The struggle for strategic natural resources in post-Soviet Central Asia is reformatting international relations in the region and triggering confrontation between the key players. Turkey is gaining new opportunities on the global stage with the launch of energy transit routes that bypass Russia.
Geo-economic and geopolitical significance of natural gas transit routes.
Modern economies are unable to continue developing without access to traditional energy sources, including natural gas. Despite breakthroughs in industrial technologies and renewable energy sources, national economies, especially those of developed countries, will continue to need supplies of gas for a long time to come.
And ideally the source of the gas should be conveniently located, without a long transit route involving its transportation across multiple international borders. But generally energy resource deposits tend to be located at a considerable distance from the consumer, requiring the establishment of long term multimodal transit projects to carry energy from point A to point B, often across challenging terrain or bodies of water and passing through conflict regions. It is also necessary to overcome the geopolitical and geo-economic obstacles caused by the existence of competing centers of power.
Often, in the modern world, military conflicts have their roots in questions relating to the control of natural resource deposits (including gas fields) and transit routes. Gas is becoming an effective instrument for exercising geo-economic and geopolitical influence on the financial and political elites involved in each of the three stages of the supply process (i.e. suppliers, transporters, consumers).
When the world was divided into spheres of geopolitical influence, resulting in a balanced international system (for example the world order that developed after the Second World War and remained in place for the second half of the twentieth century), the competition between world powers for access to petrochemical resources served to maintain a certain level of stability. In other words, the West, led by the United States, and its allies in the developing world were able to control a considerable part of the oil- and gas-rich countries of the Arab Middle East, Iran (until 1979), part of Latin America and Northern Europe. The USSR itself was rich in these raw materials and maintained control in some countries in the Middle East, North Africa and South America.
With the end of the USSR, things changed in the global energy market. US geopolitical dominance distorted the world order and served to aggravate regional relations. The “collective West,” led........