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THE CORLEONES OF THE CASPIAN. HOW AZERBAIJAN'S DICTATOR WOOS THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPE
12:06, 11 June, 2014
On Oct. 9, 2012, the American subsidiary of the State Oil Company
of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) purchased a five-story,
23,232-square-foot mansion in the heart of Washington, D.C., for
the purposes of "expand[ing] its operations in the United States,"
as theWashington Business Journal put it. Oil is the one thing
Azerbaijan has plenty of, and it's the one thing the United States is
most interested in, so SOCAR's "operations" are bound to be extensive.
Given the money at stake, the mansion's sale price was a pittance:
$12 million. The exact address is 1319 18th St. NW, which ought to be
familiar to many an old Cold War hand as the former office of Jeane
Kirkpatrick, a onetime U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and one
of the most influential officials in Ronald Reagan's administration.
This mansion is where Demokratizatsiya, the journal of post-Soviet
democratization, founded in 1992, used to be published. And, for a
time, its most famous lessee was Freedom House, the respected human
rights monitor, which today counts Azerbaijan among the "not free"
countries.
"I'm speechless," said Jennifer Windsor, the executive director of
Freedom House when it was based at the Kirkpatrick address and now the
associate dean for programs and outreach at Georgetown University's
School of Foreign Service. "I find it the highest form of irony that
one of the world's least free countries is now occupying what was
the house of freedom."
It's as much a sign of the times as it is an irony. Barack Obama's
administration has cut the U.S. budget for democracy promotion and has
struck all manner of cynical bargains with kleptocratic authoritarian
regimes. Realpolitik and isolationism are trading at high premiums
again, as whole swaths of Congress, beholden to a libertarian or Tea
Party ideology, view human rights as, at best, an afterthought of the
national interest or, at worst, as an inconvenience that America can
ill afford in the 21st century.
But SOCAR USA's tony new address also underscores the quiet success
of one of the most energetic and free-spending foreign lobbies
in American and European politics -- that of the regime headed by
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Over the past decade, a South
Caucasian country the size of Ireland but with possibly twice the oil
reserves of Texas has managed to win friends and influence people
who include past and present members of the U.S. Congress, British
Parliament, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe,
which was once known for pressuring dictatorships, not embracing them.
Where it hasn't resorted to all-expenses-paid vacations to Azerbaijan's
capital, Baku -- a form of what one European think tank witheringly
describes as "caviar diplomacy" -- it has poured millions of dollars
into top-drawer U.S. lobbying, consultancy, and PR firms to whitewash
its image in the American media.
But it's a bit more subtle than that: The Aliyev regime has quietly
made inroads into transatlantic establishments by recapitulating a
hat trick of persuasive arguments.
The first is that Azerbaijan is the only secular Muslim-majority
state that is an ally of the United States and NATO in the war on
terror as well as a happy commercial and diplomatic ally of Israel,
which imports around a third of its energy from the Caucasian state.
Azerbaijani infrastructure is set to help facilitate NATO and U.S.
troop withdrawal from Afghanistan later this year.
The second is that its oil boom, which caused Azerbaijan's GDP to
grow tenfold from 2001 to 2011, is a necessary counterweight for
diversifying Europe's energy consumption and putting an end to Russia's
monopolistic and bullying tactics, the nadir of which were its "gas
wars" with Ukraine and Belarus. Almost all of Azerbaijan's exports
in 2011 were in oil and petroleum products. The so-called Southern
Gas Corridor, a pipeline rival to Russia's Nord Stream, advanced
dramatically last December when a BP-led consortium began laying the
groundwork for Shah Deniz 2, a $28 billion natural gas exploration
project in the Azerbaijani-controlled part of the Caspian Sea. British
Foreign Secretary William Hague and EU Energy Commissioner Gunther
Oettinger were both in Baku for the signing of this landmark deal,
which will ship gas through two pipelines: the Trans Anatolian Natural
Gas Pipeline, running through Turkey, and the Trans Adriatic Pipeline,
running through Greece and Italy. Even though Azerbaijani gas going to
the European Union represents just 2 percent of the 500 billion cubic
meters per year that the continent imports, Europe wants to lower its
energy dependence on Russia. Moscow's state-owned gas giant, Gazprom,
is now under antitrust investigation by the European Commission. And
the continuing Western standoff with the Kremlin over Russia's invasion
and destabilization of Ukraine will mean that Azerbaijani gas becomes
more important to Brussels in the coming months and years.
Finally, situated at the gateway between Asia and Europe, Azerbaijan
is a strategic partner for the West in resisting Iran's nuclear
threat as well as Russian President Vladimir Putin's attempts to
"re-Sovietize the region," as then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton memorably characterized the Russian-conceived customs union,
entry into which has sparked a political crisis in Ukraine. So as
the United States goes looking for as many friends as it can find in
the post-Soviet world -- especially those with energy resources --
Baku's influence in Washington is only poised to grow.
And if the West is ever ungrateful or unreceptive to these overtures,
the Azerbaijani lobby passive-aggressively intimates, then the Aliyev
regime always has the option of turning toward Moscow or Tehran,
both of which are eagerly knocking at its door.
The immediate aim of this three-tiered charm offensive is to "Johnny
Mercerize" an otherwise ugly domestic political reality, as one veteran
Azerbaijan specialist, who spoke to Foreign Policy on the condition
of anonymity, termed it. That is, accentuate the positive and ignore,
downplay, or just plain lie about the negative. But there's another
encoded agenda. "The Aliyev lobby's true purpose is to send a message
back home that there is nothing that can be done to remove this family
from power," said Elmar Chakhtakhtinski, chair of Azerbaijani-Americans
for Democracy (AZAD), an opposition-linked diaspora group. "When
a U.S. congressman or former congressman congratulates Aliyev on
victory, it doesn't necessarily give the regime any better position
in the West, but to the regime's own domestic population, it sends
a powerful signal that even the West is behind it, that the world
outside of Azerbaijan isn't that much different." The demoralizing
effect such signaling can have on embattled dissidents or civil
society groups in Azerbaijan is profound.
http://armenpress.am/eng/news/765326/the-corleones-of-the-caspian-how-azerbaijans-dictator-woos-the-united-states-and-europe.html
12:06, 11 June, 2014
On Oct. 9, 2012, the American subsidiary of the State Oil Company
of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) purchased a five-story,
23,232-square-foot mansion in the heart of Washington, D.C., for
the purposes of "expand[ing] its operations in the United States,"
as theWashington Business Journal put it. Oil is the one thing
Azerbaijan has plenty of, and it's the one thing the United States is
most interested in, so SOCAR's "operations" are bound to be extensive.
Given the money at stake, the mansion's sale price was a pittance:
$12 million. The exact address is 1319 18th St. NW, which ought to be
familiar to many an old Cold War hand as the former office of Jeane
Kirkpatrick, a onetime U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and one
of the most influential officials in Ronald Reagan's administration.
This mansion is where Demokratizatsiya, the journal of post-Soviet
democratization, founded in 1992, used to be published. And, for a
time, its most famous lessee was Freedom House, the respected human
rights monitor, which today counts Azerbaijan among the "not free"
countries.
"I'm speechless," said Jennifer Windsor, the executive director of
Freedom House when it was based at the Kirkpatrick address and now the
associate dean for programs and outreach at Georgetown University's
School of Foreign Service. "I find it the highest form of irony that
one of the world's least free countries is now occupying what was
the house of freedom."
It's as much a sign of the times as it is an irony. Barack Obama's
administration has cut the U.S. budget for democracy promotion and has
struck all manner of cynical bargains with kleptocratic authoritarian
regimes. Realpolitik and isolationism are trading at high premiums
again, as whole swaths of Congress, beholden to a libertarian or Tea
Party ideology, view human rights as, at best, an afterthought of the
national interest or, at worst, as an inconvenience that America can
ill afford in the 21st century.
But SOCAR USA's tony new address also underscores the quiet success
of one of the most energetic and free-spending foreign lobbies
in American and European politics -- that of the regime headed by
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Over the past decade, a South
Caucasian country the size of Ireland but with possibly twice the oil
reserves of Texas has managed to win friends and influence people
who include past and present members of the U.S. Congress, British
Parliament, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe,
which was once known for pressuring dictatorships, not embracing them.
Where it hasn't resorted to all-expenses-paid vacations to Azerbaijan's
capital, Baku -- a form of what one European think tank witheringly
describes as "caviar diplomacy" -- it has poured millions of dollars
into top-drawer U.S. lobbying, consultancy, and PR firms to whitewash
its image in the American media.
But it's a bit more subtle than that: The Aliyev regime has quietly
made inroads into transatlantic establishments by recapitulating a
hat trick of persuasive arguments.
The first is that Azerbaijan is the only secular Muslim-majority
state that is an ally of the United States and NATO in the war on
terror as well as a happy commercial and diplomatic ally of Israel,
which imports around a third of its energy from the Caucasian state.
Azerbaijani infrastructure is set to help facilitate NATO and U.S.
troop withdrawal from Afghanistan later this year.
The second is that its oil boom, which caused Azerbaijan's GDP to
grow tenfold from 2001 to 2011, is a necessary counterweight for
diversifying Europe's energy consumption and putting an end to Russia's
monopolistic and bullying tactics, the nadir of which were its "gas
wars" with Ukraine and Belarus. Almost all of Azerbaijan's exports
in 2011 were in oil and petroleum products. The so-called Southern
Gas Corridor, a pipeline rival to Russia's Nord Stream, advanced
dramatically last December when a BP-led consortium began laying the
groundwork for Shah Deniz 2, a $28 billion natural gas exploration
project in the Azerbaijani-controlled part of the Caspian Sea. British
Foreign Secretary William Hague and EU Energy Commissioner Gunther
Oettinger were both in Baku for the signing of this landmark deal,
which will ship gas through two pipelines: the Trans Anatolian Natural
Gas Pipeline, running through Turkey, and the Trans Adriatic Pipeline,
running through Greece and Italy. Even though Azerbaijani gas going to
the European Union represents just 2 percent of the 500 billion cubic
meters per year that the continent imports, Europe wants to lower its
energy dependence on Russia. Moscow's state-owned gas giant, Gazprom,
is now under antitrust investigation by the European Commission. And
the continuing Western standoff with the Kremlin over Russia's invasion
and destabilization of Ukraine will mean that Azerbaijani gas becomes
more important to Brussels in the coming months and years.
Finally, situated at the gateway between Asia and Europe, Azerbaijan
is a strategic partner for the West in resisting Iran's nuclear
threat as well as Russian President Vladimir Putin's attempts to
"re-Sovietize the region," as then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton memorably characterized the Russian-conceived customs union,
entry into which has sparked a political crisis in Ukraine. So as
the United States goes looking for as many friends as it can find in
the post-Soviet world -- especially those with energy resources --
Baku's influence in Washington is only poised to grow.
And if the West is ever ungrateful or unreceptive to these overtures,
the Azerbaijani lobby passive-aggressively intimates, then the Aliyev
regime always has the option of turning toward Moscow or Tehran,
both of which are eagerly knocking at its door.
The immediate aim of this three-tiered charm offensive is to "Johnny
Mercerize" an otherwise ugly domestic political reality, as one veteran
Azerbaijan specialist, who spoke to Foreign Policy on the condition
of anonymity, termed it. That is, accentuate the positive and ignore,
downplay, or just plain lie about the negative. But there's another
encoded agenda. "The Aliyev lobby's true purpose is to send a message
back home that there is nothing that can be done to remove this family
from power," said Elmar Chakhtakhtinski, chair of Azerbaijani-Americans
for Democracy (AZAD), an opposition-linked diaspora group. "When
a U.S. congressman or former congressman congratulates Aliyev on
victory, it doesn't necessarily give the regime any better position
in the West, but to the regime's own domestic population, it sends
a powerful signal that even the West is behind it, that the world
outside of Azerbaijan isn't that much different." The demoralizing
effect such signaling can have on embattled dissidents or civil
society groups in Azerbaijan is profound.
http://armenpress.am/eng/news/765326/the-corleones-of-the-caspian-how-azerbaijans-dictator-woos-the-united-states-and-europe.html