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by James Corbett
boilingfrogspost.com
November 29, 2011

Pipeline politics have entered the North American consciousness over the last several months, with the proposed Keystone Pipeline connecting the Alberta Oil Sands to the United States becoming a contentious political issue sparking a storm of protest from a concerned population.

Much less firmly implanted in the North American consciousness, however, are a series of pipeline projects both proposed and under construction that are set to change the face of Central Asia, and to rewire the political relations of Eurasia as a whole. The political implications of these projects are enormous, if underappreciated, and the potential economic rewards for the players involved are likewise enormous, a fact certainly not lost on the players involved in the North Stream Pipeline, a pipe connecting Germany directly to Russian gas reserves, which was inaugurated earlier this month.

As in the German-Russian example, pipelines and the lucrative economic benefits they offer have a unique ability to smooth over otherwise bumpy political relations. This is evident in the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline that would see long-time political enemies Pakistan and India connected to the same pipe supplied by the largest natural gas field in the world, the South Pars field in the Persian Gulf.

In the same way, many countries are wary of pipelines that might increase their energy dependence on a single source. Europeans uncomfortable with growing energy dependence in Russia, for example, are eager to proceed with the Nabucco pipeline, a project that would see Iraqi, Azerbaijani, and Turkmenistani gas supplied to Europe via Turkey. Seen not just as an economic investment, but a strategic security asset, the pipeline would reduce Europe’s reliance on gas from Moscow, and help supply Europe’s growing need for gas, which is expected to rise over 50% in the next 20 years. The project is backed by the EU and the US.

The Nabucco project has been on the drawing board since 2002, however, and the project consortium director just announced yesterday that they will not even have a final investment decision until early 2013. Expected to cost several billion Euro, it still has yet to secure participation of Azerbaijan and other key players who can help supply the pipe’s proposed capacity of 31 billion cubic metres per year.

The project has major competition from Moscow, however, in the form of South Stream, the Southern Gas Corridor mirror of the recently opened North Stream project. And like the North Stream, South Stream is a project of Gazprom, the Russian government-controlled pipeline corporation.

As noted journalist, author, and pipeline pundit Pepe Escobar noted in a conversation earlier this month, the Russians have the political and economic upper hand over the Europeans in this high-stakes game of resource management:

As the US and Europe are all too aware, the growing leverage that these pipelines give to Russia and their partners in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, including gas rich Turkmenistan, make for an Eastern block that could potentially pose an economic and even a military threat to NATO hegemony over the pivotal Eurasian region.

As posited by a growing number of pundits, including William Engdahl, the author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, this threat has created a situation of “pipeline warfare” whereby Western interests are served by covertly destabilizing the S.C.O. partners in the region in order to justify an increased NATO presence. Earlier this week, I had the chance to talk to Engdahl about this covert military tension and the ultimate endgame of the western interests in Eurasia.

As the scramble to secure pipeline concessions heats up in the highly strategic Caspian basin region, and as the Eurasia becomes a more central player in the politics of America and the NATO countries as a whole, we are likely to see an increasing focus of attention of western mainstream media and political discourse. If analysts like Engdahl and Escobar are correct, we are likely to see the destabilization of these key states in the coming years in a campaign of terror that will be blamed on Islamic fundamentalists or other shadowy terror groups, but the destabilization will self-evidently benefit the very NATO countries with an interest in gaining control in the region.

Political observers who are interested in staying ahead of the curve of this seemingly inevitable development are advised to follow the old investigative dictum to “follow the money” and to map the increasing destabilization of the Central Asian states against the list of key players in these ongoing pipeline projects.