The New 'Great Game': state & non-state competition

[Jedburgh]

...is emerging with its oil and gas riches as the first strategic battleground of the "Multipolar Era" among the U.S., China and Moscow...

Sheesh, talk about old news. Or maybe I should say the writer is trying to make a tired line interesting by massaging a bit more currency into it...the "Great Game" in the context of post-Soviet Central Asia has been beaten to death by a Horde of geo-pol authors since the collapse of the USSR in '91.



...how 'bout this one: Africa emerges as Strategic Battleground...

[Tc2642]

Sheesh, talk about old news. Or maybe I should say the writer is trying to make a tired line interesting by massaging a bit more currency into it...the "Great Game" in the context of post-Soviet Central Asia has been beaten to death by a Horde of geo-pol authors since the collapse of the USSR in '91.

True, but one of the best books on this issue is by Ahmed Rashid 'Taliban - Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia'. Read it a while back so my memory of it is a bit fuzzy, but does have a lot of good background to the conflict within Afghanistan and the wider geo-political implications for the Middle East.

[GorTex6]

Special Report: Russia

There are nine current and planned gas pipelines, including Blue Stream, the $3.4bn (£1.8bn) network operated by Russia's Gazprom and Italy's ENI that runs for 400km along the bottom of the Black Sea. Another, much favoured by the European commission, is the Nabucco project costing $4.4bn and managed by Austria's OMV. This one passes gas from central Asia - Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan - to central Europe.
There are the same number of oil pipelines, including the $3bn BTC line from Baku to Ceyhan in Turkey, spearheaded by BP, which runs for 1,100 miles underground and will be formally opened in Ceyhan in July. This project, first endorsed by the former US president Bill Clinton, is the pet project of the US state department in its renewed power struggle, in both senses, with the Kremlin. US special forces have trained 2,000 Georgian soldiers in anti-terrorist techniques to protect the pipeline, a target if America ever engaged militarily with Iran, from saboteurs.
It is estimated that Turkey will carry 200bn barrels of crude oil and 18 trillion cubic metres of natural gas just from the Caspian to Europe and other markets. Agata Loskot, of Warsaw's Centre for Eastern Studies, says the country can also become a corridor for bringing oil and gas from Iraq (if the Kurdish issue can be resolved peacefully) and other parts of the Middle East, with a (readily sabotaged) pipeline already running from Kirkuk to Ceyhan.