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and a visit from Margaret Thatcher (all faithfully detailed became history when the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC)
in the book) by various companies before the final $800 pipeline was inaugurated during a lavish ceremony in
million deal among a consortium of oil companies, BP Istanbul. The second-largest pipeline world, it will soon
included, was signed in 1994. But that was just the transport 1 million barrels of oil per day.
beginning. It would be another five years of politicking The BTC pipeline may indeed be a “rare post-Cold for-
before the current pipeline traversing Georgia to Turkey eign policy triumph” for the United States, but the deal
was negotiated, with the debate over the direction of the was a triumph for Azerbaijan, which had seen in the U.S.
pipeline even more contentious than the exploration an opportunity not just for economic leverage but also
rights to the field itself. for political backing that could later serve as a counter-
With internal disagreement over its Caspian policy, the weight to Russia’s force. Yet ironically, it is Kazakhstan,
NSC decided to leave Kazakhstan in private hands and fo- still connected to Russia through its iron umbilical cord,
cus their attention on the pipeline from Azerbaijan instead. that may turn out to be the middling success. Though
The Dutch oil trader Deuss, with backing from Oman, had Nazarbayev recently granted himself the right to be pres-
nimbly maneuvered himself into building the sole pipeline ident for life, and routinely routs out his opposition, the
from Tengiz. During “one of the most prolonged and bitter economy has grown 10 percent, which, unlike in Azer-
confrontations of the era,” Chevron balked at Deuss’ sug- baijan, has created a genuine middle class. When I visit-
gestion to build a pipeline into the heart of Russia, on its ed Astana, Kazakhstan’s capital, in the summer of 2007,
Black Sea. But unlike the U.S., its concerns were not polit- I found it awash in nationalist fervor and prohibitively ex-
ical, but economic. Though the pipeline to Russia was the pensive; its multiple luxury hotels were all packed, and
shortest and cheapest of the possible routes, monopolist with its futurist renditions of iconic structures (the pyra-
Deuss pushed monopolist prices, and the Russia pipeline mids, the Eiffel Tower), it looked like Las Vegas, a simu-
meant mixing Tengiz oil—some of the best in the world— lacrum of a simulacrum.
with inferior Russian crude. Though Azerbaijan’s economy is now the fastest grow-
Though a pipeline leading from Azerbaijan to Russia ing in the world, it has fared worse. Its money will run
had already been built, and would have been considerably out in about a decade, and, with power held tightly by the
cheaper to update rather than build a pipeline from scratch, president and his family, there has been no development
the U.S. aggressively pressed for a two-pipeline plan— of institutions to suggest that the country will prosper
an additional pipeline along with the existing Russian one. much beyond that time. The model of the resource curse
Russia balked, as did the oil companies, but for different offers the seeming paradox that oil-rich countries gen-
reasons. Russia saw it as a personal attack; for the oil com- erally fare worse than their energy-poor states; though
panies, which would have to cover the costs, oil prices were there are some notable examples, such as Norway and
then so low that they wondered if they would make a profit. Canada, in general the consensus is that oil wealth deters
The U.S. stood firm, eventually bringing in Turkey to offset investment and entrenches authoritarian rule. When I
some of the extra costs and to sweeten the deal. was in Baku for their 2005 parliamentary election, Azeris
“Washington viewed BP and many of the other oil told me that if only they didn’t have oil, Washington might
companies as an obstreperous and narrow-minded lot be more willing to intervene on their behalf against their
that failed to understand that the Caspian was unlike government. The opposition, now destroyed by infight-
other places—commerce shouldn’t be divorced from ing and government suppression, waved signs that read:
politics,” writes LeVine. The oil companies suggested “Stop trading our democracy for oil” in the telltale orange
hundreds of pipeline routes—including one through color used during the revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine.
Iran, which made the most sense economically—only It was inevitable that the Caspian would be developed, if
to have them summarily rejected by the U.S. After much not by Russia or the United States, then by someone else.
wrangling, everyone finally everyone agreed on the But meanwhile, Azeris now wonder: happiness may be
current route: a pipeline through Georgia, a desperately multiple pipelines, but whose? т
poor state recovering from a recent civil war and eager to
offer itself to Washington’s disposal. Last year, the rest
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