Raising the stakes further is the fact that the Caspian is one of the primary sites of geopolitical competition between Russia and the West. Russia controls most of the oil and natural gas export infrastructure from the sea, but the US and European governments and oil companies are trying to break that monopoly. Westerners have succeeded in building pipelines for oil and gas from Azerbaijan, on the western coast of the Caspian, to Europe, and are now trying to connect those pipelines to Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan on the eastern shore.
The United States also has tried to make its mark in the region by helping the newly-independent countries build up their navies. A 7-year, $100 million programme called Caspian Guard carried out over the past decade aimed to coordinate the maritime security capacities of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. While the programme failed to accomplish that goal, the United States has helped Azerbaijan establish maritime radars, a command-and-control centre in the capital of Baku, and trained Azerbaijani Special Forces sailors to protect oil installations. The United States also has provided patrol boats to Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and continues to advise Kazakhstan on how to build its navy.
Russia maintains significant influence over its former colonies' navies, as well. Most of Azerbaijan's, Turkmenistan's and Kazakhstan's naval equipment was inherited from the Soviet navy, and Russia still maintains close ties to the newly independent countries' navies. Russian shipbuilding companies appear to be in the lead to win the contracts for Kazakhstan's new corvettes and patrol boats. It has held counter-terror maritime exercises (including Russian, Kazakhstani, Belorussian and Ukrainian forces) on the coast of Kazakhstan. And Russian officials are quick to criticize any US involvement in Caspian naval issues, clearly seeing the two countries as in a rivalry for influence. In 2006, Moscow proposed a sort of alternative Caspian Guard, CASFOR, which would coordinate Caspian security between all five littoral states. But like its American analogue, CASFOR appears not to have amounted to anything.
If anything will slow the naval arms race in the Caspian, it will probably be financial problems. All of the Caspian countries are hamstrung by the worldwide economic crisis, which has forced some austerity in defence budgets, rendering many of these countries plans worth little more than the paper they're written on. Kazakhstan's navy was supposed to be operational by 2010; naval officials now decline to predict when they’ll be ready. Construction of some ships for the Russian Caspian Fleet has been delayed; other ships originally intended for the Caspian have been instead diverted to the Baltic Sea.
But the economic crisis will not last forever, and the oil and gas revenues of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, in particular, will give those countries ample spending money to build up their navies. Only time will tell if a true Caspian Sea arms race develops.
Joshua Kucera blogs at The Bug Pit.
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