Sunday 19 August 2018

The Caspian is a sea after all — but landlocked in geopolitics | Arab News

The Caspian is a sea after all — but landlocked in geopolitics | Arab News:

Despite its name, the Caspian Sea by strict definition a very large lake. The body of water that historically marks the boundary between Europe and Asia has no contiguous connection with any other outlet that would link it with the open oceans, so strictly speaking cannot be called a sea.

That might seem the ultimate pedantry, but actually it has profound implications for energy policy in the crucial central Asian and East European regions, with big knock-on effects for Middle East energy economics.

The Caspian basin is strategically important as the place where the tectonic plates of empires — the Russian, the Ottoman and the Persian — banged up against each other for centuries. But it has always been one of the world’s great energy-rich zones.

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