[BRIEF NOTE] Helms on the Southern Tier
Nov. 16th, 2004 06:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldPearsall Helms has recently completed an excellent series of posts on post-Communist Central Asia and the Caucasus, with particular former southern tier of the Soviet Union.
The analysis is centered upon Lutz Kleveman's The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia. The original Great Game was the Anglo-Russian competition over central Asia in the 19th century, with Britain pushing north and west from the Raj even as Russia successfully moved south to seize and colonize the choicest parts of central Asia, a region mostly Muslim and formerly within the Persian cultural sphere. The New Great Game of Kleveman's book was enabled, of course, by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the eight different independent states of the southern tier (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan in central Asia, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan in the South Caucasus). Motivation came from Western, particularly American, concerns regarding the need to diversify oil supplies beyond the politically unreliable Middle East, with a secondary goal being the permanent weakening of Russian influence in the area, and tertiary goals being the limitation of Chinese and Iranian influence.
As Helms makes clear in the third segment of his review, these fragile countries are easy prey for external powers. Ruled by erratic, incompetent, and occasional deadly political regimes of dubious legitimacy, devastated by economic breakdowns which provoke social decay and mass emigration (particularly but not exclusively on the part of non-titular nationalities which immigrated to the region during the Tsarist and Soviet eras), and incapable of responding to destructive foreign interference beyond the capacity of the locals, the eight former Soviet republics (along with Afghanistan, itself a country devastated by the 1980s war and its aftereffects), the hundred million people of this region seem destined for an unpleasant future as pawns of assorted superpowers, Great Powers, ideological hegemonies, and oil companies. Would that this could change.
Helms' blog, incidentally, is marked by an excellence quite out of proportion to its youth--his recent reviews of Floridiana-related books have inspired me to search out Carl Hiaasen. Go read.
The analysis is centered upon Lutz Kleveman's The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia. The original Great Game was the Anglo-Russian competition over central Asia in the 19th century, with Britain pushing north and west from the Raj even as Russia successfully moved south to seize and colonize the choicest parts of central Asia, a region mostly Muslim and formerly within the Persian cultural sphere. The New Great Game of Kleveman's book was enabled, of course, by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the eight different independent states of the southern tier (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan in central Asia, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan in the South Caucasus). Motivation came from Western, particularly American, concerns regarding the need to diversify oil supplies beyond the politically unreliable Middle East, with a secondary goal being the permanent weakening of Russian influence in the area, and tertiary goals being the limitation of Chinese and Iranian influence.
As Helms makes clear in the third segment of his review, these fragile countries are easy prey for external powers. Ruled by erratic, incompetent, and occasional deadly political regimes of dubious legitimacy, devastated by economic breakdowns which provoke social decay and mass emigration (particularly but not exclusively on the part of non-titular nationalities which immigrated to the region during the Tsarist and Soviet eras), and incapable of responding to destructive foreign interference beyond the capacity of the locals, the eight former Soviet republics (along with Afghanistan, itself a country devastated by the 1980s war and its aftereffects), the hundred million people of this region seem destined for an unpleasant future as pawns of assorted superpowers, Great Powers, ideological hegemonies, and oil companies. Would that this could change.
Helms' blog, incidentally, is marked by an excellence quite out of proportion to its youth--his recent reviews of Floridiana-related books have inspired me to search out Carl Hiaasen. Go read.
