Under the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan lie rich oil reserves that have hardly been exploited. These reserves could easily match the supply from Venezuela some day. One big obstacle: getting this crude to a port on the Black Sea so it can make its way to the West.

Russia wouldn’t mind having the pipelines run through its territory. That way, it could exact a toll and exert a measure of control. But for security reasons, the United States wants to cut Russia out of the loop. Instead, it prefers a pipe across the former Soviet state of Georgia, after a brief pass through the neighboring country of Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea.

But there’s a big problem with this. Historically, Russia has been very sensitive about foreign powers setting up camp in countries near its borders. (Georgia is said to have the biggest CIA outpost in the world.) So naturally Russia sees U.S. entanglement in Georgia as a major threat, says Stephen Cohen, a professor of Russian studies at New York University. “In the last few years, the U.S. government has adopted the attitude that Georgia now belongs to the U.S.,” he says. “It has become obscenely provocative.”

Even though you don’t hear about this potential problem on the evening news, at some point these tensions may boil over in a big way. “Georgia could become the place for a major conflict between the U.S. and Russia, one that might come very close to being another Cold War,” Cohen says.

Those are strong words. But Cohen is a leading expert on the region, one who has followed the politics there for several decades, previously at Princeton University. This kind of conflict would not only throw Caspian oil supplies into doubt. Just as importantly, it would create the kind of global uncertainty that spooks the oil markets.