Tehran Times: "U.S. tries Caspian gambit against Russia"

Although Russian President Vladimir Putin favored George W. Bush in the 2004 U.S. presidential election, during a meeting of Baltic leaders in Vilnius, Lithuania last Thursday, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney launched the sharpest rebuke of Moscow, accusing it of using blackmail and intimidation in its energy policy toward Europe. Cheney also accused Russian of stifling democracy.

Cheney's harsh statement even prompted former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to say, "Cheney's speech looks like a provocation and interference in Russia's internal affairs in terms of its content, form, and place."

Then, on Saturday, at a summit of the Adriatic Charter group, which comprises Croatia, Albania, and Macedonia, Cheney expressed Washington's full support of the three Balkan nations' aspirations to join NATO and the European Union, saying that their accession would help revitalize the democratic values of the two Western clubs. He also praised Balkan leaders for their involvement in U.S.-led military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, calling their contribution "a very important step".

In his tour of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Cheney also held a meeting with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev in which the two discussed plans for trans-Caspian pipelines that would bring oil and gas to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, and then Europe, after crossing the territories of Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, thus "avoiding Russia altogether".

The plan to transfer gas from Kazakhstan to Europe through the seabed, despite the potential environmental damage, has only been formulated because the West wants to undermine Russian influence in the region. These developments can be interpreted more clearly in light of Azeri President Ilham Aliyev's recent visit to Washington.

It is a naive to think that Washington is upping the pressure on Moscow to force it to observe democratic reforms demanded by the West. With a glance at the political systems of some of the regional governments which Cheney visited, one can easily conclude that their systems are in no sense more democratic than Russia's. They are immune from open criticism by Washington due to Western economic interests. For example, who can claim that the Nazarbayev government, which has been in power since 1989, is more democratic than the Putin government?

Without downplaying Kremlin officials' unscrupulous policies on various issues, such as the temporary cuts of gas supplies to Ukraine last winter and their failure to take action to attempt to halt the bloody Balkan wars of the 1990s, and the promise of NATO and EU membership to less developed Eastern European states, the United States has been tirelessly trying to undermine Russia's influence in the region, to the extent that the reverberations of NATO expansion can be heard at the gates of Moscow. This encirclement policy has been given more impetus as Russia has begun taking a more independent policy toward international issues such as Iran's nuclear dossier and the Hamas-led Palestinian government, especially since Putin received Hamas officials in Moscow, to the indignation of Tel Aviv and Washington.

In addition, Washington seems to be seeking control of the Caucaus and Central Asia in order to implement the theory that the country that controls this critical region, controls the world.

After all the early Washington-Moscow honeymoons, the recent harsh criticism of Russia, along with the plan for oil and gas pipelines under the Caspian Sea as Russia is preparing to host a G8 summit in St. Petersburg in July, are new warnings to Moscow that it should drop its strong opposition to a draft resolution on Iran's nuclear program at the UN.

Therefore, Russia's grandmasters of the geopolitical chessboard will be facing some tough decisions as the next episode of the new Great Game moves to New York.