Interesting map of the Caspian Sea, western Iran, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Eastern Iraq, illustrating the so-called "Guerre du Petrole" (Petroleum War).

The map focuses on the growing importance of the Middle East and the Caucasus to global oil supply in the 1940s and the geopolitical implications of that shift in energy supply.

The map points out the fact that the Soviet Union and the British relied very heavily on the oil supplied by the regions shown on the map, and were they to be cut off from that supply, they would be in great trouble:

Cut from the Caucasus and the Caspian the Russians would be reduced to their wells between Urals and Volga, whose production is problematic. Prized from Iran and Iraq, the British armies of Asia and Africa should get their petrol at the other end of the world, in Central America or in the United States. This is perhaps the fate of the war that is being fought around Caucasus.

The map establishes the stakes of protecting the region from Nazi Germany and presages the future development of the Middle East as the global center of the production of oil.