A New Washington Team and a Fresh Game in Russia, Iran and the Caspian

Posted by: Steve LeVine on March 18

After much gnawing over the notion, the Bush administration decided last year to issue a White House invitation to Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. That was wise — this trained dentist is one of a handful of indispensable players in Eurasian energy.

Alas, the invitation was also late — geopolitical rival Vladimir Putin had marked up a several-year-long head start of mutual state visits between Moscow and Ashgabat. And it was clumsy: the Turkmen leader was asked to come after the November presidential election. In other words, after Bush was officially a lame duck.

Understandably, Berdymukhamedov declined.

Today, the Obama administration is trying to lower the temperature in U.S. relations with Russia, what it calls a “reset.” In two weeks, President Obama will meet with President Medvedev in London. As part of the warming-up exercise, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is cobbling together a basic agreement for the presidents’ perusal on replacing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expires in December.

At the same time, the administration is forming its foreign policy team for Eurasia, the former Soviet Union, and energy. Russia has largely regained the upper hand in Central Asia and the Caucasus, which Washington had treated as a region of U.S. strategic interest since it backed construction of the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline connecting the Caspian and Mediterranean seas in the 1990s. Washington called it the East-West Energy Corridor.

Will the Obama administration get its timing better in terms of inviting Berdymukhamedov to the White House? If so, he might become friendlier toward the parade of U.S. diplomats and oil company executives who call and email me and others regularly with tales of woe regarding their reception in Ashgabat.

Members of the new team include Mike McFaul, the long-time Russia hand who co-wrote a prescient analysis of the Russian economy in Foreign Affairs a year ago. McFaul is running the Russian and Eurasian Affairs desk at the National Security Council. Also at the NSC is Liz Sherwood-Randall, a key architect of the U.S. embrace of Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov in a stint at the Pentagon during the Clinton administration, who will watch the rest of the former Soviet Union. The talk is that NSC chief James Jones will also establish a new NSC slot for global oil, but I've heard the names of no firm candidates. At the State Department, the administration is losing Steven Mann, the ultra-experienced Coordinator for Eurasian Energy Diplomacy, who was offered various posts, but instead is leaving to go into the private sector. Stepping back into Eurasian energy is Dick Morningstar, who served as Caspian czar during the 1990s before leaving to teach law at Harvard and Stanford.

In addition, there's talk in Washington of deputizing Vice President Joe Biden as a direct, regular interlocutor with Putin, along the lines of the Al Gore-Viktor Chernomyrdin Commission of the 1990s, which scored numerous successes on political and commercial issues.

In terms of energy itself, the Obama administration has signaled a break with previous administrations by naming a team focused on climate change and alternative fuels. But, in the case of Eurasia, policy can't be one-size-fits-all. Fossil fuels are king there, and Putin has recently handily bested U.S. diplomacy in that sphere. The final act of his triumph was the five-day Russian-Georgian war last August, which revived Russia's premier great power status throughout the former Soviet Union.

Recently, the U.S. has struck back with an West-East corridor. Turning the trans-regional corridor into a two-way route, West-East is a railroad route to supply U.S. troops in Afghanistan with non-lethal commercial supplies -- food, toilet paper and the like. Want to sell something that the troops can use? This is the way to get it there.

The context is the apparent U.S. loss of the Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, and the uncertainty of the overland supply route from Pakistan through the Khyber Pass.

After Russia helped to persuade the Kyrgyz to eject Manas, it told Washington that it was willing to pick up some of the slack. (One alternative overland route starts in the Baltics, runs through Russia, and on through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to Afghanistan; traffic on this route could be expanded, Russia points out).

But the last 16 years in the region have been all about the uncanny power of alternative routes on geopolitics. So the U.S. appears to have politely declined and, in addition to the trans-Russia route, begun to run the West-East corridor through Georgia and Azerbaijan, across the Caspian to the Kazakhstan port of Aktau, then on to the Uzbekistan city of Termez and Afghanistan.

The ultimate game-changer in the region would be a U.S. diplomatic breakthrough with Iran. Clinton has tried to set the stage by inviting Iran to a March 31 conference in The Hague on Afghanistan to be attended by her and ministerial-level officials from some 75 countries.

As part of the attempted thaw with Moscow, Clinton is also trying to get Russia to help forge a breakthrough with Iran. There's talk of an Obama trip to Moscow in July.

Though Clinton is focused on other benefits to be gained by normalized relations with Iran -- mainly a better chance for Middle East peace -- such a change would also open up a new source of oil and natural gas. And that would change the geopolitics of Europe by diversifying its natural gas supply. That makes the Iran policy in part a new Russian policy.