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TODAY Tuesday 17 February 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
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TODAY Tuesday 17 February 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: The New Great Game
"The Great Game" is what Rudyard Kipling called the decades of maneuver between the British Empire and the Russian Empire over the inhospitable territories of Central Asia. To the distress of English moralists, who anathematized The Turk, the Queen's ministers usually sided with the Ottomans against the Russians in the Balkans and Caucasus, the better to sap the Tsar's strength for any designs against Afghanistan and, ultimately, India.
You would have to declare the game a tie. Russia never reached India, but she was able to help the Balkan Slavs expel the Ottomans and extend her own effective borders to include a hodgepodge of inconveniently overlapping realms of Georgians, Armenians, Azeris, Khazaks, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Kirgizis. The realms were given lines on a map and declared constituent republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; you know the rest.
Today the Great Game is once again afoot, and for two reasons: oil and gas. It is but a pale reflection of the bigger game being played around the Persian Gulf, but it promises to grow more robust with time. The 13 February edition of The Economist (with Tony Blair on the cover) has a special insert on increasingly important Central Asia, and it's worth a look (call 212-541-5730 for copies).
In the best hyper-rationalist Economist tradition, reporter Zanny Minton Beddoes explains why. "The world consumes around 70 million barrels of oil a day....[G]lobal demand for oil is set to rise by at least a third by 2010, to between 92 million and 97 million barrels per day. Most of the increase will be due to rising populations and rapid economic growth in South and East Asia. Total natural gas consumption is currently around 78 trillion cubic feet a year. As rich countries increasingly rely on gas, demand is also likely to soar.
"These forecasts are not set in stone. A more serious effort to reduce global warming, for instance, could lower demand for fossil fuels, although it would benefit natural gas. The same is true for technological innovation, particularly breakthroughs in the use of hydrogen as an energy source. Protracted economic stagnation, particularly in Asia, would also weaken future demand. These caveats aside, global demand looks set to rise."
Well. What supply will meet that demand? The Persian Gulf, mostly, for its proven reserves dwarf all others. But the industrialized countries have done well over the past 25 years in using additional petroleum sources as leverage against high prices set in the Middle East: Europe has the North Sea fields (running down quickly) and the US has Venezuela. The basin of the Caspian Sea won't rival the basin of the Persian Gulf for oil and gas richness, but it looks to be more productive than any other area, save Siberia, and it promises to act as a Turkic geopolitical counterweight to the Arab lands of the Gulf.
This new Great Game will be deucedly complicated. Religion is the great wild card. How much of a glue is the Islam of Arab, Persian, and Turk? Will a resurgent nationalist/Christian Russia seek to revenge its current humiliations (my 20-year-old son is in St. Petersburg these days, and reports that the rock'n'roll bars are full of young Russians who want to pick a fight over American and Iraq), and can it do so by making common cause with the Muslim peoples it once subjugated?
Meanwhile, of course, the United States has lately backed itself into a figurative corner of the Gulf. Aptly attacked from both left and right -- just what do you expect these air strikes to accomplish? -- the Administration and its little band of English-speaking allies has to do something or other, but only because not doing something or other seems worse. Who knows what will happen?
Prophecy may not be given to us, but hindsight sure is: this fight with Iraq was and is about oil. It's not only about oil -- need we add that Saddam is an evil warmonger? -- but there wouldn't be a fight if it weren't for oil. Whatever happens in the next couple of weeks, you'll be wanting to brush up on your Caspian Sea geography for the decades ahead.
Unless... Maybe, as Ms. Beddoes suggests, demand for carbon fuels by the rich countries tapers off because of "a serious effort to reduce global warming" and/or because of "technological innovations" in bringing hydrogen fuels on line. Not a bad agenda.
TODAY ON THE SITE
The American Association for the Advancement of Science has been holding its annual meeting in Philadelphia over the weekend, and our Brian Levendal is there, filing daily dispatches. Prosperous America is once again embracing Science -- we don't exactly know how it makes us rich but we know it makes us rich -- and the President gave a speech at the meeting reminding the audience that his new budget calls for biggish increases for the National Academy of Science, the National Institutes of Medicine, and the Centers for Disease Control. Check in with Brian on the scenes behind the scenes.
Recent "Today" columns:
2/13: Windmills
2/12: Stuart Eizenstat's Smart Bomb
2/11: Alligator in the Coal Mine
2/10: Inconvenient Public Opinion
2/9: Remember Penn Station
2/6: Adam Smith and Automobile Efficiency
2/5: Clean Water, Naturally
2/4: Roll, Storms, Roll
2/3: Land Purchase Fever
2/2: Groundhog Day in the Persian Gulf
1/30: Trees and Hormones
1/29: Things To Come (2)
1/28: Things To Come
1/27: 'Bye, 'Bye Brazil
1/26: Jaywalking and Jaydriving
1/23: Good Biotech, Bad Biotech
1/22: No More Roads
1/21: Swordfish
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