Nabucco Turkey EU and Obama Geopolitics

[jakeXT]

Nabucco Turkey EU and Obama Geopolitics
author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order
by F. William Engdahl
July 20, 2009

One of his first foreign visits as new President took Barack Obama to Ankara for a high-profile meeting with Prime Minister Recep Erdogan and other leading Turkish officials. Obama engaged in classical “horse trading” wheeling and dealing. “I give you support for Turkey’s EU membership; you open the diplomatic door to Armenia,” appears to have been the core of the deal. What other inducements the US President gave in the case of Turkish influence within NATO and such is secondary. Obama’s goal was to break a political deadlock in Turkey to construction of a major gas pipeline to Germany and other EU countries in direct opposition to Russian Gazprom’s South Stream pipeline.

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Why Armenia?

The natural route to bring Iranian gas to Europe via Nabucco goes through Armenia, the small and fiercely independent nation sandwiched between Iran, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey. In early 2007 a small pipeline opened bringing Iranian gas to Armenia. A second pipeline, if built, would potentially allow Iran to bring its gas via Turkey and Nabucco to European markets. This begins to explain why Obama made the issue of Turkish reconciliation of the long-standing tensions between Ankara and Armenia over the Armenian charges of genocide during World War I a priority in his April talks with Prime Minister Erdogan.

It seems Obama’s advisers are playing a far more subtle geopolitical game than did Cheney and Bush. By holding out several juicy financial carrots, to Turkey, to Armenia, even to Teheran if it were to abandon its nuclear ambitions, Washington hopes to throw a giant monkey wrench into the attempt of Moscow to retain a significant control over Eurasian energy supplies to the EU, a major lever to ensure more stable EU-Russian relations amid growing threats to Russia’s security from Washington’s misnamed missile defense shield being built in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Notably, on the latter point, it is worth noting that Obama refused to give an inch during the recent summit talks in Russia. That’s because Washington’s agenda of geopolitical control over the Eurasian Continent is the only lever of maintaining the hegemony of a failing American Century at this point. Full Spectrum Dominance or none seems to be the motto.

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/engdahl/2009/0720.html