Rarely, if at all in the post-Cold War world, has there been such a stark case of high politics and doubtful economics. BP Amoco's director of international affairs has been openly blunt about it: "The only way this is going to work is to make the pipeline as affordable as possible for shippers to put their oil down it. We are asking the US government to attract as much oil as possible and to attract as much financing as possible."
Thus BP Amoco, the world's third largest oil company, opens its begging bowl for a taxpayers' handout with the fulsome backing of the US government. All in the cause of giving Russia, now supposedly no longer our enemy, a black eye.
Left to itself and the dictates of the competitive market, the oil company would not build a new pipeline to carry Caspian Sea oil across Turkey, avoiding the old routes through Russia. But if the US government makes it worth its while, well that is another story.
Not for nothing have the oil companies signed up highly paid consultants like former US Secretaries of State Al Haig and James Baker and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The oil companies -- insecure when it comes to political decisions whose stakes are this high -- have bought the best advice money can buy.
Long-held convictions
The truth is they've bought recycled Cold War warriors whose primary loyalty is not to their current paymasters, but to their long-held convictions that the US should first win the Cold War and then make sure that Russia can never again mount a credible challenge to the West.
To integrate Russia with the West would be a mistake, they believe. Rather, Russia should be reduced in power and then isolated. This is the Treaty of Versailles by another name and another method.
Not reparations. Instead, no opportunities. And political encirclement -- an expanded NATO on its western flank and a line of pro-western oil-rich client states including Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkmenistan and Kazahstan -- on its southern Asian flank. And, of course, if possible, a Western-orientated China on its east.
At the moment, oil from the Caspian Sea goes from Azerbaijan across Georgia to Russia or through Chechnya. The Russians, naturally, would want to see these routes -- which are both the cheapest and the most direct -- used to capacity. And, if they become overused, build an additional underwater pipeline for oil and gas to Turkey's Black Sea Coast.
The oil companies themselves have pushed for a new pipeline south via Iran with an outlet on the Persian Gulf. But the US, despite some tentative moves towards rapprochement with Iran, is not yet in the mood to consider ending its long standing embargo. It remains convinced that Iran is still intent on manufacturing nuclear weapons and targeting them on Israel.
The deal, long in the making for the new Caspian pipeline across Georgia and then Turkey, was announced two weeks ago by President Bill Clinton in Istanbul. Immediately it was denounced in Moscow as one more piece of evidence that although Washington talks a lot of peace, its clear long-term purpose is hard real politik, a fundamental change in the whole strategic relationship between Russia and the West.
For now, the Yeltsin administration has its own reasons for keeping the Russian reaction in check. Yeltsin himself started the ball rolling by working to dismember the Soviet Union as part of his own bid to displace from power Mikhail Gorbachev.
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