James Bond and Bill Clinton are both eyeing the same remote terrain these days. Whether Clinton's script for the Caspian Sea region will manage to avoid the geopolitical land mines that confront James Bond remains to be seen. But the film highlights the very real dangers lurking in the region. PNS commentator Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and the author of the forthcoming book, "Resource Wars: Global Geopolitics in the 21st Century."

The timing could not have been more fortuitous: on the day before the new James Bond thriller about oil intrigue in the Caspian Sea region was due to open up in movie theaters around the United States, President Clinton presided over the signing of a new Caspian Sea oil scheme in Istanbul.

For the first time ever, this remote part of the world was featured in both the business and the entertainment sections of major newspapers. The fact that these two events occurred so close together was purely coincidental--MGM could hardly have predicted that a complex oil deal, years in the making, would be ready for signing the day before the opening of the latest Bond feature, "The World is Not Enough." Nevertheless, both events highlight the rising importance of the Caspian Sea basin as a source of petroleum. Both, moreover, hint at the dangers lurking in the region.

At this point, geologists are not sure exactly how much oil is available for extraction in the Caspian Sea region--some say 40 billion barrels (about twice the amount found in the North Sea area), some say 100 billion and some claim that as much as 200 billion barrels are waiting to be tapped there. If the higher numbers prevail, the Caspian would become the world's second largest source of oil, exceeded only by the Persian Gulf.

Before all this oil can be made available to consumers in the West, however, producers must overcome a critical problem: because the Caspian Sea itself is landlocked, all oil leaving the area must travel by pipeline--and the only pipelines now in existence pass through Chechnya or other areas of chronic violence. To overcome this problem, the major oil companies--with strong U.S. backing--hope to build a new pipeline system from Baku in Azerbaijan to the Mediterranean coast that would skirt the most dangerous areas of the Caucasus and pass through Turkey (a NATO ally) on the way to global markets.

This is where James Bond and President Clinton enter the picture. In the Bond movie, Agent 007 is assigned by Her Majesty's Government to protect this new pipeline against attacks by unknown terrorists. As it turns out, the terrorists are really a decoy to distract attention from a more complex and nefarious plot to block the Bosporus Sea and thus make the Baku-Mediterranean pipeline the only secure source of Caspian oil--thereby producing untold riches for its owners. (All other existing pipelines terminate on the Black Sea coast and require onward transportation by tanker through the Bosporus.) True to form, Bond saves the day by averting a nuclear explosion at the very last minute.

President Clinton's interest in the new Caspian pipeline stems from somewhat similar concerns. In the past, all of the Caspian's oil went north to Russia or south to Iran. Now, in this new era of geopolitical competition, Clinton wants the oil to move along an east-west axis from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan (this part traversing the Caspian Sea itself) and thence by land to Georgia and Turkey, thereby avoiding both Russia and Iran. To accomplish this, he has waged a personal campaign to persuade the leaders of all four countries involved to embrace his preferred routing. The agreement signed by these four on November 18th in Istanbul achieves this key objective.

While the Bond version of this story is entirely fictional, it does raise important warning signs regarding the risk of conflict raised by the Clinton gameplan. Although the leaders of Azerbaijan and Georgia have pledged to provide the necessary security for the east-west pipeline, neither country is strong enough to overcome insurgent and separatist forces operating within their territory. (Azerbaijan faces a separatist threat from the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh; Georgia faces separatist forces in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia.)

This means that the pipeline could be exposed to constant attack from guerrillas, as depicted in the Bond movie. Should this prove to be the case, it is not unlikely that Washington will find it necessary to mimic London and send its own facsimiles of Bond to the region.

President Clinton has already been accused of imitating the cinema--specifically, the 1998 movie "Wag the Dog"--by attacking Iraq and Serbia to distract attention from his domestic troubles. In this case, Clinton obviously began his Caspian endeavors before James Bond's creators decided on the pipeline theme. Nevertheless, there is a real danger here that the White House is downplaying the risk of violence foreshadowed by the Bond movie, and so is creating a situation in which Washington will again imitate the cinema by sending American troops into danger.