I've seen a lot of people circulating a meme saying that the entire Syrian civil war is due to some competing pipeline projects, one involving Qatar and another going through Iran. Supposedly, the Syrian civil war was orchestrated by the CIA or something like that just so that we could have this pipeline. The question is, does this actually make sense? There's a very compelling article by Cedric Mas (Administrator at Conseil de l'Union Européenne) linked below. It points out some things that I had already thought of, such as Russia's similarly pipeline-related interests in Ukraine, and the fact that connections to energy policy can be drawn in almost any region. When I first saw the meme, my first thought was "Congratulations, you've proven that the U.S. and Russia have different allies and competing interests. Welcome to geopolitics 101." He also recounts the other causes of the war, such as drought and rapid population growth, as well as government shootings and torture. Furthermore, the events in Syria are closely intertwined with the Arab spring, which had little to do with natural gas. I was not aware of the chronology, but apparently the Qatar pipeline was declined 2 years before the uprising began, and the Iran-backed pipeline was not agreed to until a few months after. On top of that, there are doubts about whether either pipeline will happen any time soon. Iran and Iraq cannot acquire funding and support for this currently, and Saudi Arabia would currently veto the Qatar project because of events in that region. The Qatar project even has an alternate route which bypasses Syria, which is not after all a large country. What's more, this war halts the ability of middle eastern natural gas to make it to European markets, which has the primary effect of leaving Europe more reliant on Russian imports. If anything, the current disruption would seem to benefit Russia. Finally, if we accept that this theory is all nonsense, then what does it say about our current era that this unsubstantiated rumor has become so widely accepted? One might be tempted to blame a Russian internet campaign, but it seems to me that online agents are only exploiting an ignorance and a gullibility that has been festering for over a decade now, particularly on the internet. All that is happening here is that major powers are just now realizing how they can exploit it. Is there a solution to this problem? https://kurultay.fr/blog/?p=1103
