[RUS] The grand chessboard, in clear and easy terms

[Zenaan Harkness]

http://journal-neo.org/2016/04/23/the-illusion-of-balkan-energy-security/
 23.04.2016 Author: F. William Engdahl
The Illusion of Balkan Energy Security
Column: Economics
Region: Russia in the World

Since strong pressure on the Bulgarian government back in 2014
caused her to stop construction of the Russian gas pipeline, South
Stream, that was to have supplied Russian gas to the Balkans and on to
Austria and Italy, Brussels has argued that the stop was necessary
because of “regional energy security” and the risk of dependence on
Russian gas. The decision has, to the contrary of what Brussels
claimed, left Bulgaria and the entire region in south East EU states
in a state of great uncertainty regarding its future sources and price
of natural gas for their economies. The reality is that regional
energy security in the Balkans is an illusion so long as the world is
at war. We today in Europe and the world are in a state of de facto
world war even if to date, war by hybrid or non-traditional means.

How did this come about in a world where a mere six  years earlier
events hardly seemed to suggest such a deterioration in political
relations, especially between the European Union and the Russian
Federation?

To answer this question it is necessary to understand the strategic
military policy of the United States today.

Wolfowitz Doctrine

As Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared repeatedly over a
period of years, Washington and those who control Washington policy
are pursuing some form of what they like to call America’s Manifest
Destiny, ever since the Soviet Union dissolved and with it the Warsaw
Pact military alliance in 1990-1991. It is neither manifest nor
destiny, rather the mad plan of some power-addicted circles.

A triumphalist President George Herbert Walker Bush admitted that
“destiny” or, in fact, an undeclared agenda of those power-addicted
circles, in an address to a Joint Session of Congress on September 11,
1990. Bush was one of the prime engineers of the transformation of the
United States into a globalist war machine of empire. In his September
11 speech Bush proclaimed that America as Sole Superpower would create
what freemasons and others refer to as a “New World Order,” or as the
American dollar bill declares in the Latin, Novus ordo seclorum. That
new order, as is clear today, is one of war, killing, chaos, hate and
vengeance, negativity everywhere in the world where there is
positivity. It’s very much the history of the forty so years since
Bush was Director of the CIA, and put much of those developments into
motion starting with the 1991 US invasion of Iraq.

In February, 1992 the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guidance for
1994–99, a strategic policy for the post-Cold War era–a world with one
Sole Superpower–was drafted by the office of Under Secretary of
Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz. Known today as the Wolfowitz
Doctrine, it was prematurely leaked by a Pentagon official who
believed such a radical departure from US defense posture–particularly
when the prime “enemy,” the Soviet Union, was no more the enemy–should
be subject of a full public debate. The initial draft policy, which is
actual policy today, was hastily edited and softened after appearing
in original form in the New York Times. The original policy however
remained until today.

The original Wolfowitz doctrine stated that, “America’s political and
military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to insure that no
rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the
territory of the former Soviet Union.” It called for action outside
the UN rules if necessary, and for the US military to wage pre-emptive
wars: “We will retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing
selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but
those of our allies… (
http://journal-neo.org/2016/04/23/the-illusion-of-balkan-energy-security/,%20http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/us-strategy-plan-calls-for-insuring-no-rivals-develop.html?pagewanted=all
)” At that time Dick Cheney was President Bush senior’s Secretary of
Defense.

The Wolfowitz Doctrine proclaimed that the American mission will be,
“convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a
greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their
legitimate interests. (
http://journal-neo.org/2016/04/23/the-illusion-of-balkan-energy-security/,%20http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/us-strategy-plan-calls-for-insuring-no-rivals-develop.html?pagewanted=all
)” The late US Senator Ted Kennedy denounced the doctrine in 1992,
declaring it, “a call for 21st century American imperialism that no
other nation can or should accept (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfowitz_Doctrine ).”

That original Wolfowitz Doctrine became official, declared policy
under George W. Bush’s presidency after September 11, 2001 when
Cheney, Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, Andrew Marshall and
other hard-core so-called neo-conservatives controlled US military and
foreign policy. It was made public in the media as the Bush Doctrine
or formally, the National Security Strategy of the United States, in
2002.

The policy justified “pre-emptive” US military strikes such as against
the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, as well as US
promotion of regime change in nations around the world not willing to
tow the Washington line under the name “exporting democracy (
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/aug/30/syria-chemical-attack-war-intervention-oil-gas-energy-pipelines
).”

Two Pillars of American Power

Since 1944 following the Bretton Woods agreements and a year later the
US decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan, US power in the world
has rested on two pillars. The first pillar has been, Wall Street and
the US dollar as world reserve currency. Second, no other nation shall
be allowed to challenge America’s military superiority. Since then US
foreign policy has been a careful alternation of one or the other
depending on the strength of a potential financial rival or a
potential military rival.

By 1989, an economic rival to the United States was emerging called
the European economic Union and its new Single Market blueprint that,
following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, was unveiled
as the Maastricht Treaty on European Union in February 1992. It called
for creation of a European Central Bank and a single currency, now the
euro. Little-remembered, it also called for a European Defense Pillar
independent of NATO. That was not to happen. Washington took active
measures to ignite the war in Yugoslavia that changed the political
map of Europe. NATO was pushed on EU member states in the east
including Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic.
US-controlled NATO was to dominate EU military affairs and does to
this day.

By 2007 the financial pillar of US global hegemony was in deep trouble
as the US real estate-related banking crisis began to spread into the
worst financial crisis in US history by September 2008.

At that juncture an entirely new challenge was presented to Washington
and Wall Street in the form of an increasingly assertive China and the
emergence of Russia from the devastation of the Yeltsin years under
the nationalist presidency of Vladimir Putin. In 2008 an assertive
China made it publicly clear to Washington that she would reconsider
buying of US Treasury debt if the US continued to run deficits at the
trillion dollar pace they were.

Washington’s response was in the form of irregular warfare. She
launched a series of regime change destabilizations across the Middle
East starting with Tunisia in December 2010 with the Tunisian
revolution to unseat President Ben Ali. It was immediately followed by
the Tahrir Square ‘Color Revolution’ in Egypt, spreading rapidly
across the entire Middle East with the savage destruction of Africa’s
most prosperous Muslim country, Libya, and the murder of Gaddafi in
late 2011. Washington’s hidden agenda behind sponsoring those
revolutions was to ultimately impose Muslim Brotherhood puppet regimes
as they briefly managed with Mohammed Morsi in Egypt. The strategic
aim was for the US military to directly control the center of the
world’s known oil reserves directly for the first time. Through such
control, it could control the economies of the EU as well as of
emerging China by controlling their access to energy, and Russia by
controlling world oil and gas prices. It was a strategy Dick Cheney,
then Halliburton CEO alluded to in his 1999 London speech to the
Institute of Petroleum (
ttp://www.resilience.org/stories/2004-06-08/full-text-dick-cheneys-speech-institute-petroleum-autumn-lunch-1999
).

Middle East Energy Geopolitics

The geopolitics of energy—oil and natural gas—played a central role in
the Washington strategy of what was deceptively named Arab Spring. In
2009, the

The largest gas field in the world straddles both Iranian and Qatari
territorial waters of the Persian Gulf

Emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani met with Syrian President
Bashar al Assad in Damascus. There Al Thani proposed to Assad that
Syria join in an agreement to allow a transit gas pipeline from
Qatar’s huge North Dome Field in the Persian Gulf adjacent to Iran’s
huge South Pars gas field. The Qatari pipeline would have gone through
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey to supply European
markets. Most crucially, it would bypass Russia.

An Agence France-Presse report at the time claimed Assad’s rationale
for rejecting Al Thani’s proposal was “to protect the interests of his
Russian ally, which is Europe’s top supplier of natural gas.” In 2010
Assad instead joined talks with Iran and Iraq for an alternative $10
billion pipeline plan that would also potentially allow Iran to supply
gas to Europe from its South Pars field in the Iranian waters of the
Persian Gulf. The three countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding
in July 2012 – just as Syria’s civil war was spreading to Damascus and
Aleppo. Assad had made himself Enemy Number One for the US and France
and Britain, joined by Erdogan’s Turkey and then by Saudi Arabia and
Qatar. Qatar is home today of the Muslim Brotherhood.

‘Most blatant coup d’etat…’

In October 2011 and again in February 2012 in the UN Security Council
Russia vetoed US resolutions that would have sanctioned military
intervention to topple Assad in Syria. Washington’s response was to
hit Moscow in her backyard–Ukraine. Following months of US-backed
EuroMaidan protests in Kiev, Washington forced the elected president
of Ukraine to flee for his life in February 2014.

The Obama Administration, led by State Department hawk, Victoria
Nuland, US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, and legions of CIA operatives
inside the Maidan Square protests, openly installed their hand-picked
puppets, using overt neo-nazis of Pravy Sektor and Svoboda Party to do
so. George Friedman, head of Stratfor, a US strategic consultancy
whose clients include the Pentagon and CIA, as well as Israeli
agencies, told the Russian Kommersant in a December interview, the
US-organized coup d’etat in Ukraine was “the most blatant [US] coup in
history ( http://journal-neo.org/2016/04/23/the-illusion-of-balkan-energy-security/%20http://russia-insider.com/en/2015/01/20/2561
).”

When Washington spat in the face not only of Germany and France and
the EU, but in the face of Russia and of Ukraine itself, by dictating
the persons to run the new Kiev coup regime, headed by their choice of
Prime Minister, reputed high-ranking Scientologist, Arseniy Yatsenyuk,
Germany and France swallowed hard. They groveled behind the lead of
the Washington warhawks in the Obama Administration. The EU
unanimously voted US-dictated sanctions against Russia after the
March, 2014 referendum in Crimea. German industry protested openly at
the sanctions. Merkel’s government bowed before NATO and Washington,
and the German economy suffered gravely along with the rest of the EU.

That US policy of driving a deep wedge between Russia and the EU using
Ukraine, was the actual background to the immense pressure put by
Brussels on the government of Bulgaria to halt construction of the
South Stream gas pipeline that would have brought 63 billion cubic
meters of gas a year to South East European countries independent of
dependence on the unstable Ukrainian transit line. It would have been
a step to regional energy security independent of the warzone called
Ukraine.

The EU Commission, itself under pressure from the Obama
Administration, put undue pressure on the Bulgarian government to
renegotiate its Gazprom Russian bilateral agreements on South Stream
to conform to their Third Energy Package, which is little more than a
geopolitical vehicle to weaken Russian gas flows inside the EU. It
mandates that no single company control the full process of
extraction, transportation and sale of energy in the EU. Brussels
acted with dubious legality as South Stream included diverse
international partners such as Italy’s ENI (20 percent), France’s EDF
(15 percent http://www.globalresearch.ca/cancelling-the-south-stream-project-the-woes-of-energy-insecurity/5419705
) and Germany’s Wintershall, subsidiary of BASF (15 percent). In the
event, on December 1, 2014, as is known, Russian President Putin on a
visit to Turkey announced it had been forced by the EU rules to cancel
South Stream, offering instead delivery of gas through Turkey stopping
at the Greek border where EU states would have to construct other
pipeline options.

At this point there are no other secure gas options for Bulgaria and
the countries of South East Europe short of Russia and Gazprom. The
gas of offshore Azerbaijan is insufficient. The gas of Qatar is in the
midst of a war zone as is the gas of Iran and the newly-discovered
Leviathan gas field claimed by Israel is disputed by Lebanon. For
geopolitical reasons Iranian gas is an unlikely candidate for major EU
dependency. The recent signing by Germany of Nord Stream II to route
additional Russian gas via an underwater route from Russia via the
Baltic sea to north Germany would likely at the present be the only
feasible gas alternative for Bulgaria and the region until the EU
states decide to lift Russian sanctions and back away from
Washington’s posture of fostering a new war with Russia using Europe
as the proxy.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds
a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling
author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine
“New Eastern Outlook”.