I've also trekked various of the overlapping modern Silk Roads, or perhaps Silk Pipelines, of possible future energy flows from Shanghai to Istanbul, annotating my own DIY routes for LNG (liquefied natural gas). Map showing Central Asian completed and projected pipelines (Oh, by the way, the map of Pipelineistan is chicken-scratched with acronyms, so get used to them!) I've crossed the Caspian in an Azeri cargo ship just to follow the $4 billion Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, better known in this chess game by its acronym, BTC, through the Caucasus. Since the second half of the 1990s, I've been hooked on pipelines. Think of it, geographically, as Pipelineistan.Īll geopolitical junkies need a fix. Put another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. I like to think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Our good ol' friend the nonsensical "Global War on Terror," which the Pentagon has slyly rebranded "the Long War," sports a far more important, if half-hidden, twin - a global energy war. What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia will provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game. Liquid War Across Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific: Postcard from PipelineistanĬzech translation available here Pepe Escobar
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