Today I got to see Steve LeVine do something very rare indeed: hold a book launch party at CSIS. His talk, which mostly summarized the broader geopolitics of pipeline politics surrounding Russia, was vastly curtailed from its intended length, and so came across as sort of vague and pretty awkward. I felt bad for him, because he skipped over some of the most interesting bits, including the machinations of John Deuss and James Giffen (the mere mention of which elicited sneers from the men around the conference table). He also skipped through what I considered to be the most interesting part of his work—old Baku—which was too bad, as that could have added some good historical context that is usually missing from these discussions.
Much like with Afghan Finance Minister Anwar ul-Haq Ahadi, the crowd was the most interesting part. I got the impression I was the only attendee who had arrived having already read his book, based on the questioning. There were a lot of former oilmen, diplomats, and government officials there, as well as several current ones. This ordinarily wouldn’t be big of a deal, fairly standard stuff at these talks depending on the subject, but several were either directly or tangentially involved in the events LeVine describes—which brought vanity, as well as vested interest, into the questioning. In fact, many of the men who dominated the discussion had an air of smug self-congratulation about themselves for what LeVine calls one of the biggest foreign policy victories of the last decade. To which I say, “meh.”
I stopped being amazed at (and impressed by) DC’s socially incestuous audiences some time ago—there’s way too much grandstanding for way too little output. And indeed there was a ton of grandstanding in play, as everyone pushed their pet agenda and talking points at LeVine, who remained level headed and fair throughout. Still, it was neat to see LeVine in person—he’s a really nice guy.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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