The Great Game – Then and Now Michael Mandelbaum To refer to the politics and economics of Caspian Basin energy as the new Great Game is to deploy an historical analogy. It is to compare what is happening in the Caspian Basin region now with the imperial rivalry between Russia and British India in the Caucasus and Central and Southwest Asia in the nineteenth century. The deployment of analogies in this way is familiar, useful, and perhaps even necessary. After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate. During the Cold War, American diplomats were perpetually concerned to avoid another Munich and American military officials strove to prevent another Pearl Harbor. Lately, we have been warned about the need to avoid, in Kosovo, another Bosnia. The appeal of this particular analogy, moreover, is plain. There are striking parallels between the events to which it refers that were important in the last century and those to which it also refers that promise to be important in the next. The region in question is the same. In both cases, high stakes were involved – in the nineteenth century the control of territory and the security of what were then the two largest empires on the planet, in the twenty-first the enormous wealth that flows from the exploitation of energy resources. Conflict is a feature of both cases. Then, two great European powers were rivals. Now, although there are many players in this new Great Game, they often have different interests. And lurking beneath the surface of current events, at least in the eyes of some, is the specter of the revival of the great antagonism of global politics in the second half of the twentieth century, the one between the United States and the Soviet Union. While analogies are useful, however, they can also be misleading. They smuggle in assumptions that can be wrong. That, I believe, is the case here. The differences between the Anglo-Russian rivalry in the nineteenth century and the politics and economics of Caspian Basin energy in the twenty-first are more important than the similarities. 85