Remote, forbidding, and risky, the Caspian Sea lengthy tantalized the area with its big oil reserves. yet outsiders, blocked by way of the closed Soviet process, couldn’t get to it. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and a wholesale rush into the zone erupted. in addition to oilmen, representatives of the world’s best countries flocked to the Caspian for a proportion of the thirty billion barrels of confirmed oil reserves at stake, and a stressful geopolitical fight started. the most gamers have been Moscow and Washington–the former trying to keep regulate of its satellite tv for pc states, and the latter reason on dislodging Russia to the good thing about the West.

The Oil and the Glory is the gripping account of this most up-to-date part within the epochal fight for keep watch over of the earth’s “black gold.” Steve LeVine, who used to be dependent within the quarter for The Wall highway magazine, the recent York Times, and Newsweek, weaves an awesome story of high-stakes political gamesmanship, greed, and scandal, set in a single of the main opaque corners of the area. In LeVine’s telling, the world’s strength giants jockey for place within the wealthy Kazakh and Azeri oilfields, whereas superpowers search to realize a strategic foothold within the quarter and to maintain one another in cost. on the middle of the tale is the competition to construct and function strength pipelines out of the landlocked sector, the most important to controlling the Caspian and its oil. The oil pipeline that resulted, the longest on the earth, is between Washington’s maximum overseas coverage triumphs in not less than a decade and a part.

Along the best way, LeVine introduces such gamers as James Giffen, an American moneyman who was once additionally the political “fixer” for oil businesses wanting to do company at the Caspian and the dealer for Kazakhstan’s president and ministers; John Deuss, the fancy Dutch oil dealer who gained substantial yet misplaced even larger; Heydar Aliyev, the oft-misunderstood Azeri president who transcended his earlier as a Soviet Politburo member and masterminded a scheme to loosen Russian keep watch over over its former colonies within the Caspian quarter; and all demeanour of rogues, adventurers, and others drawn by means of the impossible to resist pull of untold riches and the prospective “final frontier” of the fossil-fuel period. the wider tale is of the geopolitical questions of the Caspian oil bonanza, reminiscent of no matter if Russia could be a relied on best friend and buying and selling companion with the West, and what Washington’s access into this significant yet chaotic quarter will suggest for its long term stability.

In an extreme and suspenseful narrative, The Oil and the Glory is the definitive chronicle of occasions which are understood by means of few, yet whose political and fiscal influence may be either profound and lasting.