By Dmitry Shlapentokh (3/17/2010 issue of the CACI Analyst)
Dmitry Rogozhin, Russian representative to NATO, and General Boris Gromov, a general who fought in Afghanistan, recently published an open letter about NATO in The New York Times. NATO was presented as an alliance lacking a will to fight, where especially the Europeans members were ready to cut and run in Afghanistan. They concluded this would be a great disaster and that the West should remember that the USSR had defended “Western civilization” at large in Afghanistan.
By Roman Muzalevsky (3/17/2010 issue of the CACI Analyst)
The U.S.
By Robert M. Cutler (3/3/2010 issue of the CACI Analyst)
In recent days, energy diplomats on both the Azerbaijani and Turkish sides have revealed that an agreement in principle over the price that Turkey will pay for Shah Deniz gas from Azerbaijan has been reached. However, there are several ongoing sets of simultaneous negotiations over Shah Deniz, also taking place in the context of larger implicit bargaining games over other the Caspian Sea basin deposits of natural gas and indeed the geo-economics of their supply to Europe over the next several decades. These subtleties must be unpacked in order to understand the wide-ranging significance of even seemingly small agreements.
By Stephen Blank (3/3/2010 issue of the CACI Analyst)
The opening of the Turkmenistan-China gas pipeline in December 2009 has focused deserved attention on China’s growing presence in Central Asia, particularly in the energy field. But the larger story transcends China and is really about the growing connections between Central Asia and East Asian countries in general, not just China. In this context, South Korea’s reinvigorated moves to consummate energy and infrastructure contracts with Central Asian producers are particularly revealing.
The Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst is a biweekly publication of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program, a Joint Transatlantic Research and Policy Center affiliated with the American Foreign Policy Council, Washington DC., and the Institute for Security and Development Policy, Stockholm. For 15 years, the Analyst has brought cutting edge analysis of the region geared toward a practitioner audience.
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