President Barack Obama pictured with Russian President Vladmir Putin in Ireland last June. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
05 May 14
ladimir
Putin annexed Crimea. Barack Obama and his European allies organized
the coup in Kiev. Both actions violated international law. Both intruded
massively in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. Yet, most
commentators limit their concern, loudly condemning one crime while
silently ignoring the other. It cuts both ways, though Western academics
are the worst, dismissing any idea that the US and Europe stage-managed
the putsch. That, they insist, is a figment of Putin’s twisted
imagination. Would that it were!
Russian propagandists and their useful idiots conjure
up their own crock. They take a real problem – the role of neo-Nazis and
ultra-nationalists on the other side – and exaggerate it beyond
anything the evidence supports. It’s called crying wolf. It discredits
honest reporting of neo-Nazi and ultra-nationalist activity. And it will
grow more flagrant as Eastern Ukraine moves toward full-scale civil war
with the likely intrusion of Russian “peace-keepers.”
Willful blindness, crying wolf, and double standards
all seem par for the course. It’s much like the intellectual Iron
Curtain of earlier years when Stalinists lived in one reality,
conservatives and cold war liberals in another. Everyone now knows that
the great divide no longer reflects an ideological conflict between
capitalism and communism, but few have faced up to the new reality. The
conflict has gone more primal, the high-minded pretensions less
persuasive. The world’s sole hyper-power still has game. And, contrary
to conventional wisdom, the moving force is not Putin’s tactical genius
(or home-court advantage) but the audacity of Washington’s strategic
game plan, which US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt let slip when he first
arrived in Kiev last September.
“Ukraine is in a fantastic position,” the American diplomat and covert warrior told
the country’s pro-Western newspaper Day in early September. “[It] has a
border with four EU member states. It has the opportunity to become the
eastern frontier of a large European economic space at the same time as
it serves as Europe’s gateway to the Eurasian heartland and Europe’s
gateway to one of the most dynamic economic regions of the world which
stretches all the way to Shanghai and Vladivostok.”
Pyatt was not just moving his lips. He had said much the same
on Ukrainian television the week before. In plain English, he and his
superiors in Washington see Ukraine as key to dominating the
resource-laden land mass of Eurasia – not just the cluster of oil rich
states on the southern border of the former Soviet Union, but the entire
“World Island” from Western Europe to Eastern Asia. At the close of
World War I, the British geographer and geostrategist Sir Halford John
Mackinder had spelled out the logic in more elegant terms. “Who rules
East Europe commands the Heartland,” he wrote. “Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island. Who rules the World Island commands the World.”
Pyatt’s talking points echoed Mackinder’s most active
intellectual heir, former US national security adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski. “Eurasia is home to most of the world’s politically
assertive and dynamic states,” Brzezinski
wrote in 1997 in the influential journal Foreign Affairs. “All
the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The
world’s most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India,
are in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic
challengers to American primacy. After the United States, the next six
largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of
the world's overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones.
Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the world’s populations, 60 percent
of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Collectively,
Eurasia’s potential power overshadows even America’s.”
In Foreign Affairs and his book the same year, “The Grand Chessboard,”
Brzezinski urged nothing less than “a benign American hegemony” over
Eurasia, one that would impede the rise of any rival, whether Russia,
China, or some coalition of Islamic or other nations. This was
Brzezinski’s path to “American global primacy,” and it started with more
NATO and more Europe. “NATO entrenches American political influence and
military power on the Eurasian mainland,” he wrote. “A wider Europe and
an enlarged NATO will serve the short-term and longer-term interests of
U.S. policy.”
As the evidence now shows,
President George H.W. Bush and German chancellor Helmut Kohl hoodwinked
Mikhail Gorbachev and never ended the Cold War containment of Russia.
“The Soviet threat” lost any remaining reality, and in time Brzezinski’s
vision of Eurasia took its place, encouraging the eastward expansion of
NATO and its troubled stable-mate the European Union. The stakes could
not have been higher. Washington – not Moscow or Beijing – would
dominate the World Island and its enormous flow of oil and gas, while
the European allies would either play second fiddle or – to borrow from
US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs
Victoria Nuland – “Fuck the EU.”
This is the big untold story – much bigger than
whatever Putin or Obama do next. Or whether Cold War rhetoric and
nuclear rivalries persist. Or how much austerity the IMF imposes. Or how
corrupt the Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs remain. Or what becomes of
various oil and gas pipelines or of hydraulically fractionated shale
gas, whether from the United States or within whatever borders Ukraine
can maintain. These are all vital stories to tell, as RSN will continue
to do. But they are only stepping stones, stumbling blocks, or sidebars
in the grand strategy that Washington is pursuing – and from which it
will not step back without a fight.
Ignoring all this or taking American hegemony as the way things are supposed to be, modern Kremlinologists
justify recent Western actions in Ukraine as a needed response to
Putin’s own Eurasian customs union and whatever fantasies he may have of
recreating the Soviet Union or old Czarist Empire. What shoddy
scholarship! Whether as geostrategy or economics, Putin’s ambitions pale
in light of Washington’s effort to establish primacy over Eurasia and
beyond.
Eurasian Dreams
With such grand ideas on his lips when he arrived in
Kiev, Ambassador Pyatt set out to help Ukraine’s legally elected, if
massively corrupt, President Viktor Yanukovych “walk through the door
that Europe is holding open.” This was Pyatt’s top priority, he
repeatedly told reporters. At the time, Russia was raising tariffs on
selected Ukrainian goods as a warning of what could happen if the
country moved closer to the EU. But when threats failed to scare
Yanukovych, the geo-savvy Putin offered the nearly bankrupt Ukraine
short-term relief – some $15 billion plus a 30-33% discount on its
natural gas. With the penny-pinching Europeans and their American ally
promising little upfront cash and demanding too many concessions,
Yanukovych leaned toward Putin in what Der Spiegel called “a marriage of convenience, not a marriage of love.”
This was crime enough. As documented here and here,
Washington and its European allies had spent many years and billions of
dollars in Ukraine building up the “civil society” opposition that took
to the streets in the Maidan protests. Nonviolent at first, they tried
to pressure Yanukovych back toward the EU. Failing that, they overthrew
him with the Molotov cocktails of neo-Nazi and ultra-nationalist
street-fighters and the inside help of disgruntled oligarchs who had
previously backed him. The protesters and their Western backers then
replaced Yanukovych with the current right-wing nationalist government,
led by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, America’s man “Yats.” No
surprise, the original ambitions remain in play, as Washington continues
to use Ukraine in an attempt to establish hegemony over Eurasia.
Pyatt laid it out
from the start, though in modest terms. “My second priority,” he
announced last summer, “is to support Ukraine’s aspiration to achieve
greater energy independence.” He spoke of independence from Russia and
its largest company Gazprom, the corrupt oil, gas, construction, media,
and banking conglomerate that the Kremlin half-owns and controls and to
which the equally corrupt Ukraine still owes billions of dollars. Pyatt
suggested instead dependence on predominantly American oil giants, all
privately owned but working in concert with the US Department of State.
With so much at stake, words like “independence” take on an Orwellian
twist, as do “freedom,” “democracy,” and “civil society.”
Pyatt talked specifically
about ExxonMobil and Chevron, praising their plans to invest in
developing Ukraine’s shale gas reserves. “They want to bring the best of
American technology, American know-how and American capital to the
Ukrainian energy sector,” he said. Pyatt reminded reporters that one of
Chevron’s former corporate directors, US secretary of state Condoleezza
Rice, had negotiated America’s “Strategic Partnership” with Ukraine.
This is an ongoing forum with trips to the US that Washington used to
help persuade local officials to overcome widespread fears that the
intended “fracking” of shale gas reserves would endanger water supplies,
increase earthquakes, and create other environmental disasters.
“I think the US experience with non-conventional gas is very important for the decisions that Ukraine will have to make,” Pyatt told Day.
“This has been a game changer in the United States. It has helped us to
achieve greater energy independence. It has helped to drive employment
in the United States. It has helped to improve the competitiveness of
American companies. I am very optimistic that these new energy plays in
Ukraine have the potential to do some of the same, which would be good
for America, but it will also be very good for Ukraine and it will be
particularly good for the communities that host these resources.”
What a salesman! On November 5, in the presence of
Pyatt and oil company executives, President Yanukovych and his
government announced a production sharing agreement with Chevron. The
deal would extend for 50 years and bring a total investment as high as
$10 billion. Chevron would begin with some $350 million
to explore for shale gas over two to three years in Western Ukraine’s
Olesska region, part of a band of shale that stretches from the Baltic
to the Black Sea. According to the International Business Times,
Washington supported the agreement “as part of its national security
strategy to help reduce Russia’s hold on Europe and Kiev.”
Yanukovych had signed a similar agreement with Royal
Dutch Shell in January 2013 to cover exploration at Yuzivska in eastern
Ukraine. He was hoping, he said,
“to have full sufficiency in gas by 2020,” and if the explorations went
well, to export energy without having to worry about Russia.
As far back as August, Pyatt had offered
American aid to improve Ukraine’s energy efficiency and allow the
country to use its extensive network of gas pipelines to Europe to
reverse the flow should the Russians cut off supplies as they did in
2006 and 2009. Vice President Biden talked the same talk on his recent trip to Kiev, and an interagency team of American experts has been trying to make it happen.
Keeping Europe on a Leash
For many EU leaders, the fight for Ukraine caps their
long crusade to build a Europe “full and free.” For leaders of Poland
and Sweden, the fight builds on centuries of shared history and holds
out the hope of creating an economic and political counterforce to
Germany’s overwhelming power within Europe. For Washington, it’s all a
bit different. Pursuing primacy in Eurasia requires “a benign American
hegemony” over America’s European and NATO allies as well, and that
means keeping them from getting too close to Moscow.
During the Cold War, German chancellor Willy Brandt
worked to create closer relations with East Germany, Eastern European
members of the Soviet Bloc, and the Soviet Union itself. He called it
his “ostpolitik,” and it created tensions with the US. More recently,
some in Washington feared that Chancellor Angela Merkel was pursuing an
independent “ostpolitik” of her own, which could have supplied a motive
for listening to her telephone calls.
In a less political way, Germany and other countries
in Europe have now developed a strong economic relationship with the
post-Communist Russians, who have become a major market for exports, a
large supplier of oil and natural gas, owners of domestic pipelines and
other energy facilities, and even sponsors of German football teams.
Gazprom, for example, supplies 30% of Europe’s natural gas, and for some
countries – Finland and Slovakia – the figure reaches 100%. According
to Der Spiegel,
Gazprom’s customers find the company a reliable supplier, which does
not make Washington any happier. Much as Ambassador Pyatt urged Ukraine
to reduce its dependence on Russian oil and gas, Washington has long
been among the loudest voices urging Europeans to do the same. Moscow,
warn the Americans, will use the threat of shutting off Europe’s energy
to hold it hostage to political demands.
The one case the Americans always cite concerns
Ukraine, though the evidence is far from conclusive. Pipelines crossing
Ukraine deliver much of Gazprom’s gas to the rest of Europe, and the
company also has some of its largest storage facilities in the county.
This Ukrainian connection has twice caused major problems for Europe.
In January 2006 and January 2009, the heart of winter,
Gazprom shut down shipments to Ukraine as part of billing and contract
disputes. According to industry experts, Ukrainian leaders then
conspired with local oligarchs to syphon off the gas meant for Europe,
leaving the Europeans with insufficient heat and power. Gazprom has
since begun construction of major new pipelines that will bypass
Ukraine. But last month, Putin warned
that Europe could again suffer similar shortages this coming winter if
the Ukrainians – or their European backers – refuse to make regular
payments for current deliveries and back payments of $2.2 billion
dollars or more that Ukraine owes Gazprom for past purchases.
“The situation with gas transit to the EU is serious,” explained Russian energy minister Alexander Novak. "It's possible that there will be disruptions in gas deliveries."
"We have no other interest other than fulfilling our commitments,” added
Gazprom’s deputy CEO Alexander Medvedev. “We are heavily dependent on
revenues from Europe. It then becomes a question of whether Ukraine will
comply with the transit contract and deliver the gas to the border of
Ukraine or would they steal gas from the export pipe?"
Are the Russians resorting to political extortion? Or
is Gazprom simply doing what any business would do, refusing to deliver
the goods until the deadbeat customer pays?
A bit of both, I think. But the questions will now
create major nightmares for Ukraine, Europe, and their “benevolent
overlords” in Washington. Such are the burdens of pursuing American
hegemony across Eurasia.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and
the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in
London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now
lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big
Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and
Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for
this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a
link back to Reader Supported News.
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