<![CDATA[It’s The Oil, Stupid]]>How soon we forget that Putin wrote his grad school thesis on the strategic importance of Russia’s energy resources. Yes, as Tom Friedman points out, the Georgia mess is in part due to Western over-reach and Saakashvili’s hubris, but at its center is the Russian state trying to play the big card it still has:

No one quite believed in the mid-1990s that Western oil companies could pump Caspian crude across two war-torn republics, Azerbaijan and Georgia, to a quiet bay on the Mediterranean, and that they would do it without so much as a by-your-leave to the two regional superpowers, Iran and Russia.

But before a bomb (probably not Russian) put out part of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline some two weeks ago, it was carrying 40-45 million tons per year to the international market. Another line is feeding Caspian gas across Georgia to Turkish consumers. And Russia can do nothing.

Only last month it looked like Russian resistance to improving pipeline capacity across its territory would force Kazakhstan to increase its trans-Caspian tanker-born oil transport. Meanwhile, the transport of Azeri (and possibly Kazakh) oil through Georgia and Turkey ran counter to all Russian aims.

This is because Russia can exercise no political control and get no share of the profits.

]]>