The New Great Game, an article dating from 2004, but still with some relevance.

Another case of the contradictions in Western foreign policy - supposedly pro-democratic and pro-freedom, in practice not always so - is Azerbaijan, which I visited back in 2004 when I was one of the few people in the British media who knew that it (or Georgia)  was a real place, or who was aware that an oil pipeline was being built from Baku to Turkey through Georgia. I had been to Georgia several times, in the Soviet era when they were part of the USSR. 

Here's an extract from the article I w...