The Deputy Chairman of the Editorial Board of Vestnik Kavkaza, General Director of the Institute of Caspian Cooperation, Sergey Mikheev
One of the key outcomes of the 4th Caspian Summit held in Astrakhan was the joint declaration issued by Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran calling for the "non-presence" of armed forces which don't belonging to the countries of the Caspian Sea in order to ensure the implementation of the concept of the Caspian Sea as an area of peace and harmony.
The ban on the military presence of third countries in the Caspian Sea can be considered as a very significant achievement of the Astrakhan Summit, due to the simple reason that the facts show today that any interference of outside players in certain regional affairs brings only instability. First of all, we are talking about the United States and NATO.
Over the last 20-30 years we have not seen a single case where interference by NATO or the United States Army in the other region would lead to peace, tranquility or stability. At best, it leads to dismemberment (as in Yugoslavia) with the application of very serious economic damage, and at worst - for endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
That is why the "Caspian Five" decided to protect their territory from external threats. The heads of the five littoral states are well aware that strangers do not care about our concerns and our problems - they solve their own problems, and prefer to do so at someone else's expense. So it was and will always be.
In the case of the Caspian Sea there was an urgent need to prevent the entry into the region of third forces. This has quite been clearly said, but at the summit in Astrakhan the parties managed to declare their position in a very specific and well-documented form.
It is obvious that this is a serious security guarantee, because we will always find a way to negotiate any problem with our neighbours, while to reach an agreement with a third force is much more difficult.
One should also take into consideration the specificity of further development of the military cooperation between the Caspian states in the new environment. The Final Statement of the 4th Caspian Summit was aimed at maintaining the Caspian Sea's status as a sea of peace, where it does not make sense to build weapons indefinitely. The military cooperation should be addressed in the sense that it may be defined by any reasonable level of military parity that will provide peace in the region.
Military cooperation is essential when there is a common goal. We have such a goal in the Caspian region - to preserve peace. Therefore, the military cooperation there must be appropriate only in order to promote security in the region.
