Richard Morningstar in Baku - Reliable or Uninspired?

Seeking to fill a gap in the Baku embassy which has hindered US policy in the region for months, the Obama Administration has nominated Richard Morningstar, longtime Caspian hand and current Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy, as ambassador to Azerbaijan. He is likely to fare better in the nomination process than his predecessor Matt Bryza.

Bryza was sent to Baku in February 2011 after the White House gave him a recess appointment, a temporary fix to circumvent congressional opposition from Senators representing constituencies with large Armenian-American populations (Bryza is regularly accused of being too close to Azerbaijan and Turkey, and correspondingly biased against Armenia). His appointment ended in December, and he has since taken up the think-tank and conference circuit.

Charge D’Affaires Adam Sterling has been minding the shop in the absence of an ambassador. This is becoming the usual state of affairs – since Obama took office, the embassy has been run by a lower-ranking diplomat for the better part of two years. The perceived slight has provoked consternation in Azerbaijan, which was used to being assiduously courted by the US under the Bush Administration.

Did the US just give up on Nabucco?

The US government has never championed the Nabucco project as much as Europe, for obvious reasons – unlike Caspian oil pipelines which Washington lobbied for extensively back in the 1990s, the US will receive no direct benefit from huge quantities of Caspian gas being piped to central Europe.

But the US has remained a heavyweight player in the debate, and American diplomats have been very useful to Brussels in leaning on Turkey, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan to get things moving.

Now, with the choice of pipeline project being weighed up in Baku by the Shah Deniz consortium which will supply the first tranche of gas, Washington’s top Caspian energy specialist seems to have just delivered a major blow to the EU’s favoured project.