The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea by Steve Levine

Author:Steve Levine
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Industries, Technology & Engineering, Political Science, Petroleum Industry and Trade - Caspian Sea Region - History, Caspian Sea Region, Caspian Sea Region - Politics and Government, Petroleum, Geopolitics, Petroleum Industry and Trade, History & Theory, Human Geography, General, Geopolitics - Caspian Sea Region - History, World, History, Business & Economics, Social Science
ISBN: 9780375506147
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2007-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

The development of a new foreign policy in Washington sometimes proceeds in a circular fashion. Sheila Heslin got a painful reminder of that in March after replacing Rosemarie Forsythe at the National Security Council. She was asked to draft talking points for Vice President Al Gore to use in a meeting with Kazakhstan’s prime minister. Heslin blended elements of her “iron umbilical cord” paper with language on the virtues of multiple pipelines; as such, it could be read as a brief against yielding to Russia in the Caspian.

Her work impressed Gore’s forceful and articulate foreign policy adviser, Leon Fuerth. But he wondered why the material seemed so unfamiliar and began asking about its history. Had these policy statements gone through the proper approval process? It was decided that Heslin’s NSC supervisor, Coit “Chip” Blacker, should pass final judgment. Heslin rushed her notes to Blacker at his home on a Saturday morning, and he okayed them.

Two days later, the vice president used her talking points in his sit-down with the Kazakh prime minister. When Heslin’s critics within the administration learned of this, they went on the offensive, especially the “Russia First” camp. They accused her of bureaucratic sleight of hand—attempting to slip in a new policy position when nobody was looking. Some colleagues “wouldn’t talk to me. Whatever I did was considered pretty bad,” Heslin said. Collins, the ambassador-at-large, was among the aggravated. “That was no policy. That was a cable,” he said of Grossman’s pipeline announcement, “a throwaway” intended to mollify Turkey and nothing more.

Heslin was puzzled. Rosemarie Forsythe had collected the presumably necessary signatures and had specifically “made [Collins] sign it to make sure it was policy.” But a postmortem of the dustup concluded that the policy statements incorporated into Gore’s talking points should have been reviewed at a higher level—at the so-called Deputies Committee, a senior policymaking group. Lacking that, the multiple-pipeline policy so optimistically shaped by Forsythe and enunciated by Grossman in Ankara was not policy at all.

Three months later, Heslin had an opportunity to begin picking up the pieces. Al Gore was about to meet with Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, their fifth encounter since opening a back-channel dialogue in 1993 to bridge differences between the two countries. As unlikely as it seemed, the two men—one a policy wonk born into a political dynasty, the other a tongue-tied former Red factory director—warmed to each other, resulting in several important agreements. Now they were to discuss Russia’s sale of nuclear technology to Iran. But Gore, at President Clinton’s request, also had the issue of oil in the former Soviet republics on his duty list. Heslin thought the time might be ripe to slip in some of her concerns; if he wanted to, Chernomyrdin could defuse some of the tensions over Caspian pipelines.

Once again, she would have to do some groundwork. Heslin walked Leon Fuerth through her central argument that energy was emerging as a major issue in the region—and that the U.S. government lacked a policy to address it.

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