The Next Great Game

‘OF course, this is your first time to Azerbaijan,” a young Azerbaijani said to me when we dined together a few weeks ago in Baku, the capital of his nation.

“Well, no, actually,” I told him. I had been to Azerbaijan eight years before and had spent a week or so in Baku, which was just then starting to shake off the dust of Soviet domination and a bloody war with Armenia to discover, Jed Clampett-style, that all that Caspian Sea oil meant only one thing: Baby, we’re rich.