The importance of the Caspian region to American foreign policy is
grossly exaggerated. Until the demise of the Soviet Union, not even
Antarctica was more remote from the American mind than were the lands
around the Caspian Sea, and this for good reasons. Of all the new
states in the area, only the Christian ones of Georgia and Armenia in
the southern Caucasus had ever existed as nations before the conquest
of the region by the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century. The
Muslim areas were previously ruled by a variety of princes (including
in some cases and for certain periods the Shah of Iran), and most of
what are now Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan were inhabited
by tribal confederations that acknowledged the rule of no state.
"National identities" in the modern sense only took shape under
Russian and Soviet rule.

With the Soviet collapse, the nine "union republics" of the region
became internationally recognized independent states: Georgia,
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Russia itself. At around the same time,
several of the autonomous regions incorporated into these republics
by Soviet fiat revolted and tried to assert their own independence:
Karabakh from Azerbaijan, Abkhazia and Ossetia from Georgia, and
Chechnya from Russia itself. Georgia also experienced a civil war
between forces loyal to the nationalist president, Zviad
Gamsakhurdia, and supporters of the former local communist boss,
Eduard Shevardnadze. In Tajikistan, a bloody civil war between
Islamist and tribal forces and the former communists was won by the
latter, with strong support from Russia and Uzbekistan.

In the early 1990s, America's very limited interest in this region
mostly expressed itself through support for the Christian Armenians
in their conflict with Azerbaijan. There was also some concern about
the threat of increased Iranian influence. In the mid-1990s, however,
four factors combined to alter this picture: the prospect (vastly
exaggerated) that the oil and gas reserves of the region would rival
those of the Persian Gulf; the rapid deterioration in relations
between the United States and Russia; the growing instability within
Russia itself; and strengthened U.S. ties to Turkey. With a strong
admixture of the personal interests of some State Department
officials and academics, the result was an ambitious strategy of
attempting to "roll back" Russian influence in the region and to
replace it with a new, more benign American hegemony. This strategy
was always naive, and now appears thoroughly inappropriate. But as so
often is the case, the policy itself continues to trundle along under
its own momentum, and is likely to carry on doing so until the road
ahead curves and the cart ends up in the ditch.