An Oil-Powered Russia

An interview with Steve Levine, author of The Oil and The Glory ($28, Random House, 2007).

Forbes.com: In the book, you describe how a handful of policy advisers convinced the Clinton administration to put its weight behind a planned oil pipeline stretching more than 1,000 miles from Azerbaijan to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan in Turkey. Now that the pipeline exists, why is it so important?

Steve Levine: The most important fact in Russia’s re-emergence on the world stage is energy, and its most important instrument in parlaying that into actual power–and projecting it abroad–is control of the flow of that oil and natural gas from the former Soviet Union to places abroad. This pipeline–the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, with its million barrels of daily exports–is the first significant break in Russia’s previous monopoly control over all oil and natural gas from the Caspian Sea states.


When the line starting shipping that oil in 2006, it entirely changed the geopolitics of this important region–Central Asia and the Caucasus. Now Russia no longer calls the shots with impunity. Azerbaijan and Georgia, for example, rely on this pipeline–and a companion natural gas line–for the political independence they often act out. Of course, that’s somewhat dated news now. It’s Russia who so far has learned the lessons of that enormous U.S.-backed diplomatic triumph; it’s got a handful of carefully selected oil-natural gas pipelines on the drawing board that, if built unanswered by rival, western-built lines, will grab back much influence in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and project more of its petro-power into Europe down the road. I call it the Pipeline War.

Forbes