THE TIDE TURNS 335
held true throughout the Middle World, and these two sets of issues con-
tinued to intertwine throughout Dar al-Islam to the end of the century.
East oflran, the Cold War simply looked like the Great Game revisited.
The differences were only cosmetic. What had been czarist Russia was now
called the Soviet Union. The role once played by Great Britain now be-
longed to the United States. The dynamics, however, were the same: the
intrigues, the pressures, the threat of violence, and the actual bloodshed.
The scale was bigger, though. The Great Game had unfolded along the
line where the Russian Empire butted against the British one. The Cold War
was driven by U.S. determination to block Soviet expansion around the
world; and since new nation-states were emerging everywhere, and most of
them had the potential to end up as either Soviet or U.S. allies, the line of
scrimmage in the Cold War could be anywhere on earth. Every potentially
disputed country could receive money and guns from both superpowers, one
funneling aid to the government, the other to some anti-government insur-
gency, depending on which way that country tilted.
The core battlefield of the Great Game had been Iran, Afghanistan, and
central Asia, and this region remained in play. The Russians of the nine-
teenth century had wanted to push south through Afghanistan to the Persian
Gulf to secure a warm water port for their navies and shipping. The Soviets
had the same interest, but with added stakes: geologists were now confirm-
ing that roughly 65 percent of the world's petroleum lay under and around
the Persian Gulf and in a few other Muslim countries of North Africa (and
much of the rest of it, geologists would later find, lay in the Muslim coun-
tries of Central Asia, north of Afghanistan.) With global industrialization es-
calating off the charts, the significance of oil was still soaring.
Although oil had a huge political impact on the Muslim world, its so-
cial impact was probably even deeper. Ever since the 1930s, countries that
had oil had been chipping away at the rapacious terms of those early leases.
Every few years one or another of them had managed to renegotiate its
agreements with foreign oil corporations and come away with incremen-
tally better terms. By 1950, the "oil exporting" countries were generally re-
ceiving as much as 50 percent of the revenues from their oil, and from that
time on considerable wealth began flowing into the region.
This sudden gush of wealth might have had a very different impact if
only democratic institutions had emerged in the oil-rich nations before oil