Iran and India) and the North (Russia).

Alat is also designed as a top logistics/manufacturing/connectivity hub of the New Silk Roads, aka Belt and Road Initiative. Its top strategic location straddles the BRI’s central connectivity corridor; links to the newly opened Baku-Tblisi-Kars railway, connecting the Caucasus with Central Asia; and also links with the International North-South Transport Corridor that connects Russia to India via Iran.

Transportation corridors are all the rage. For Azerbaijan, oil and gas may only last up to 2050. So the priority from now on is to engineer the transition toward becoming a logistics hub; actually, the premier Caspian Sea hub.

Do (Caspian) opposites attract?

Baku’s drive revisits and propels to the forefront the role of Pipelineistan and connectivity corridors in Eurasia integration. The overall picture may finally point to a “third way,” Europe-bound, for Caspian energy exports, for the moment mostly concentrated on Russia and China.

Turkmenistan is actively promoting itself this year as “the heart of the Great Silk Road.” Yet that’s centered more on reviving Ancient Silk Road sites than on digital connectivity.

Still, Ashgabat did anticipate the BRI when the 1,800-kilometer Central Asia-China gas pipeline, from Turkmenistan to Xinjiang via Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, carrying 55 billion cubic meters (bcm) a year, was inaugurated in 2009.

Ashgabat and Moscow have had a tortuous spat that eventually led to Gazprom completely ceasing imports of Turkmen gas into Russia more than two years ago.

And that’s how Beijing, and not Moscow, ended up being configured as Central Asia’s top energy customer – and trading partner.

Because of its idiosyncratic practices, Turkmenistan in the end never managed to diversify its export markets. It operated the switch from Russia to China but could not land the lucrative European market.

It has been a mantra in Brussels for ages now that the EU needs energy diversification away from Gazprom – even as member nations are incapable of agreeing on the mere lineaments of a common energy policy.

European companies at best are developing major oilfields in Kazakhstan. But on the “blue gold” Pipelineistan front, so far no gas from Central Asia is flowing to Europe.

The traumatic experiences of the past are epitomized by the Nabucco soap opera – a pipeline from Turkmenistan via the Caspian to Turkey and beyond that in the end will never be built.

Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan are actually stiff competitors on opposite shores of the Caspian. Baku was delighted with Nabucco’s failure because that boosted the prospects of its own gas from the sprawling Shah Deniz field hitting Europe. The key Nabucco problem was the mystery surrounding Turkmenistan’s real gas-production capability, considering that most of its gas is now directed toward China.

A complicating factor is that any pipeline that crosses the still legally undefined Caspian (is it a sea or is it a lake?) is also not exactly welcomed by either Russia or Iran.

Gazprom has its own plans to increase its share of the European market via Nord Stream and Turk Stream. Iran would aim finally to crack European markets via a possible pipeline from the massive South Pars field in cooperation with Qatar, a revamped version of the Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline that was one of the key reasons for the war in Syria.

TAP meets TANAP

So in the end the only realistic Pipelineistan gambit in terms of Caspian gas connections to European markets is bound to be the small, €4,5 billion (US$5.55 billion) Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), carrying 10bcm of gas a year from Baku.

TAP, only 878km long (northern Greece 550km; Albania 215km; Adriatic Sea 105km; southern Italy 8km), is supposed to come online by March 2020.

TAP will be a sort of extension of the way more ambitious, $8 billion Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP), which will ship gas from Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz 2 to western Turkey, as configured by the so-called Southern Gas Corridor. TAP and TANAP will connect at the Greek-Turkish border.

It’s enlightening to compare how Azerbaijan is betting on Europe while Turkmenistan bets on China.

And then there’s Kazakhstan – which deploys its own, branded, “multi-vector” foreign policy involving Russia, China, the US and the EU.

At the same time that Astana is a key node of the BRI, a member of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), it welcomes investment from EU majors and US oil giants.

Going forward, the trend is Beijing enjoying a strategic advantage as the top trading partner of every Central Asian “stan” except Kazakhstan, while Moscow maintains its multiple roles as security provider, trading partner, source of foreign investment, employer to millions of Central Asian expats, and Soft Power Central (Russian is the lingua franca in Central Asia, and Russian TV and culture are ubiquitous).

And this will all play within the framework of interpolation between BRI and the EEU.

But what about Iran and Turkey in the Big Picture?

Azerbaijan, as a Caspian nation, maintains deep ethnic and linguistic links with Turkey. Yet Baku prizes secularism in an Ataturk vein – which sets it at odds with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamic-tinged neo-Ottomanism.

The major complicating factor is that Ankara and Moscow are collaborating on Turk Stream – in essence a Pipelineistan move from Siberia to Europe under the Black Sea directly competing with Azerbaijan’s own gas exports.

Iran for its part deploys ample cultural and linguistic influence all across Central Asia. In fact Persia, historically, has been the top organizing entity across Central Asia. Iran is as much a Central Asian power as Southwest Asian (what the west calls the Middle East).

But in a BRI environment shaped by the building of roads, railways, bridges, tunnels, pipelines, and fiber-optic networks, the real game-changing player in Central Asia will continue to be China – allegedly more than Turkey, Iran and Russia.

Chinese companies already own roughly 25% of Kazakhstan’s oil production and practically all of Turkmenistan’s gas exports. And they have their sights on Baku as a major BRI node.

Call it a sort of digital revival of the Tang dynasty, when Chinese imperial influence extended across Central Asia all the way to northeastern Iran. Any bets on the Caspian soon becoming a Chinese lake?

atimes.com

Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hassan Rouhani will hold a summit this Wednesday in Sochi to discuss Syria. Russia, Turkey and Iran are the three power players at the Astana negotiations – where multiple cease-fires, as hard to implement as they are, at least evolve, slowly but surely, towards the ultimate target – a political settlement.

A stable Syria is crucial to all parties involved in Eurasia integration. As Asia Times reported, China has made it clear that a pacified Syria will eventually become a hub of the New Silk Roads, known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – building on the previous business bonanza of legions of small traders commuting between Yiwu and the Levant.

Away from intractable war and peace issues, it’s even more enlightening to observe how Turkey, Iran and Russia are playing their overlapping versions of Eurasia economic integration and/or BRI-related business.

Much has to do with the energy/transportation connectivity between railway networks – and, further on the down the road, high-speed rail – and what I have described, since the early 2000s, as Pipelineistan.

The Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, a deal brokered in person in Baku by the late Dr Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski, was a major energy/geopolitical coup by the Clinton administration, laying out an umbilical steel cord between Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey.

Now comes the Baku-Tblisi-Kars (BTK) railway – inaugurated with great fanfare by Erdogan alongside Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili, but also crucially Kazakh Prime Minister Bakhytzhan Sagintayev and Uzbek Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov. After all, this is about the integration of the Caucasus with Central Asia.

Erdogan actually went further: BTK is “an important chain in the New Silk Road, which aims to connect Asia, Africa, and Europe.” The new transportation corridor is configured as an important Eurasian hub linking not only the Caucasus with Central Asia but also, in the Big Picture, the EU with Western China.

BTK is just the beginning, considering the long-term strategy of Chinese-built high-speed rail from Xinjiang across Central Asia all the way to Iran, Turkey, and of course, the dream destination: the EU. Erdogan can clearly see how Turkey is strategically positioned to profit from it.

Of course, BTK is not a panacea. Other connectivity points between Iran and Turkey will spring up, and other key BRI interconnectors will pick up speed in the next few years, such as the Eurasian Land Bridge across the revamped Trans-Siberian and an icy version of the Maritime Silk Road: the Northern Sea Route across the Arctic.

What’s particularly interesting in the BTK case is the Pipelineistan interconnection with the Trans-Anatolian Gas Pipeline (TANAP), bringing natural gas from the massive Azeri gas field Shah Deniz-2 to Turkey and eventually the EU.

Turkish analyst Cemil Ertem stresses, “just like TANAP, the BTK Railway not only connects three countries, but also is one of the main trade and transport routes in Asia and Europe, and particularly Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan ports. It connects Central Asia to Turkey with the Marmaray project in Istanbul and via the Caspian region. Along with the Southern Gas Corridor, which constitutes TANAP’s backbone, it will also connect ports on the South China Sea to Europe via Turkey.”

It’s no wonder BTK has been met with ecstatic reception across Turkey – or, should we say, what used to be known as Asia Minor. It does spell out, graphically, Ankara’s pivoting to the East (as in increasing trade with China) as well as a new step in the extremely complex strategic interdependence between Ankara and Moscow; the Central Asian “stans”, after all, fall into Russia’s historical sphere of influence.

Add to it the (pending) Russian sale of the S-400 missile defense system to Ankara, and the Russian and Chinese interest in having Turkey as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

From IPI to IP and then II

Now compare the BTK coup with one of Pipelineistan’s trademark cliff-hanging soap operas; the IPI (Iran-Pakistan-India), previously dubbed “the peace pipeline”.

IPI originally was supposed to link southeastern Iran with northern India across Balochistan, via the Pakistani port of Gwadar (now a key hub of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, CPEC). The Bush and Obama administrations did everything to prevent IPI from ever being built, betting instead on the rival TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) – which would actually traverse a war zone east of Herat, Afghanistan.

TAPI might eventually be built – even with the Taliban being denied their cut (that was exactly the contention 20 years ago with the first Clinton administration: transit rights). Lately, Russia stepped up its game, with Gazprom seducing India into becoming a partner in TAPI’s construction.

But then came the recent announcement by Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak: Moscow and Tehran will sign a memorandum of understanding to build a 1,200km gas pipeline from Iran to India; call it II. And Gazprom, in parallel, will invest in unexplored Iranian gas fields along the route.

Apart from the fact of a major win for Gazprom – expanding its reach towards South Asia – the clincher is the project won’t be the original IPI (actually IP), where Iran already built the stretch up to the border and offered help for Islamabad to build its own stretch; a move that would be plagued by US sanctions. The Gazprom project will be an underwater pipeline from the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean.

From New Delhi’s point of view, this is the ultimate win-win. TAPI remains a nightmarish proposition, and India needs all the gas it can get, fast. Assuming the new Trump administration “Indo-Pacific” rhetoric holds, New Delhi is confident it won’t be slapped with sanctions because it’s doing business with both Iran and Russia.

And then there was another key development coming out of Putin’s recent visit to Tehran: the idea – straight out of BRI – of building a rail link between St. Petersburg (on the Baltic) and Chabahar port close to the Persian Gulf. Chabahar happens to be the key hub of India’s answer to BRI: a maritime trade link to Afghanistan and Central Asia bypassing Pakistan, and connected to the North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), of which Iran, India and Russia are key members alongside Caucasus and Central Asian nations.

You don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows across Eurasia; integration, all the way.

atimes.com

A meeting of GUAM (the Organization for Democracy and Economic Development) held in Brussels got together the foreign chiefs of Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova. The chairmanship of the organization was transferred from Ukraine to Azerbaijan. Collective security and gas pipelines, as well as other transport routes going around Russia, topped the agenda. 

The project to expand the South Caucasian gas pipeline (Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum) constitutes the backbone of growing cooperation between Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkmenistan. The plans include the construction of the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) going through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey and the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) – a pipeline project to transport natural gas from the Caspian Sea (Azerbaijan) starting from Greece via Albania and the Adriatic Sea to Italy, and further to Western Europe. The plans are supported by the European Union. Turkmenistan wants to join the Southern Gas Corridor, an initiative of the European Commission for the gas supply from Caspian and Middle Eastern regions to Europe. The talks are on the way between Brussels and Ashgabat. The Southern Gas Corridor is planned to become operational in 2018-2019. 

Turkey is behind these vigorous diplomatic activities. Turkey’s trade turnover with Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkmenistan had grown over 50 percent. Turkish investments into these countries have increased by one third. Turkey is the main importer of oil and gas from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. The Southern Gas Corridor is destined to diminish the dependence of Turkey and Europe on Russian gas. 

The Kars-Akhalkalaki-Tbilisi-Baku railway is a regional rail link project to directly connect Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan. The project is aiming to create a rail transportation route for energy resources mainly supplied by Azerbaijan. The construction of a highway along the same route is also in the cards together with the plans to build ferry routes going through Georgia to Moldova and Ukraine and through Turkey to the Balkans. The Trans-Caspian International Transport Route aimed to invigorate foreign trade and cargo transportation between China and Europe, via Central Asia and the South Caucasus region became operational last year. In early August the first container block train from China arrived at the Port of Baku in Azerbaijan.

Before the talks in Ashgabat, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmed Davutoglu visited Baku to discuss the possibility of expediting the construction of the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline, part of the Southern Gas Pipeline to connect Azerbaijan and Georgia with the eastern part of Turkey. It could become operational in 2017. Mehmet Fatih Öztarsu, an expert on South Caucasus and vice-president of the Turkish Strategic Outlook Institution which is one of the most effective English based research portals on international relations in Turkey, believes the project will make Azerbaijan the key country in the implementation of the plans to expand transport links between the southern part of the former Soviet Union, Turkey and Europe. 

In Ashgabat Georgian President Giorgi Margevlashvili told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that the cooperation between Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey and the European Union should be expanded. In his turn, Erdogan expressed support for Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. He condemned the treaties between Russia and Abkhazia, Russia and South Ossetia. The Turkish President also confirmed Turkey’s support for Georgia’s integration with NATO.    

During the talks in Ashgabat, Erdogan said that Turkey has always been paying special attention on the relationship with Turkmenistan since it became an independent state. According to him, Turkmenistan is the original homeland of Turkish people. Since its independence, we have especially valued our relations with Turkmenistan, the land of our ancestors. Our deep-rooted history and shared values constitute the solid base of our relations with Turkmenistan. I believe our relations, we built on this base, will continue to grow stronger