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Sunanda K. Datta-Ray

This is the Great Game of the new millennium, and the Caspian Sea could be the Persian Gulf of the coming decades. Ostensibly to suppress terrorism, Operation Enduring Freedom secured its approaches for America.

IT CAN be only a matter of time before the US again intervenes, as the former President, Mr Bill Clinton, did, in the hectic jockeying over the Caspian Sea's vast hydrocarbon reserves. For, though Russia seems all set to steal a march over the four other littoral countries, Mr George W. Bush is an oil-man, like his father, and understands Halford Mackinder's shrewd comment that "who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island. Who rules the World-Island commands the World."

Mackinder was a 20th century British geographer to whom we owe the concept of geopolitics and who used World-Island to signify the Eurasian landmass. It is not territorial control that is at stake now but control of economic resources. This is the Great Game of the new millennium, and the Caspian Sea could be the Persian Gulf of the coming decades. Ostensibly to suppress terrorism, Operation Enduring Freedom secured its approaches for America.

Though an $8-billion international consortium is already in production off the Azerbaijan coast, a high-profile attempt to clinch an overall deal failed on April 23-24 when the leaders of Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan held an unprecedented summit conference in the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat.

The proposal that each littoral country should share the Caspian in accordance with its shoreline proved unacceptable to countries with a smaller seafront, while those with a longer seafront opposed the idea of five equal shares.

In the wake of the failed summit, the Russian President, Mr Vladimir Putin, announced that Moscow would push for a series of bilateral deals instead of an overall agreement. He has also ordered Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov, commander-in-chief of the Russian Navy, to involve his country's Caspian fleet in staging military exercises this summer because "we have had no opportunity to test it in a decade".

Expecting a decisive say in the distribution of the Caspian's oil riches, Moscow is planning to hold what is billed as an "Oil and Gas Summit: Caspian XXI" on May 23-24 in Russia's Caspian capital of Astrakhan.

The American Heritage Foundation estimated the sea's fuel wealth, which is regarded as larger than the combined deposits of Alaska and the North Sea, at 24 billion barrels, while according to Mr John J. Maresca, international vice-president of the American oil giant, Unocal, reserves amount to 236 trillion cubic feet of proven gas and more than 60 billion barrels of crude.

Some of the most formidable names in American public life were associated with Unocal's ambitious plans for two major pipelines to transport Turkmen gas and oil through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. One 1,700-km pipeline would convey a million barrels of oil a day from the Turkmen fields at Charjou to a Pakistani port on the Arabian Sea. The other shorter (1,200-km) pipeline was for a trillion cubic feet of gas from Dauletabad, also in Turkmenistan, to India, which Unocal regarded as the market of the future.

Senior Republican and Democratic officials like Dr Henry Kissinger, Mr Lawrence A. Eagleburger, Mr Samuel R. Berger, Mr Richard Armitage, Senator Howard Baker, Ambassador Robert Oakley and Mr Zbigniew Brzezinski gave their blessings to Unocal, sustaining the suspicion that this was Washington's way of doing business with the Taliban.

Oil is not the Caspian's only attraction. Two-thirds of the world's sturgeon fish live here, and though fishing is controlled, poaching is - 10 times the official fishing. This richly lucrative business inspired a famous schoolboy doggerel, "Caviar comes from the virgin sturgeon/The virgin sturgeon is a very fine fish/The virgin sturgeon needs no urging /That's why caviar is such a rare dish."

Terrorism, drug smuggling, navigation, and pollution and environment protection are other items on Moscow's agenda. But the former Asian republics of the old Soviet Union are worried about Russia's military muscle, especially with the Russian Ambassador to Iran, Mr Alexander Maryasov, warning "some politicians" not "to seek military aid from non-littoral states in order to strengthen their naval forces in the Caspian".

No doubt with an eye on an interventionist US, Mr Maryasov added, "Russia categorically opposes any outside military presence in the Caspian as a development, which could entail further destabilisation."

Fears are understandable. The US is the world's biggest consumer of fuel, devouring daily a 17 million barrels. Domestic production accounts for only 2 per cent of the oil and 3 per cent of the gas America needs. Saudi Arabia provides a quarter of America's fuel but Crown Prince Abdallah's recent abortive attempt to solve the West Asian crisis suggested that Riyadh's permanent goodwill cannot be assumed. Washington is haunted by the prospect of another West Asian conflict that would hold up oil supplies from the Persian Gulf.

America aims at minimising Russian influence over the Caspian reserves, blocking China's entry into the theatre, and preventing Iran from playing a lead role in the Great Game. But Iran's President Mohammad Khatami recently visited Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in order to boost his country's Central Asian ties, and the next Caspian summit is tentatively scheduled to be held in Teheran.

The Clinton administration tried to achieve its ends by pushing through two agreements for pipelines that would ignore China, cut out Iran and reduce Russia's role. The Bush administration has yet to show its hand, but a fulfilment of Lord Wavell's prediction that "the next great struggle for world power" would be over Asia's oil reserves still cannot be ruled out.

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