159 central asia and the caucasus

The Southern Caucasus

and Central Asia

It seems that the efforts of the British-American alliance in the Southern Caucasus and Central Asia

should be regarded as a consequence of its global policies. I have already written that the European com-

ponent is one of the pillars of the alliance’s global strategy. In the same way, the alliance’s policies in

Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus are an extension of its global policies designed to preserve its

global domination. The “preventive self-defense” doctrine formulated by President Bush after 9/11 cre-

ated the wide foreign policy basis the alliance is using to extend and strengthen its presence in regions

which, before the tragic day, either remained outside the scope of U.S. strategies or lingered on the mar-

gin of American attention.

Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus have acquired additional strategic importance for Amer-

ica and the alliance within the framework of the so-called new approaches to the global antiterrorist

struggle formulated after the terrorist attacks against the United States. Today, the two regions are

probably receiving the alliance’s closest attention on post-Soviet territory. Indeed, 9/11 forced the

American political elite to radically revise global strategies and security policies; as a result the South-

ern Caucasus and Central Asia joined the ranks of Asian countries receiving particular British-Amer-

ican attention.

In 2002, the sanctions imposed by notorious Art 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act, and which

blocked U.S. assistance to the Azerbaijani government, were lifted. The volumes of U.S. government

aid to Azerbaijan and Georgia were increased for the 2003 and 2004 fiscal years. The main export pipeline

Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan will be commissioned in 2005 (the leading role in the project belongs to BP and

American companies). These and other measures (setting up an American military base in Kyrgyzstan;

U.S. military advisors now operating in Georgia; the fact that Azerbaijan will probably receive part of

the NATO contingent now deployed in Germany) testify that the British-American alliance has come

to stay.

Washington and London’s shared interests suggest that the oil- and gas-rich area adjacent to

the Persian Gulf and the Middle East is of exclusive strategic importance. Due to the possibility of

diversifying energy sources and strengthening energy security of the United States and its allies, and

owing to the fact that the pressure from radical Islam has been relieved, and that the Southern Cau-

casus is adjacent to Iran (counted as a terrorist-supporting country in the United States), the region

has acquired a greater strategic value in light of the U.S.’s new antiterrorist policies. Moreover, the

Southern Caucasus is of special importance for further strengthening the alliance’s influence in the

Caspian and Central Asia.

I am convinced that the alliance, and the West as a whole, will finally entrench itself in the Southern

Caucasus when the region is gradually removed from the sphere of Iranian and Russian influences, or

when such influence is reduced to its minimum. It is in this context that I regard the alliance’s insistent

promotion of certain large-scale oil and gas projects in Azerbaijan, the Caspian and Central Asia, in which

British and American companies play the first fiddle.

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