Simply put, Turkey is in no mood to see Russia as a potentially aggressive expansionist power. This, however, is exactly how most American analyst have seen Moscow since last year's confrontation in Georgia. The consensus in Washington is that Russia has now become a mafia state willing to assert a sphere of influence in the former Soviet territories with its main weapon: gas. There were high hopes at the end of the Cold War that a new relationship would emerge with Moscow. That optimism is now gone. A few commentators, such as Tom Freidman, from The New York Times, still blame Washington for rapidly expanding NATO in the 1990s. But the majority of the American power establishment has moved on. The big debate now is whether Ukraine and Georgia should be included in the club.
Another dimension of this need to once again “contain” Russia is of course about energy and pipelines and this is where Turkey enters the picture. Washington has long been a strong supporter of alternative pipelines bringing Caspian and Central Asian energy resources to Western markets without going through Russian territory. The classic example is the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (TBC) pipeline linking Azerbaijani oil with Europe through Georgia and Turkey. Last month, another major project to sideline Russia gained the green light for construction when the EU and Turkey signed the Nabucco project, the 3,300-kilometer-long gas pipeline from Central Asia to Europe.
But Putin's visit to Turkey made a mockery of Nabucco's very own raison d'être. Under the deal signed on Thursday, Turkey granted the Russian natural gas giant Gazprom the right to use its territorial waters in the Black Sea, under which the company wants to route a second South Stream pipeline to gas markets in Eastern and Southern Europe. Needless to say, this Russian pipeline, called the South Stream, will directly compete with Nabucco. The project needs Ankara's consent because the planned route passes through Turkish territorial waters.
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