Great Game, Greatly Exaggerated

It is rare to read anything about natural resources in Eurasia these days that does not invoke a “Great Game.” There is little agreement about the finer details of this game, but writers on both sides of the Atlantic like to spice up their accounts of Nabucco or the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline with comparisons to the 19th century struggles between great powers at the heart of Eurasia.

The conventional wisdom about this 21st century iteration is that major state powers—EU, US, Russia, China, India— are mired in a web of geopolitical intrigue, in which they carve out “spheres of influence” and covetously eye natural resources and prized transit routes. Meanwhile, a host of private and semi-private corporations jockey for access to, and control of, gas- and oilfields, pipeline paths, and the weak, cash-starved governments who can bless the companies’ presence on their sovereign territory. Even a few classical geography texts have been dusted off for their insights into how to win this game, such as Sir Halford Mackinder’s 1904 “The geographical pivot of history,” in which he developed his Heartland Theory. Are lessons from the 19th century apt metaphors for the present era? Should policy makers “think like Victorians,” as Robert Kaplan famously asked in 2009? My short answer: No.

Recent incarnations of Victorian geopolitics suggest that struggles over access to energy and other natural resources could herald a reprise of the paranoid, cynical views of Eurasia of a century ago, where access to resources and territorial control of the heartland trump all else. “Geopolitics”—a term coined by the conservative Swedish nationalist Rudolf Kjellén—was a field of study rooted in the scientific-deterministic ways of thinking that eventually culminated in the Nazis’ territorial grabs and murderous racial ideologies. Hence its use in the context of struggles over territorial access in Eurasia should be treated with a fair dose of skepticism, and I would caution that the Great Game is another blast from the past that should be used a bit more reflectively. It is an older expression than geopolitics, and is generally ascribed to the struggles for influence in Central Asia between tsarist Russia and imperial Great Britain.

The problem with these narratives is that they tend to exist on a plane unto themselves, well removed from reality, yet all encompassing. A Great Game appeals to our appetite for “news-by-sports-metaphor,” especially when it comes to parts of the world we don’t really care about but know we should. Writers like them because they seem to awake primordial territorial instincts in their readers’ minds (i.e. they’re highly readable), and they are convenient substitutes for any deep understanding of what is going on “over there.” At least for Americans, the purported playing field of the current Great Game—the Eurasian core between Turkey and China—also happens to be the most conspicuous blind spot in our mental maps of the world. Judging by the collective shrug reaction to Herman Cain’s recent comments that he didn’t know the leader of “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan,” a place that doesn’t exist but is nevertheless in his words a “small insignificant state,” don’t expect this to change anytime soon. (Happy Geography Awareness Week, November 13–19, 2011, by the way!)

It is clear that natural resources are viewed as prizes by a number of global actors, particularly the large multi-national companies that exist to extract, refine, and sell them. But when it comes to pipelines and gas contracts, Great Game makes better copy than the rather more mundane reality. Europe, India, and China need gas and have a number of options for procuring imports. Azerbaijan, Russia, and several Central Asian countries have gas and wish to sell it at the highest possible price. The calculus the involved companies and governments use to decide these matters is much more about cost-benefit analysis than about moving pawns and rooks on a chessboard.