Turkmenistan President Serdar Berdimuhamedov makes no bones about his country’s policy of neutrality in foreign affairs. He has made it clear that if foreign interests have designs on the country’s massive natural gas reserves, they will have to play by Ashgabat’s rules or take a powder.
As Turkmenistan opens its oil and gas market to international energy companies, President Berdimuhamedov and his team will resist turning over the country’s natural resources – and with them, its sovereignty – to foreign interests in exchange for vague promises of prosperity or for the enhanced international prestige that would supposedly come with casting the nation’s lot with this or that geopolitical bloc.
Turkmenistan – the locus of converging strategic interests – controls the fifth-largest reserves of natural gas in the world after Russia, Iran, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
As the global race to control energy resources heats up, it would appear that Turkmenistan prefers engaging partners who at once are reliable, embrace neutrality and recognize the core principles of the 1955 Bandung Conference – self-determination, respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and equality.
No amount of pressure from the European Union or the international media will succeed in bulldozing Turkmenistan into playing fast and loose with its own neutrality.
Brussels, London and Washington will not be thrilled with Turkmenistan’s insistence on geopolitical independence at this time of energy insecurity in much of the world. Beijing and Moscow will remain uncomfortable with Ashgabat’s standoffishness.
New Delhi, Riyadh, Baku, Ankara, Astana and Tashkent have been relaxed about Turkmenistan’s course because, for them, as for Ashgabat, regional stability, geo-economic integration, and connectivity take precedence over bloc politics.
A time-tested policy with precedent
In a December 4, 2022, article titled “Neutrality in the name of peace and prosperity,” Turkmenistan’s ambassador to Belgium, Sapar Palvanov, said: “The key feature defining the role of Turkmenistan in the system of modern international relations is the doctrine of positive neutrality. Since gaining independence in 1991, the principle of neutrality in foreign policy has become the foundation of Turkmenistan’s political strategy.”
Turkmenistan’s neutrality – designed to enhance domestic and international peace and security – bears some resemblance to Switzerland’s. Just as Switzerland is not a member of the European Union, the European Economic Area, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, so Turkmenistan is not a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Eurasian Economic Union, or the Collective Security Treaty Organization.
Neither Switzerland nor Turkmenistan maintains formal ties to any political or military bloc.
Turkmenistan’s ambassadors across the globe and at the United Nations have been delivering the same message: dialogue in the first instance. In other words, the mainstream media should stop trying to get Turkmenistan to compromise its neutrality by taking sides. Afghanistan learned the hard way, and no one in the region wants to see a repetition of that particular calamity played out on their own soil.
Switzerland, it is worth noting, is under pressure from major media such as the Financial Times and others to sacrifice its neutrality. So far, Switzerland hasn’t taken the bait. Last October, it reconfirmed its neutrality.
Brussels and the media clamor
President Berdimuhamedov and his team must know that major international media have been gaslighting Turkmenistan, implying that if Ashgabat doesn’t cast its lot with the Western camp, it will remain an inconsequential player in the eyes of the West.
For Josep Borrell, Europe’s would-be foreign minister, Turkmenistan is the denizen of a “jungle” that cannot aspire to a place in the European Union’s putative “garden,” unless, of course, it forks over the lion’s share of its natural resources to the Western bloc. Borrell’s statement surely beats all world records for running, jumping or standing chutzpah.
Articles such as “25 years later, and Turkmenistan reaps zero benefits from ‘positive neutrality‘,” “Turkmenistan is the center of a geopolitical tug-of-war,” and “Turkmenistan becoming focus of intense geopolitical competition” are either disingenuous or self-serving.
They often contain a modicum of truth as when, for example, they describe Ashgabat’s less-than-optimal management of its national economy, but then go on to suggest that Turkmenistan needs Western experts to solve its technical and socio-political problems – as if non-Western experts can’t cut the mustard.
To those who believe Turkmenistan will accept one-way deals aimed at its economic and geopolitical subjugation, Ashgabat is responding with a resounding: No dice!
Turkmenistan will “not to be drawn into any form of regional rivalry,” says Ambassador Palvanov. In other words, despite media calls for Turkmenistan to maintain an open mind in its approach to the world, it will not be so open-minded that its brains fall out.
Neutral but not isolationist
Turkmenistan’s policy of neutrality should not be confused with isolationism. Ashgabat has been actively reaching out to neighbors across Eurasia and the Middle East.
In the last quarter of 2022 alone, President Berdimuhamedov has personally engaged with the leaders of Iran, Qatar, Russia and Saudi Arabia as well as with those of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in an effort to broaden Turkmenistan’s quest for economic integration and modernization.
Just take a look at Turkmenistan’s upcoming oil and gas tenders, the pace of high-level official visits and the number of conferences in Ashkhabad.
Clearly, Berdimuhamedov has no intention of economically insulating Turkmenistan from other nations as erroneously suggested in such one-sided articles as this one on the European Union’s diplomatic push in Central Asia.
Since Berdimuhamedov became head of state, Turkmenistan has ramped up its diplomatic engagement across the globe. Likewise, foreign diplomats and businesspeople have visited Ashkhabad more times in the last 12 months than in the previous five years. Expect more of the same in 2023.
President Berdimuhamedov has empowered his Ministry of Foreign Affairs to make sensible cross-border economic commitments, endorse non-ideological international agreements and develop smart connectivity and integration across Eurasia.
For example, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Turkey have just signed five documents in the areas of trade, transport, energy, communications, science and culture.
Practical engagement
Turkmenistan practices realpolitik couched in strategic ambiguity. Moreover, it takes a common-sense approach to engagement that requires long hours of patient discovery as a means to develop trust and genuine partnership.
Turkmenistan will engage with foreign oil and gas companies, but discussions must be exclusively of a commercial nature, transactional and apolitical – that is, political conditions should not be attached to partnerships.
Naïveté in this area will not save financiers and external advisers from being booted out of the country but rather will tend to guarantee such a fate. And their plight will be especially dire if they seek to bamboozle the Turkmens into exchanging their traditional values for Western nihilism, however trendy.
As Ambassador Palvanov underscored, “Having huge reserves of natural gas, Turkmenistan … does not allow for the politicization of [economic] relations and its neutrality strategy contributes to the diversification of natural gas supply routes to the world market.”
Saudi Arabia has augmented its geo-economic engagement with Turkmenistan over the past year. So have Iran, China, Japan and India. The Turkmenistan-Iran natural-gas pipeline has been in operation for more than a decade.
It comes as no surprise that Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran are talking to Turkmenistan, and “Two new railway lines could transform Central Asia,” as The Economist reported.
If foreign diplomats and their hangers-on want to cavort in Turkmenistan’s sandbox, they’ll need to stick to business and respect its neutrality, desire for multipolarity, and unique culture; in other words, refrain from introducing political preconditions in commercial negotiations.
They need to understand that President Berdimuhamedov and his team will not sacrifice the country’s neutrality or sovereignty for illusory promises of security, perpetual progress, or inclusion in the community of ostensibly enlightened nations.
That vision of the global system is so old, it’s got whiskers.
