The Role of Pipeline Wars on Geopolitics and the Rise of a New Cold War with Pepe Escobar

Journalist and roving correspondent for Asia Times/Hong Kong Pepe Escobar examines the effects of “pipeline wars” on global geopolitics, and also discusses the new Cold War developing between Russia and the United States and other major world powers.

Escobar said when he first got interested in what he terms Pipelineistan –the crucial oil and gas pipelines crisscrossing Eurasia – one such pipeline was being built. This pipeline – the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) – extended from the Azerbaijani port of Baku to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, and was supported by the Clinton administration in the 1990s.

“The guy who negotiated that in Baku, Azerbaijan, was none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski,” he said, adding that the idea was to use the pipeline to bypass both Iran and Russia. “It’s very complicated, because you simply cannot bypass the second and the third largest producers of natural gas in the world - Russia and Iran – at the same time.”

But Escobar said this was the goal of the Clinton administration, as well as the Bush No. 1 & No. 2 administrations. “The Afghan story is fascinating because from the beginning, it involves the construction of that one pipeline that used to be called TAP (Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline), referring to Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan.

“So you would have to build a pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Turkmenistan, crossing western Afghanistan, essentially going to Pakistan.”

He says when the Taliban came to power in 1996, U.S. officials in Washington thought the plan worked out perfectly for them, since they saw it as an opportunity to negotiate a deal covering finances and transit rights to build a pipeline. “But the Taliban had other ideas,” he said. “They wanted, for instance, our figure is $50 million dollars in transit rights, which is nothing, but for the Taliban it was a lot of money.”

Then in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, there was no agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban, and at the same time, al-Qaeda was relocating inside Afghanistan – making a pipeline project impossible.

Escobar said at this time, the Bush administration had Dick Cheney in charge of the government that was attempting to map out “energy wars” and plans to take over energy in different regions in what was later termed the “arc of instability,” across the Middle East, Central Asia, to the borders of Russia and western China.

Then in 2001, he said Washington wanted not only to get rid of Osama bin Laden, but also go into Afghanistan and take it over and build the pipeline it had planned. “So there was already an organized plan to take over Afghanistan. And this plan was discussed in a G-7 meeting in Italy in July – two months before 9/11.”

Addressing the resurgence of a new Cold War, Escobar said there is currently a coordinated effort to thwart Russian progress from many angles. He said he recently spoke with Mikhail Leontyev, an official with the Russian oil giant Rosneft.

“He told me, ‘We know that they’re coming after us,’” referring to top business figures in Russia. “We know that they want to smash the Russian economy, they want rigid change, they want their vessels - international vessels in financial and economic spheres – to take over Russia.”

Watch the full interview to also hear Escobar elaborate on Russia’s vast military capability and for his views on the recent rise of ISIS.