Pipelines and politics in the Med

Gas-rich Egypt is a power broker of sorts in the broader Mediterranean region, playing a pivotal role in settling disputes between Israel and Palestinian militants. Israel too has vast gas riches that could provide long-lasting benefits to the broader region. But energy and national security issues overlap and the myriad of alliances in the region suggests hard economic power may not yield the results one would expect.

So-called soft power is the ability to coerce and co-opt through the broadcast of ideologies and value systems that in many cases run tandem to the principles of democracy. By sharing a common set of virtues, states can bring friends and foes alike into a similar network where camaraderie contributes to peaceful conditions. War in this environment is in nobody’s interest.

Hard power, by contrast, is military or economic force that coerces others to follow a particular course of action based on ultimatums. When goods and services cannot cross borders, armies will.  

Another iteration proposed by US academic Walter Russel Mead is sticky power.

“Consider the carnivorous sundew plant, which attracts its prey with a kind of soft power, a pleasing scent that lures insects toward its sap. But once the victim has touched the sap, it is stuck; it can’t get away,” he wrote in 2004. “That is sticky power.”

Sticky power is one way to look at energy policy. When President Jimmy Carter fretted over Soviet ambitions in Afghanistan, he looked to the shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf as a point of demarcation. 

“Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force,” Carter said in his State of the Union address in 1980.

Here is where energy and national security collide. Should Soviet expansionism have reached the broader Middle East, it would have not only threatened US national security interests established when it broke out of isolation to enter World War II, but also the flow of vast amounts of oil and natural gas. Washington can not afford to let the Kremlin exert sticky power over the regional energy sector.

That doctrine can extend to the energy dynamics in the Mediterranean.

Energy and politics

The decade-old aspiration for gas offshore in the eastern Mediterranean to supply the Palestinian Gaza Strip could become reality within the next two years. Financial hurdles were overcome in February on the $107mn, 44-km cross-border pipeline that would feed the Palestinian territories.

Chevron, the US major that has operated Leviathan and the Tamar field off Israel since taking over Noble in an all-share deal last autumn, told NGW in April that it was “pleased to partner with the state of Israel, and we look forward to supporting the country's strategy to develop its energy resources for the benefit of the country and the region.” 

The EU, which is in talks with Palestinian, Israeli and Qatari officials on the project, could provide a grant to help finance the project. 

That is the sticky power. State actors can “trap” other players in their network, leaving them with few options but to toe the line or risk getting cut off from the loans, security guarantees or even the natural gas supplies that come with a sticky relationship.

Power dynamics were upended during the Trump presidency with the signing of the Abraham Accords, an agreement that saw the normalisation of ties between the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan that Washington saw as a final path to settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The possibility of ending a region-wide blockade on the Qatari government, meanwhile, could have brought Doha into the fray. For Israel, Qatari’s involvement would bring another Palestinian-friendly government into its circle, and it is a friendly government backing regional pipeline ambitions.

But Colin Clarke, the director of policy and research at The Soufan Group – a global intelligence and security consultancy based in the US – told NGW to not look at the accords as a platform for brokering broad-ranging agreements in the way that Chevron envisioned in the Palestinian pipeline.

“If there is an energy deal in the Middle East, don’t look to the Abraham Accords as a proxy for regional interests,” he said.

Soft power by way of consolidation around the Israeli government may be hard power in sheep’s clothing. Egypt too may see its natural gas as a way to expand its sphere of influence north into the Shiite crescent, possibly delivering supplies to an ever-struggling Lebanon.

During the latest skirmish in the Gaza Strip, it was Cairo that helped settle the conflict. But on the Palestinian issue, it may be just window dressing.

Arab states may be using the Palestinian cause for their own internal purposes. Should domestic issues surface that would undermine their position, be it on geopolitical or economic terms, the Palestinian cause works well as a deflection point for many Arab states with less-than stellar records on human rights and other issues.

Israel needs Palestine to justify their cause, just as the broader Arab world and the Palestinians need Israel to justify theirs.

We can see a similar dynamic play out in the pipeline politics in Europe. The US government has long objected to Russian ambitions to set anchor in the European economy through its vast network of natural gas pipelines. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the second leg of the twin pipeline system that runs through the Baltic Sea to Germany, is a growing source of contention.

That pipeline system simultaneously strengthens and undermines European energy security. The network means less gas would need to traverse Ukraine, which is in the grips of a tug of war between Western and Russian powers. But it also maintains Russian leverage over the European economy. Disputes leading up to a Ukrainian pivot toward the EU and the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 had and continue to have deep energy consequences for Europe.

But with US energy interests now extending to LNG ambitions for former Soviet satellites Poland and Lithuania, the pipeline is particularly problematic. With comments reminiscent of Cold War dynamics, the German energy company Wintershall Dea – which plays a role in the project – warned after Washington cracked down on the pipeline to avoid playing “geopolitical football” over the project. 

That geopolitical football could be played too in the broader Mediterranean region. Lebanon, where Hezbollah’s political wing holds considerable influence, is at odds over its maritime border with Israel. Those boundaries lie close to Israel’s coveted Tamar and Leviathan natural gas fields. Hezbollah, which has shown itself capable of withstanding an Israeli military onslaught, claims Tamar as its own. 

In the Gaza Strip this year, Hamas, which at times relies on Hezbollah for its heavy weaponry, clashed with Israel over the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites. In May, Chevron said the Israeli ministry of energy told it to close down operations at the Tamar field due to the fighting.

Transnational pipelines, unlike LNG or renewable energy resources such as wind and solar power, offer a way for suppliers to say “this is mine.”

“Gas is gas and politics are politics,” Clark at The Soufan Group said. “That said, energy can trump politics just as easily as energy can define politics.”

Pipelines and energy trade have a way of affirming geopolitical claims. We can draw the same conclusions on Western concerns over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline as we can for the Middle East players bordering the Mediterranean Sea. Should pipelines and supplies reach further north from the Egyptian and Israeli gas fields, it could be defining in terms of the geopolitical landscape. But you would be remiss to think that definition rests purely on political grounds.