топот
Business
is a combination of war and sport. —André Maurois
Regimes get rocked, and rogues get rich, as Russia
and the U.S. take turns muscling in on Caspian oil.
By Daria Vaisman
It wasn’t that long ago that the United States did not fear Looking back, it seems as much a prescient policy
Russia as much as pity it. Russia had just been stripped of as an inconclusive one. The Clinton administration
an empire (worse, the empire had peeled itself away) and did, in the end, get what it wanted: a 1,100-mile
what the country needed most was a soft touch, not re- pipeline from the oil fields of Azerbaijan to Turkey’s
crimination. Or at least that was the argument posed by Mediterranean coast, bypassing Russia and breaking
Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s Oxford roommate, Khr- its Caspian monopoly in the process. Russia, now the
uschev’s translator, and now, as the president’s advisor on largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia, has emerged as
the former Soviet Union, the lead Russophile of the bunch. a superpower sooner than best expectations, the result
It was a lovely idea—Russia as kind of house pet, skittish of a tight global oil market as much of the very deft—and
after 70 years of being lost in the woods—but it would not dirty—energy policy that the NSC had predicted. Oil has
survive. Rosemarie Forsythe, a regional director at the made the Caspian countries very rich, though neither
National Security Council, had tramped through the Soviet more America-friendly nor more Russophobe than some
Union’s distant republics in the 1980s and returned to of the neighbors. But as for the strategy’s raison d’etre—
sound an alarm that would soon shape U.S. policy. There making Russia “more comfortable in its borders” and, as
was “nationalism lurking still in their national psyche,” a result, an eager partner with the West—it seems not to
the NSC warned in the early 1990s, and a lack of vigilance have mattered much at all.
on America’s part would allow the country to undermine Russia bristled repeatedly at the attempt. “The means
its former republics using an “iron umbilical cord”—their of [U.S.] imperial defeat on the Caspian would resemble
Surrealist coinage for the mass of oil pipelines linking the the mythical Trojan horse, only less romantic,” Wall
energy-rich Caspian directly to Russia. The independence Street Journal writer Steve LeVine writes in his new
of the Soviet Union’s far-flung republics, they decided, book, The Oil and The Glory: The Pursuit of Empire
was crucial to U.S. interests as well. Considering that the and Fortune on the Caspian Sea. It’s a telling phrase,
United States had spent tens of billions of dollars to protect and it gets to the heart of the political wound that is one
the Persian Gulf, why not create an ounce of protection by of the book’s central motifs. A Trojan horse is not just a
pushing a pipeline of its own? thrashing; it is a thrashing disguised a gift, and it is this
readrussia.com/2008/WiNTer/ 68
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