The Oil and the Glory by Steve LeVine

Over breakfast recently I’ve been hearing reports on NPR about how a dispute
between Russia and Ukraine over a gas pipeline has left hundreds of thousands of Europeans freezing in their homes. The control of oil and gas is a powerful weapon for those who seek wealth and power, and The Oil and the Glory describes in detail how the struggle for oil has played itself out around the great saltwater lake known as the Caspian Sea.

Though five countries border the sea, Steve LeVine focuses primarily on Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, which face each other across the water. His story is long and convoluted, with a numerous cast of conmen, rogues, and entrepreneurs. It is nearly impossible to summarize, but much of it concerns the efforts of companies like Chevron and BP to gain access to some of the world’s richest oil fields and the efforts of middlemen to curry favor with local governments.

For a while, it may seem that the moral of this story is that nice guys finish last. One of the book’s central characters is an operator named Jim Giffen, who made himself the “king of Kazakhstan” and a very rich man through a combination of bluff, intimidation, toadying to the powerful, and some genuine talent for the oil business. Yet by the end of the book, he and some others like him have had their comeuppance.

A closer reading shows that some of the players could have succeeded just by being a little nicer. Chevron, in particular, seems to have skipped charm school. At one point the company learned that one of its ex-employees had just become a senior official in the government of Kazakhstan. We’re in, they thought. But the ex-employee apparently didn’t have fond memories of the way he was treated as a foreigner and an underling at Chevron.

LeVine doesn’t have much to say about the “resource curse”—the idea that countries like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan that sit on top of oil or other mineral wealth so often end up poorer than their neighbors. Indeed, he doesn’t introduce the concept until late in the book. His focus is mostly on the major players. But it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see that few of these folks are interested in the well-being of the average Kazakh and Azeri, or that much of the wealth that comes out of the ground is spent on luxury goods or political influence.