 Washington's interest in Ukraine:
democracy or energy geopolitics?
William Engdahl
January 12, 2005
William Engdahl
is author of the book, 'A
Century of War:
Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,' recently
released by Pluto Press Ltd, London.
The results of the third round
of elections in Ukraine in which Viktor Yushchenko has just been
proclaimed the final winner, far from being grounds for jubilation
in Ukraine and beyond, ought to give concern for the future of
Ukraine to many. The story has major implications for the dollar,
oil and gold.
The recent battle over the
election for President to succeed the pro-Moscow Leonid Kuchma
in Ukraine was more complex than the general Western media accounts
suggest. Both Putin and Bush are engaged in highest stakes geopolitical
power plays. Both sides in Ukraine have evidently engaged in
widespread vote fraud. Western media chose to report only one
side, however. Case in point: the human rights group, British
Helsinki Human Rights Group, reported it found more vote irregularities
on the side of the opposition Yushchenko in the contested November
vote, than from the pro-Moscow Viktor Yanukovych. Yet media reported
as if fraud were only from the side of the pro-Moscow candidate.
The Kuchma regime was indeed anti-democratic, and no model for
human rights, one factor which feeds an opposition movement.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic conditions
of most Ukrainians has been beyond deplorable, a fertile ground
for any opposition to promise better times.Yet the deeper issue
is Eurasian geopolitical control, an issue little understood
in the West.
The Ukraine elections were
not about Western-sanctioned democratic voting, as some magic
formula to open the door to free market reform and prosperity
for Ukrainians. It's mainly about who influences the largest
neighbor of Russia, Washington or Moscow. A dangerous power play
by Washington is involved, to put it mildly.
A look at the geo-strategic
background makes things clearer. Ukraine is historically tied
to Russia, geographically and culturally. It is Slavic, and home
of the first Russian state, Kiev Rus. Its 52 million people are
the second largest population in eastern Europe, and it is regarded
as the strategic buffer between Russia and a string of new US
NATO bases from Poland to Bulgaria to Kosovo, all of which have
carefully been built up since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Most important, Ukraine is the transit land for most major Russian
Siberian gas pipelines to Germany and the rest of Europe.
Yushchenko favors EU membership
and NATO membership for Ukraine. Not surprising, he is backed,
and strongly, by Washington. Zbigniew Brzezinski has been directly
involved on behalf of the Bush Administration in grooming Yushchenko
for his new role.
As far back as November 2001
Yushchenko was reportedly wined and dined in Washington by the
Bush Administration, paid for by the US Congress-funded National
Endowment for Democracy (NED). Martin Foulner in the Glasgow
Herald of November 26 reported the details of the meeting.
The NED, it's worth noting, was set up during the Reagan Administration
by the US Congress, to 'privatize' certain CIA operations, and
allow Washington to claim clean hands in various foreign meddling.
Ukraine is part of a wider US pattern of active 'regime change'
in eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Brzezinski is directly involved
in Ukraine events, and has openly condemned the initial November
election results along with Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell.
Brzezinski's entire career has been geared to dismantle Russian
power in Eurasia since the time he was Jimmy Carter's National
Security Council chief. If Brzezinski succeeds in getting his
hand-picked man in power in Kiev, that will be a major step in
the direction of US domination of all Eurasia. That, of course,
is the aim, as Brzezinski makes explicit in his writings.
It is useful to quote Brezezinski
directly from his now infamous 1997 book, The
Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives:
"Ukraine, a new and important
space on the Eurasian chessboard is a geopolitical pivot because
its very existence as an independent country helps to transform
Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire...
"...if Moscow regains
control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources
as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again
regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state,
spanning Europe and Asia."
Brzezinski then adds the following:
"The states deserving America's strongest geopolitical support
are Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine, all three being geopolitcally
pivotal. Indeed, Kiev's role reinforces the argument that Ukraine
is the critical state, insofar as Russia's own future evolution
is concerned."
And why Eurasia? Brzezinski
replies: "A power that dominates Eurasia would control two
of the world's three most advanced and economically productive
regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control
over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination,
rendering the Western Hemishphere and Oceania geopolitically
peripheral to the world's central continent... About 75 percent
of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's
physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and
underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about 60 percent of
the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known
energy resources . . .Eurasia is also the location of most of
the world's politically assertive and dynamic states. After the
United States, the next six largest economies and the next six
biggest spenders on military weaponry are located in Eurasia.
All but one of the world's overt nuclear powers and all but one
of the covert ones are located in Eurasia. The world's two most
populous aspirants to regional hegemony and global influence
are Eurasian. All of the potential political and/or economic
challengers to American primacy are Eurasian."
Belgrade to Kiev to...
There is a distinct pattern
of US covert actions in changing regimes in Eastern Europe, in
the context of this Eurasian strategy of the US, in which Ukraine
fits the pattern. The Belgrade vote in 2000 to topple Milosevic,
was organized and run by US Ambassador, Richard Miles. This has
been well documented by Balkan sources and others. Significantly,
the same Miles was then sent to Georgia, where he engineered
the toppling of Shevardnadze in favor of the US-groomed Mikhail
Saakashvili last year, another pro-NATO man on Moscow's fringe.
James Baker III played a key role as well, as some noted at the
time.
Now Miles was reportedly involved
in Kiev, with the US Ambassador there, John Herbst, former Ambassador
in Uzbekistan. Curious coincidence? The Ukraine 'democratic youth'
organization, Pora ('high time') is a slick, USA-created entity.
It is modeled on the Belgrade youth group, Otpor, which
Miles also set up with help of the NED and Soros' Open Society,
US AID and similar friends. Pora was given a brand image for
selling to the Western media, a slick logo of a black-white clenched
fist. It even got a nifty name, the 'chestnut revolution,' as
in 'chestnuts roasting on an open fire...'
Before he came to power, Saakashvili
was brought by Miles to Belgrade to study the model there. In
the Ukraine, according to British media and other accounts, George
Soros' Open Society, the US government's 'private' National Endowment
for Democracy (NED), and the Carnegie Endowment, along with State
Department USAID, were all involved in fostering Ukraine regime
change. Little wonder Moscow is a bit concerned with Washington
actions in Ukraine.
A key part of the media game
has been the claim that Yushchenko won according to 'exit polls.'
What is not said is that the people doing these 'exit polls'
as voters left voting places, were US-trained and paid by an
entity known as Freedom House, a neo-conservative operation in
Washington. Freedom House trained some 1,000 poll observers,
who loudly declared an 11 point lead for Yushchenko. Those claims
triggered the mass marches claiming fraud. The current head of
the Freedom House is former CIA director and outspoken neo-conservative,
Admiral James Woolsey, who calls the Bush Administration War
on Terror, "World War IV." On the Freedom House board
sits none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski. This would hardly seem
to be an impartial human rights organization.
Why does Washington care so
much about vote integrity next door to Russia? Is Ukraine democracy
more important than Azeri or Uzbek 'democracy'? There something
else going on than what appears to be a vote count. We have to
ask why it is that the Bush Administration suddenly is so keen
on the sanctity of the democrat vote process as to risk an open
break with Moscow at this time.
Eurasian oil geopolitics
US policy, as Brzezinski openly
stated in The Grand Chessboard, is to Balkanize Eurasia,
and ensure that no possible stable economic or political region
between Russia, the EU and China emerges in the future, that
might challenge US global hegemony. This is the core idea of
the September 2002 Bush Doctrine of 'pre-emptive wars.'
In taking control of Ukraine,
Washington would take a giant step to encircle Russia for the
future. Russian moves to use its vast energy reserves to play
for room in rebuilding its political role would be over. Chinese
efforts to link with Russia to secure some independence from
US energy control would also be over. Iran's attempts to secure
support from Russia against the Washington pressure would also
end. Iran's ability to enter into energy agreements with China
would also likely end. Cuba and Venezuela would also likely
fall prey to a pro-Washington regime change soon after.
Washington policy is to directly
control the oil and gas flows from the Caspian including Turkmenistan,
and to counter Russian regional influence from Georgia to Ukraine
to Azerbaijan and Iran. The background issue is Washington's
unspoken recognition of the looming exhaustion of the world's
major sources of cheap high-quality oil, the problem of global
oil depletion, or as the late American geologist, M. King Hubbard
termed it, of peak oil.
Over the coming 5-10 years
the world economy faces a major new series of energy shocks as
older fields from the North Sea to Alaska to Libya and even major
fields in Saudi Arabia such as the giant Ghawar field, peak and
begin to decline. Many large fields already have peaked such
as the North Sea, perhaps one reason for the British interest
in Iraq. And no new fields of a North Sea size have been found
to replace them.
It was clearly no accident
of politics that former Halliburton chief, Dick Cheney, became
Vice President, with quasi-presidential powers, in the current
Washington Administration. Nor that his first job was to oversee
the Energy Task Force.
Back in late 1999, as CEO of
Halliburton, Cheney delivered a speech to the London Institute
of Petroleum. Halliburton, of course, is the world's leading
oilfield services and construction group. Cheney presumably had
a pretty good picture of where there was oil in the world.
In his speech, Cheney presented
the picture of world oil supply and demand to fellow oil industry
people. "By some estimates," he stated, "there
will be an average of two percent annual growth in global oil
demand over the years ahead, along with, conservatively, a three
percent natural decline in production from existing reserves."
Cheney added an alarming note: "That means by 2010 we
will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels
a day." This is equivalent to more than six Saudi Arabia's
of today's size.
He cited China and East Asia
as fast-growth regions, and noted that the oilfields of the Middle
East were, along with the Caspian Sea the major untapped oil
prospects.
Oil pipeline politics are also
directly involved in the fight for control of Ukraine. In July
2004 the Ukraine Parliament voted to open an unused oil pipeline
to transport oil from Russian Urals fields to the port of Odessa.
The Bush Administration vehemently protested this would make
Ukraine more dependent on Moscow.
The 674-kilometer oil pipeline,
completed by the Ukraine government in 2001, between Odessa on
the Black Sea and Brody in Western Ukraine, can carry up to 240,000
barrels a day of oil. In April 2004, the Ukraine government agreed
to extend Brody to the Polish Port of Gdansk, a move hailed in
Washington and Brussels. It would carry Caspian oil to the EU,
independent of Russia. That is, were Ukraine to become dominated
by a pro-EU pro-NATO regime in the November vote.
The stakes were big. George
Bush Sr. made a quiet trip to Kiev in May to meet both candidates
according to the British New Statesman of December 6.
Former US Secretary of State Madelaine Albright flew in to Kiev
as well.
Last July, the Kuchma government
suddenly reversed itself and voted to reverse the oil flows in
Brody-Odessa, in order to allow it to transport Russian crude
to the Black Sea.
Commenting on the significance
of that move, Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council
in Washington remarked at the time, "Kremlin officials understand
full well that Odessa-Brody has the potential to deal a fatal
blow to Russia's current near monopoly on Caspian energy."
Berman then added a telling note, "Worse still, from Russia's
perspective, the resulting European and US economic attention
would all but cement Kiev's Westward trajectory." The pipeline
to Poland, a 3-year project, would make Poland a major new hub
for non-Russian, non-OPEC oil as well, Berman notes.
The decision to reverse the pipeline
last July would greatly weaken that Westward shift of Ukraine.
The next government will have to tackle the issue. Ukraine is
a strategic battleground in this geopolitical tug-of-war between
Washington and Moscow. Ukrainian pipeline routes account for
75% of EU oil imports from Russia and Central Asia, and 34% of
its natural gas import. In the near future, EU energy imports
via Ukraine are set to expand significantly with the opening
of huge oil and gas fields in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan
and Uzbekistan. Ukraine is a key piece on Brzezinski's Eurasian
chessboard, to put it mildly, as well as Putin's.
January 12, 2005
William Engdahl
William
Engdahl is author of the book, 'A
Century of War:
Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,' recently
released by Pluto Press Ltd, London..
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