Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Republican Richard G. Lugar
Photo: Dmitry Dukhanin
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U.S. Senator Lumps Russia In with Iran and Venezuela
// Energy security
On Tuesday, head of the U.S. Senate Committee on International Affairs Richard Lugar accused Moscow of abusing its energy capacity and using its energy resources for political ends. He placed Russia in the same category as such countries as Iran and Venezuela, which use energy blackmail as an instrument of foreign policy. Lugar's attack, a response to the Russian concept of energy security advanced at the G8 summit, came at a conference on energy in Indiana, which he organized. Lugar had previously been considered a moderate critic of Russia. His speech may indicate that the United States does not consider Russia a guarantor of energy security, but rather a threat to it.
The Lugar Threat
The new charges against Russia were heard on Tuesday in West Lafayette, Indiana, at the so-called energy summit held under the patronage of Perdue University and Sen. Lugar. Major figures on the energy market and eminent experts on energy were present. The main topic of discussion was energy resources and their use in foreign policy. Lugar set the tone for the conference in his speech about challenges and threats. He is a 74-year-old veteran politician who was first elected to the Senate in 1976.
In his list of threats to U.S. national energy security, Lugar listed “hostile regimes, from Venezuela to Iran and Russia” neat the top, saying that they consciously use energy levers to pressure their neighbors. By placing Moscow in the same category as Tehran and Caracas, Lugar practically placed the Russian authorities on the same level as the regimes in those two countries. “We are used to thinking in terms of conventional warfare,” Lugar said, “but now energy is becoming the preferred weapon in the hands of those who have it.” Lugar called on U.S. authorities to develop a new national policy for energy resources to escape to avoid the “geopolitical threat from oil-rich regimes.”
Another entry on Lugar's list of six basic threats was authoritarian regimes that control the production and delivery of oil within their own countries. The money those receive from the sales of energy resources feeds corruption, Lugar said. As a consequence, a retreat from democracy happens in the best case and, in the worst case, the petrodollars are spend on the support of international terrorism. The senator was particularly upset by the fact that the U.S., by continuing to import oil from those countries, is contributing to the problem. “Our economic health depends on forces that are located far beyond the limits of our control, including in hostile countries,” he summarized. Although the senator did not list those hostile countries again, the same states that were listed earlier fell within his description.
What Lugar left unsaid was filled in by another participant in the conference, Rice University researcher Emmy Meyers- Jaff. “Bolivia, Venezuela and the Middle East are unstable regions,” she said. “And then there is Russia, where oil fields are being taken away from companies that have legally acquired the rights to produce oil. That happens when someone close to President Putin wants to make money himself. So remember, when you buy a gas-guzzling Hummer, you are voluntarily putting yourself in their hands,” she said.
The massive criticism of Russia is one response to concept of energy security proposed by Russia at the G8 summit. The American energy elite has made it clear that it does not consider Russia a guarantor of energy security, but a threat to it.
The four other threats to American energy security did not elicit as great a level of response at the conference. They concerned global warming, natural disaster and price growth due to consumption by economic giants like India and China. Lugar considers the last point a threat because high energy prices strike at developing countries' development, which often remain afloat only thanks to American aid.
Protection from Lugar
A symmetrical response to Lugar's attack has already come from Moscow. Chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Foreign Affairs Mikhail Margelov jumped into the fray. He called Lugar's statements “unmotivated Russophobia.” “Richard Lugar is using energy as a pretext to foist American petropolitical complexes onto Russia,” Margelov said. He added that Russia admits that oil and gas are a weapon today, but Russia is not poised for an attack. “U.S. politics has been fed oil literally since the first well was drilled, and in recent years the oil background of the American administration has increased that,” he said. Margelov chided the U.S. for urging the countries of Central Asia to build oil and gas pipelines that bypassed Russia. He was most likely thinking about the recently launched Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan line, which the U.S. had lobbied for since the early 1990s.
Margelov's indignation is not without grounds. There was a message on Lugar's personal website saying that the senator would tackle the subject of energy security in August. In the third week of August, Lugar headed a delegation of U.S. congressmen that followed the route of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, visiting Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, as well as Kazakhstan, whose oil should soon begin to flow through the pipeline. The site also promised that Lugar's speech in West Lafayette would sum up the results of that tour. It is noteworthy also that, when he was visiting Tbilisi, Lugar became the first American politician to express support for Georgia's demand that Russia peacekeepers be withdrawn from Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Shortly after Lugar's visit, the powerful U.S. senator John McCain visited Georgia, with a trip to South Ossetia, and he echoed Lugar's support for the withdrawal of Russian peacekeepers. He expressed doubt bout the Russian soldiers' neutrality and said that it was time to think about “new international forces” that could serve as peacekeepers in the Georgian conflict zones.
Washington has thus made it clear that the Southern Caucasus is within its sphere of vital interests. The U.S. seriously intends to guarantee the complete security of the oil pipelines it manages. In the Caspian region, a special force, called the Caspian guard, is already being formed. Furthermore, they plan to set up integrated over the air and sea borders of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.
Lugar said openly at the conference that the U.S. is maintaining a large military presence abroad to protect vital oil deliveries, among other things. “According to one conservative estimate, U.S. military expenditures in the Middle East connected with oil reach $50 billion a year, but we have no guarantee that even our armed forces can prevent an energy catastrophe,” he said.
Washington's nervous attitude about the oil pipeline indicates that the U.S. is not likely to accept calmly the frozen conflicts in the region that are the biggest threat to the pipeline. Now that oil is flowing in the pipeline, the West will not take any chances and will search for ways to settle the conflicts in Nagorny Karabakh, as well as Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Uniting around Lugar
Lugar's speech shows not only that the U.S. has firm intentions of fighting for its energy security and interests, it also shows the American establishment's position toward the Kremlin, both in the White House and in the Senate.
Ariel Cohen, senior analysts at the Heritage Foundation, told Kommersant that Lugar's statements the widening front of supporters of a harsher policy toward Russia. Cohen included congressmen John McCain and Tom Lantos in that cohort. In Cohen's opinion, Lugar's joining the ranks is bad news for Moscow because of his closeness to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Another Kommersant source tied Lugar's speech to the introduction of a document on the Senate on sanctions against French and Russian companies that do business with Iran.
A Kommersant source in the White House said that Lugar's speech should not be taken as a new turn in U.S.-Russian relations, but as a continuation of old tendencies. “He didn't say anything that U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney didn't say in Vilnius,” the source noted. “Condoleezza Rice has been talking about the same things for a long time.” That source made it clear that the U.S. would no longer remain silent if Moscow's behavior upsets it, and the uses of energy is just one of those things that upset it.
Vladimir Solovyev; Dmitry Sidorov, Washington
All the Article in Russian as of Aug. 31, 2006
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