Foul play in the Great Game

In a landmark speech at Johns Hopkins University in 1997, the then-US deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, said: “For the last several years, it has been fashionable to proclaim or at least to predict, a replay of the ‘Great Game’ in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The implication of course is that the driving dynamic of the region, fueled and lubricated by oil, will be the competition of great powers to the disadvantage of the people who live there.