of the ‘Great Game’ in the Caucasus and Central Asia . . . fueled and lubricated by oil.” But, he said, “Our goal is to actively discourage that atavistic outcome.” The Great Game, he added firmly, belonged “on the shelves of historical fiction.” Yet it would be very challenging to modulate the clash of interests and ambitions in this strategic terrain.3
For Turkey, locked out of the region for centuries, the breakup of the Soviet Union was a way to expand its influence and importance and commerce across the Black Sea into the Caucasus and onto the Caspian Sea and beyond—and also to connect with the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. And, for the Islamic Republic of Iran, here was the opportunity to expand its political and religious influence north into the other countries on the Caspian Sea and into Central Asia and to seek to proselytize among Islamic peoples whose access to Islamic religion had been tightly constrained during Soviet times.
Azerbaijan was of particular importance to Iran. Over 7.5 million ethnic Azeris lived there, now with the opportunity to interact with the outside world, while an estimated 16 million Iranians, a quarter of Iran’s total population, were also ethnically Azeri. Though generally tightly policed by Iran’s ruling theocracy, many Iranian Azeris had direct family relations in Azerbaijan. So for the regime in Tehran, an independent Azerbaijan, as an example of a more tolerant, secular and potentially prosperous society and one connected to the West, was something to be feared as a threat to its own internal control.
China’s interests developed more slowly, but they became progressively more significant as the rapid growth of its economy made energy an increasingly important issue. The Central Asian states were “next door,” and they could be connected by pipelines, providing critical diversification. China increasingly made its impact felt, but less through politics and more through investment.
The newly independent states were hardly mere pawns. Their leaders were determined to solidify their power. Although there were considerable differences among them, at home that meant what were essentially one-party states with power consolidated in the hands of the president. In foreign policy, the strategic objectives of these nations were very clear: maintain and consolidate their independence and establish themselves as nations. Whatever the differences in their views of the Kremlin, they did not want to find themselves reabsorbed one way or the other by the new Russian Federation. On the other hand, they were in no position to disengage from Russia or stoke its ire. They needed Russia. The connections were so many and so strong, and the geography so obvious. Moreover, they had to be concerned about their own ethnic populations in Moscow and the other Russian cities, whose remittances would become important components of their new national GNPs.
For many of the countries, oil and natural gas were potentially critical, an enormous source of revenues and the major driver of recovery and economic growth. The development of oil could bring in companies from many countries and generate not only cash but also political interest and support. As the Azeri national security adviser put it, “Oil is our strategy, it is our defense, it is our independence.”4
If oil was the physical resource they needed for their survival as nation-states, they also required another kind of resource—wily diplomacy. For the game, always, required extraordinary skill in balancing in a difficult terrain. Azerbaijan, a secular Islamic state, was squeezed between Iran and Russia. Kazakhstan, with a huge territory but relatively small population, had to find its balance between Russia and an increasingly self-confident and rapidly growing China.
Yet in all the discussions about oil and geopolitics and great games, one could not lose sight of the more practical matters: that oil development took place not only on the stage of world politics but on the playing fields of the petroleum industry—on the computer screens of engineers and spreadsheets of financial analysts, in the fabrication yards where the rigs were built, and on the drilling sites and offshore platforms—where the key considerations were geology and geography, engineering, costs, investment, logistics, and the mastery of technological complexity. And the risk for the companies was large—not just political risk, but the inherent risk in trying to develop new resources that might be world class but also posed great enormous engineering challenges.
The companies had to operate against extremes of expectations. For at one point, the Caspian was celebrated as a new El Dorado, a magical solution, another Persian Gulf, a region of huge riches in