Disorder, page 10
On the Russian side, Turkey offered potential solutions. In 1997, the two governments struck an agreement to build the Blue Stream gas pipeline under the Black Sea. Blue Stream, which opened in 2003, allowed Russia to increase exports to Turkey and to divert some gas for European consumers away from transit through Ukraine and Belarus. But this pipeline sowed more seeds for long-term European division around both Turkey and Russia. In part, this was driven by commercial interests. Operationally, Blue Stream was a joint venture between the part-state-owned Italian energy company ENI and the Russian energy behemoth Gazprom. Unsurprisingly, when formal accession negotiations for Turkey finally began, the Italian government was rather more sympathetic to Turkey’s case than the German. But in time, as Russia made moves to counter increased market competition and break its transit dependency on Ukraine, the EU states would divide too on which route their Russian energy imports would take.
For Turkey itself, the post–Cold War energy environment was both an opportunity and a reopening of historical wounds. Turkey was, and remains, heavily dependent on imported oil and gas. But with the new oil and gas discoveries in Azerbaijan, it could act as an energy hub connecting the Caspian Sea and the Middle East to Southern European consumers. This network of gas and oil flows would join up what had once been the Ottoman Empire, the end of which had left Turkey shut out of both the energy-rich Middle East and the Caucasus. Over the next three decades, however, this Eurasian energy geography would also create considerable incentives for Turkey, notwithstanding its position in NATO, to reach an accommodation with Russia.
The Middle East Weakness Persists
In the Middle East, the Cold War’s end and Iran’s defeat in the Iran–Iraq War appeared to strengthen the United States’ hitherto weak geopolitical position at a time when Nixon and Carter’s aspiration to restore oil independence lay shattered by low prices and Reagan’s indifference.22 For a short time, American success in preventing Iraqi troops from reaching the Saudi oil fields and then forcing them out of Kuwait appeared to show that American military power could act as a geopolitical foundation for American and some European countries’ ongoing dependence on energy imports from the Middle East. As James Schlesinger—Nixon and Ford’s defence secretary and Carter’s energy secretary—commented at the time, the United States had ‘made a choice to secure access to oil by military means’.23 Moreover, in mobilizing an international coalition to fight this war with authorization from the United Nations, Washington had been able to count on European (including French), Arab (including Saudi and Egyptian), and Turkish participation.
But the war’s fallout soon showed that the old reasons that limited American military power in, and NATO’s coherence around, the Middle East were not about to disappear. Bush Sr backed away from a longer war to depose Saddam Hussein largely because he feared the likely American casualties would be domestically intolerable. Meanwhile, the war coalition Bush assembled could not disguise NATO’s internal divisions. Twelve out of NATO’s then sixteen members provided forces, but they did not fight under NATO command. Turkey was logistically crucial to the war, providing air bases and closing Iraq’s oil pipeline to enforce sanctions against Baghdad; it also had to deal with the refugee problem the war caused on its south-eastern border with Iraq. But Turkey’s proximity to Iraq also raised the delicate question of whether all NATO’s European members were committed to defending Turkey, and it was far from clear they were.
Having eschewed regime change, the United States was left with what looked like permanent military commitments in the Persian Gulf to restrict Iraq. These entailed maintaining no-fly zones over both northern and southern Iraq, the first to defend the Kurds and the second the Strait of Hormuz, as well as an oil sanctions regime that had to be enforced by the US Navy and a weapons inspection regime that had to be implemented inside Iraq. The new American military commitment in the Persian Gulf expressed the Carter Doctrine. But a direct response to a direct attack in the Gulf, as Iraq had made against Kuwait, was not the same as a permanent military watch over the Gulf. Operation Southern Watch became an American–British–French air operation, with Saudi assistance, using Turkish air bases. Militarily, it lasted until the second Iraq War. But the political coalition underpinning it came apart five years earlier when, as disagreements mounted, the French government withdrew from enforcing the no-fly zones.
In exercising this degree of military power in the Persian Gulf, the United States deepened its long-standing predicaments in the region. Retaining American land forces anywhere in the region required movement on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict if their presence were not to re-establish Arab unity, and retaining them in Saudi Arabia, where the holiest sites in Islam stand, was likely to destabilize further Saudi domestic politics. Through the 1990s, American politicians and officials tried to contain the conflict between Israel and the Arab states and support the Israeli–Palestinian peace process set out in the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. But the ongoing American military presence in the Middle East, allied to the failure of the peace process by 2000, strengthened the religious and political forces seeking confrontation. Whether al-Qaeda was driven primarily by political or religious motives and whether or not it was responsive to American actions remains open to question. But al-Qaeda’s attacks on 11 September 2001 demonstrated that nuclear weapons were no protection against a direct assault on the American homeland from non-state militias originating in Eurasia.
* * *
As by the turn of the century, the Middle East became less susceptible to American military power and Franco-American disagreements in the region mounted again, oil stresses returned with a vengeance. With oil discoveries falling sharply, supply prospects were deteriorating. Of the world’s twenty largest oil fields in 1999, seventeen had been found between 1928 and 1968; the last to be discovered was Azerbaijan’s Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli field in 1986. Oil sanctions on Iran, Iraq, and Libya, meanwhile, restricted production from existing reserves. As these supply constraints tightened, Asian demand, generated most forcefully by China’s spectacular economic growth, accelerated. Although China would continue to use much more coal for energy in relation to oil than Western countries, China’s oil consumption more than doubled between 1997 and 2006.24
By 2005, an oil crisis was beginning to materialize. That year, as Asian demand rapidly increased, crude oil production stagnated. Predictably, between 2005 and mid-2008, oil prices rose rapidly.
From taking office, George Bush Jr’s administration treated oil as a systemic problem. Its Energy Task Force, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, concluded that the country confronted an ‘energy crisis’ arising from the ‘fundamental imbalance’ now at work between supply and demand, which threatened national security. To allow for more production from the Middle East and North Africa, it recommended reviewing the sanctions regimes in place against Iraq, Iran, and Libya.
The fear in Washington of an impending oil crisis was an important context for the second Iraq War. An Iraq not ruled by Saddam Hussein would not need to be subject to oil sanctions. Regime change in Baghdad also appeared to Bush and his advisers to offer military advantages. Without oil sanctions, Operation Southern Watch could finally end as, without the need to protect the Kurds, could military operations in northern Iraq. A post-Ba’athist Iraq would then allow the withdrawal of American troops from Saudi Arabia, a move that Bush made just days before he declared ‘mission accomplished’. In this sense, the second Iraq War constituted a reversal of the energy logic of the first: Iraq was stopped the first time because it appeared to aspire to control oil reserves in the Gulf; Iraq would be attacked the second time because containing it on a long-term basis restricted oil supply, had burdensome military costs, and ignited too much resistance in the region.25
Whatever the decisive motive behind the war, Bush chose to justify the war both as a military necessity—the threat of weapons of mass destruction—and in Wilsonian terms about democracy.26 Behind each rhetorical argument lay a presumption that American air and land power could still reshape the Middle East, and that the domestic constraint on casualties that Vietnam created had been substantially lessened by 9/11.
In the event, the second Iraq War turned into another story of geopolitical failure and domestic political disaster. Again, American democratic politics precluded mobilizing an army and fiscal resources commensurate to the task.27 Far from achieving its energy aim, the war did the opposite.28 The post-war chaos in Iraq ensured that oil production there took the best part of a decade to recover simply to where it had been in 2000. It also created the conditions for ISIS as a cross-border Sunni insurgent movement with ambitions for a caliphate. While Hussein’s Iraq had been a check on Iran, the Iraqi government that came to power after the December 2005 parliamentary elections was dominated by an alliance of Shi’ite parties. This strengthened Iran at a time when high oil and gas prices were augmenting the state’s revenues, it had begun a nuclear programme, and Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanon was growing.
Within NATO, the war was exceptionally destructive. The Turkish Parliament voted down an agreement struck between the first government formed by Erdogan’s party, Justice and Development, and the Bush administration to allow Washington to use Turkey to launch an attack on northern Iraq. Meanwhile, the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, made clear that Germany would not support the war even if it were authorized by the UN Security Council.29 Germany, France, and Belgium vetoed NATO plans to defend Turkey if attacked by Iraq. The then US ambassador to NATO described the disagreements over the war as a ‘near death experience’ for the alliance.30 As if purposely to antagonize the French government, Bush’s defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, happily extolled the ‘new Europe’ in the East, not the ‘old Europe’ of France and Germany, as NATO’s European centre of gravity.31
Russia too emerged with geopolitical advantages. The energy environment in which the war took place had already made Russia a resurgent power. Rising oil and gas revenues had allowed Putin to pay off the money Russia borrowed from the International Monetary Fund in the 1990s, ending the American capacity to influence Moscow via debt. China’s rapidly growing energy demands had amplified the opportunity. As China became a large oil- and gas-importing state, Russia had the chance to become its primary supplier.
The Iraq War amplified this burgeoning Russia–China energy relationship and prompted a strategic reassessment in China. For the Chinese leadership, it seemed self-evident that the American motive in Iraq was foreboding about future oil supply.32 The fact that Washington was willing to commit serious military power to energy security, consequently, appeared a reason to strengthen China’s capacity to defend its own foreign supply. In November 2003, China’s President Hu Jintao set out what he called Beijing’s ‘Malacca dilemma’ whereby the United States—as the naval power in practice responsible for maintaining open navigation in the maritime commons—could block Chinese oil imports through the Strait of Malacca, the narrow body of water that connects the Pacific and Indian oceans down which most of China’s oil imports passed.33 The fear behind the ‘Malacca dilemma’ encouraged the Chinese leadership to look for options that would reduce the volume of oil imports coming through the Strait. Under Xi Jinping, this desire would produce a land route out of the Persian Gulf. But in the short term, the Chinese leadership’s heightened security fears drove it to strike a formal agreement with Moscow to build the Eastern Siberia–Pacific Ocean pipeline. Since China had become a net oil importer in 1993, it had considered a more land-based oil supply. But while it had reached an agreement with Kazakhstan in 1997, previous negotiations with Russia had proved inconclusive. Now, even before the pipeline was built, Chinese oil imports from Russia accelerated.34
Russia Abides in Europe
In the same year that crude oil production stagnated, a significant shift in the geopolitics of natural gas transit in Europe occurred. In 2005, the pipelines through Ukraine still carried around 75 per cent of the EU’s Russian gas.35 This dependency on Kiev had frustrated Moscow since the Soviet Union’s dissolution. During the early 2000s, the Social Democratic–Green coalition government in Berlin sought alternative transit too. In his last weeks in power, Schröder signed an agreement with the Russian government to construct the North European Gas Pipeline under the Baltic Sea to take gas from Vyborg, near Russia’s border with Finland, to Greifswald on the north-east German coast. This pipeline became Nord Stream 1, and began operating in 2012.36
From the start, Nord Stream pulled in the opposite direction to what was supposed to be European energy diversification away from Russia. In much of Eastern Europe, it provoked a furious response, made worse by Schröder becoming the chairman of the Nord Stream company almost immediately on leaving office. The Polish defence minister compared the pipeline to the Nazi–Soviet pact, which handed over Polish-ruled Ukraine to the Soviet Union.37 But on the German side, it was the Ukrainian problem that justified Nord Stream. When in January 2006, after a dispute between Moscow and Kiev, Russia cut off gas going through Ukraine for three days, this fear appeared vindicated, even though it was not German imports that were hard hit.
Nord Stream also divided the EU on a north–south axis. For Southern European governments, Nord Stream was no remedy for the Ukrainian risk. Their interests were better served by the Nabucco project with Turkey on which there was little progress. With Putin judging this transit route for Caspian and Middle Eastern gas a threat to Russian dominance in European gas, Gazprom and the Italian company ENI signed a memorandum of understanding in 2007 to build a South Stream pipeline for redirecting Russian gas into Southern Europe away from Ukraine. This underwater pipeline would have taken gas from a port on the Russian Black Sea coast to Varna in Bulgaria—which joined the EU in January 2007—and then, on one route, through the western Balkans into Hungary and Austria and on the other through Greece and under the Adriatic Sea to Italy. ENI’s central role in a second pipeline project with Gazprom echoed the deal struck back in the 1950s between the Italian company and the Soviet Union.38 But while all the then EEC states and eventually Britain had seen Soviet energy’s post-Suez utility, the post–Cold War EU could never agree about Russian gas or its transportation. Indeed, the competition between South Stream and Nabucco at a time when Germany had made an independent commitment to Nord Stream rendered any common EU energy strategy hopeless.
Deteriorating Russian–Ukrainian relations exposed the post–Cold War NATO–EU fault line in Europe. Seeing Putin as ever more confrontational from 2007, the Bush Jr administration pushed to take Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.39 Whether such a security guarantee would have been redeemable on the American side was doubtful. But the principal EU states were simply unwilling to consider it. In April 2008, the German and French governments vetoed the two countries’ NATO entry. Instead, one month later, as a concession to Poland, they agreed to begin serious talks with Ukraine on an associate EU membership to bring about the country’s economic convergence with the EU.40 This move upended the de facto formula that emerged in the late 1990s whereby the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet states joined NATO first or NATO and the EU at the same time. Committing to Ukraine on economic association, breaking with it on gas transit, and keeping it at bay on NATO would dramatically expose the EU–NATO misalignment over the next decade.41
Ukraine’s position as an energy transit state ensured these stresses had systemic consequences in Europe. For a few days in January 2009, Russia stopped any gas going through Ukraine. The ensuing European gas crisis was later described by the Commission as a ‘stark “wake-up” call’.42 Predictably, it refocused European attention back on energy diversification and Nabucco. In 2009, Turkey signed an intergovernmental agreement, supported by the EU, with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania to build this pipeline. After the signing ceremony, the Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, described Nabucco as a ‘truly European project’.43
Inescapably, Nabucco reopened the issue of Turkish EU membership.44 In the decade after granting Turkey applicant status in 1999, the EU had acted with little alacrity to expedite Turkish entry. Formal accession talks only began in June 2005. Three months later, the German general election brought the Christian Democrats, some of whom were still happy to cast Turkey’s future in civilizational terms, back into office. If Merkel herself demurred from making religious arguments, she had repeatedly stated when in opposition that Turkey should have only a ‘privileged partnership’.45 Now, some within the Turkish government thought that a reinvigorated Nabucco made membership inevitable.46 Yet a Turkish pipeline to provide for more non-Russian gas did not represent a common EU energy strategy. Neither the German nor French governments were invested in it, and the British government under Gordon Brown was not prepared to spend political capital on it.47 Even the Italian government, which did support Turkish membership, was on gas transit strongly committed to Nabucco’s South Stream rival. With no possibility of EU unity about gas, what had appeared to Ankara a path for Turkey to enter the EU quickly closed. It would remain shut until the 2015 refugee crisis.
American Power Waxes and Wanes at the Same Time
Across the Atlantic, the second Iraq War reactivated sharp democratic political constraints on how American military power could be deployed in the Middle East. Before 9/11, there had been a broad domestic consensus about using American power to bring about regime change in Iraq. Congress had passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, committing Washington to support endeavours to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Since the Iraqi regime allowed no opposition, this meant some kind of American intervention, albeit not necessarily military.48 But, as in Vietnam, the Iraq War eventually shattered the domestic support necessary for an American president to engage in significant new military action anywhere in Eurasia. In the 2006 mid-term elections, the Democrats used the war’s unpopularity to win control of both houses of Congress. When, in January 2007, Bush announced a troop increase, labelled the Surge, members of the new Congress made a legislative bid to stop him. Although they failed, the following year Bush agreed a schedule with the Iraqi government to complete an American exit by 31 December 2011.49 The Surge provided a central context for the 2008 presidential election. As a senator, Barack Obama opposed it. He then forcibly exploited his opposition to the war when an Illinois state senator in defeating Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination and John McCain in the general election.50
