The (Not So) Great Game
Mini Teaser: Central Asia and the Caucasus, we are often told, are vital political and economic interests for the United States. This is, to put it mildly, a gross exaggeration.
The importance of the Caspian region to American foreign policy is
grossly exaggerated. Until the demise of the Soviet Union, not even
Antarctica was more remote from the American mind than were the lands
around the Caspian Sea, and this for good reasons. Of all the new
states in the area, only the Christian ones of Georgia and Armenia in
the southern Caucasus had ever existed as nations before the conquest
of the region by the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century. The
Muslim areas were previously ruled by a variety of princes (including
in some cases and for certain periods the Shah of Iran), and most of
what are now Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan were inhabited
by tribal confederations that acknowledged the rule of no state.
"National identities" in the modern sense only took shape under
Russian and Soviet rule.
With the Soviet collapse, the nine "union republics" of the region
became internationally recognized independent states: Georgia,
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Russia itself. At around the same time,
several of the autonomous regions incorporated into these republics
by Soviet fiat revolted and tried to assert their own independence:
Karabakh from Azerbaijan, Abkhazia and Ossetia from Georgia, and
Chechnya from Russia itself. Georgia also experienced a civil war
between forces loyal to the nationalist president, Zviad
Gamsakhurdia, and supporters of the former local communist boss,
Eduard Shevardnadze. In Tajikistan, a bloody civil war between
Islamist and tribal forces and the former communists was won by the
latter, with strong support from Russia and Uzbekistan.
In the early 1990s, America's very limited interest in this region
mostly expressed itself through support for the Christian Armenians
in their conflict with Azerbaijan. There was also some concern about
the threat of increased Iranian influence. In the mid-1990s, however,
four factors combined to alter this picture: the prospect (vastly
exaggerated) that the oil and gas reserves of the region would rival
those of the Persian Gulf; the rapid deterioration in relations
between the United States and Russia; the growing instability within
Russia itself; and strengthened U.S. ties to Turkey. With a strong
admixture of the personal interests of some State Department
officials and academics, the result was an ambitious strategy of
attempting to "roll back" Russian influence in the region and to
replace it with a new, more benign American hegemony. This strategy
was always naive, and now appears thoroughly inappropriate. But as so
often is the case, the policy itself continues to trundle along under
its own momentum, and is likely to carry on doing so until the road
ahead curves and the cart ends up in the ditch.
The past importance of Central Asia came from only two sources, both
now long vanished. The first was the fact that the region lay athwart
the world's greatest trade route, between China, the Middle East and
Europe. This state of affairs disappeared at the end of the fifteenth
century, with the opening by Europeans of the sea route to Asia round
Africa, and later via the Suez Canal. It will never return as a
factor of global importance, given the capacity of modern shipping
and the enormous distances, appalling roads and high insecurity of
the land route. Economically, there has never been anything in
Central Asia itself to make it a place deserving of the world's
attention.
The second source of importance was Central Asia's capacity to
produce repeated waves of warrior nomads, at a time when the mounted
bowman was the most effective soldier in the world. This too ceased
to be relevant more than four hundred years ago, with the rise of the
musket and the cannon. In fact, the last time that developments in
Central Asia were of truly great importance for the wider world was
during the early sixteenth century, when Babur's hordes swept into
India to found the Moghul Empire. In the twentieth century, Central
Asia has at no stage played an important role in deciding the fate of the world.
Much copy has been written about the parallels between pre
sent geopolitical rivalry in Central Asia and Kipling's "Great Game"
between Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century. But it is vital
to remember that Britain was interested in the region not for reasons
of world hegemony but only because it was ruler of India. Britain's
concern was purely defensive, motivated not by a desire to conquer
Central Asia but by the fear that Russia would employ the region as a
base from which to attack India or to march through Persia to the
Gulf and threaten British lines of communication. The same fear lay
behind Britain's support for Turkey against Russia, which led to its
participation in the Crimean War. No Russian attack on the
subcontinent is currently in prospect.
Even in the nineteenth century, the rivalry between Britain and
Russia in the region was a great deal less important than
propagandists on both sides cracked it up to be. In 1907 all the
outstanding issues of respective influence and control in the region
were solved relatively easily in the negotiations leading up to the
Anglo-Russian Convention of that year. For this, two developments
were responsible: the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 had revealed the
Russian armed forces to be far less formidable than had been thought;
and, much more important, the rise of Germany threatened the
interests of both powers--not in some peripheral Asian desert, but
where they really mattered: in Europe.
Seven years later, on October 28, 1914, Turkish and German warships
dealt the death blow to more than eighty years of British
anti-Russian strategy when they attacked the Russian Black Sea ports
and heralded Turkey's entry into the First World War. Seven months
after that, British, Indian and Australian troops were dying in their
tens of thousands at Gallipoli as they struggled to smash their way
through to Constantinople and serve Britain's vital interest of
opening a supply route to the Russian armies fighting Germany on the
Eastern Front. The consequences for humanity of their failure are
almost too painful to contemplate.
An Inflated Importance
Almost a century later, the rhetoric of U.S. engagement in Central
Asia has moved far ahead of America's interests in the region, and
the resources it is willing to commit there. Present U.S. strategy in
the region is not, as is frequently stated, "dual containment" of
Iraq and Iran. It is quadruple containment, of these two states as
well as Russia and now Afghanistan (and one might even consider
adding Pakistan to that list). This is not diplomacy, it is strategy
by autopilot, with the course set a generation ago. It also commits
the cardinal sin of badly overstating the real power that the United
States is willing to commit to achieve its aims in the region.
Indeed, by providing Russia and Iran with a reason to undermine local
U.S. allies who will not be supported in a crisis, American policy
may in fact end up helping to destabilize the Caspian Basin.
While the U.S. approach to the former Soviet south has been
accompanied by a lot of pseudo-historical nonsense about the area's
putative geopolitical importance, the truth of the matter is that the
United States has always assumed it would not have to pay or fight to
secure its interests there. Instead, the boom in oil and gas
production would be the engine of local growth, of independence from
Russia, and of the extension of American and Turkish influence.
Moreover, it was believed that if the United States could help secure
their protection from Russian "meddling", the region's newly
independent states would be freed to strengthen themselves through
economic reform and democratization.
None of this has proved true. At barely 2 percent of the world's
proven oil reserves (around a thirtieth of the Gulf's reserves), it
should be blindingly obvious that Caspian energy does not constitute
a "vital U.S. interest." Nor are there any signs that this picture
will change radically in the future. Moreover, to the presently low
price of oil must be added the immense costs of poor communications,
state corruption and incompetence in the region, which raise the cost
of extracting and exporting to more than three times the world
average. Not surprisingly, such costs discourage investment by
multinational oil companies. Oil, gas and other raw materials may be
sufficient to stabilize Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, but they will not
lead to prosperity and progress for the region as a whole.
Indeed, as Neil MacFarlane has written, commenting on a statement by
the special counselor to the Department of Commerce on Caspian Energy:
"Given the amounts of oil and gas at stake [in the Caspian region],
and the current state of world energy markets, one must wonder
whether statements of vital interest are overstated and are intended
to serve as justifications for policies adopted with other objectives
in mind (such as containment of Iran and weakening Russian
influence)."
For more than a year now, several things have been clear to Western
oil companies. First, the oil reserves so far established, and likely
to be established, in the Caspian do not justify massive investment
in a new main oil pipeline from Azerbaijan to the Turkish
Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. In fact, for the foreseeable future,
what Azeri oil there is can be accommodated easily enough by the
existing pipeline to the Georgian port of Poti, and then shipped to
various destinations around the Black Sea.
Second, the idea that Russia may be able to force the creation of a
new main pipeline to the Russian port of Novorossiisk is simply
ludicrous. Given price, quantity and the security situation in
Chechnya and Dagestan, Western oil consortia are not going to invest
in any such thing, and Russia certainly is not able to. Now that it
controls northern Chechnya, Russia may be able to restore the
existing, limited oil link to Novorossiisk, but that is all. Finally,
so long as there remains a possibility that a U.S.-Iran détente will
allow the construction of a much shorter and cheaper pipeline via
Iran to the Gulf, the oil companies would be profoundly foolish to
invest heavily in other routes.
Equally important, much of the discussion about Central Asia in the
United States has centered on the threat of renewed Russian hegemony,
whereas what the experience of Chechnya proves is that Russia,
although often brutal, is a great deal weaker than was assumed in the
early 1990s. Chechnya provides a searing example of the dangers of
state collapse, anarchy and growing Islamist radicalism that
currently beset the Caspian region. For if one aspect of the
disasters that have befallen Chechnya has been the cynicism,
incompetence and chauvinism of the Yeltsin regime, another has been
the disappearance of the institutions and culture of a modern state
in the territory. This fate may yet await other territories in the
region, as its various post-Soviet regimes prove incapable of
carrying out effective reforms and overcoming the enormous social,
political and economic problems confronting them.
I say this with the deepest regret. During their last war, I came
greatly to like and admire the Chechens (one reviewer accused me of
being in love with them), and to sympathize with what they have had
to endure. While the Russian campaign of terror bombing has its
international--and, indeed, recent Western--precedents, that does not
make it any the less deplorable. One can only hope that the Kremlin
will not be led into another lunatic and morally criminal attempt to
conquer the whole of that state. For this would likely lead to a
scale of devastation and suffering exceeding even that of the war of
1994-96, which played such a disastrous role in fomenting banditry
and extremism in the region.
Nevertheless, it must also be recognized that these tendencies were
already present in Chechnya before 1994. They stemmed from economic
collapse; from an anarchical social tradition; and, above all, from
the fact that, while the Chechen national revolutions of 1991
destroyed the old Soviet structures, the Chechens have proved
incapable of creating effective state institutions of their own.
Instead, as in Afghanistan after the fall of the communist regime
there, the resulting vacuum has been filled by a rule representing a
mixture of traditional social codes and warlords, against the
backdrop of the growing power of radical Islamists supported by or
even directed from the Middle East. Terrorism by these Islamist
revolutionaries has already become a serious threat in Russia,
Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and in recent months has spread into
Kyrgyzstan.
It is, of course, not impossible that the recent bombings in Moscow
were executed by forces close to the Yeltsin regime in an effort to
create an excuse for the declaration of a state of emergency. This
seems counterintuitive, however, given what we know of the background
of the Saudi-born leader of the radical Islamist forces in Chechnya,
Khattab, and the terrorist record of such groups elsewhere. If such
people were willing to kill hundreds of innocent Africans (including
Muslims) in attacks on U.S. embassies, why should they have hesitated
to kill Russian civilians? All one can say with certainty is that if
dark forces in Moscow were looking for "cover" for a terror campaign,
the presence of Khattab and his men in Chechnya, and their incursion
into Dagestan in August, gave all the "cover" anyone could possibly
have desired.
Irrelevant and Dangerous
As a number of states in the region increasingly confront the
possibility of Chechen-style collapse, it is essential that the
United States face the fact that it is neither strong enough, nor
indeed interested enough, to contribute seriously to Central Asian
stability. U.S. and Western assistance can be very useful where local
leaders and conditions genuinely favor reform, as in Georgia; but in
Central Asia, programs like NATO's Partnership for Peace are wildly
irrelevant to the actual threats facing the region. They are also
dangerous, for they provide regimes with the impression of a U.S.
commitment that simply does not exist, while at the same time
thoroughly alarming and irritating Russia.
Many advocates of stronger U.S. engagement in the region argue that
the United States should in effect substitute an increased military
commitment and even the deployment of U.S. forces for economic growth
and political stability. Stephen Blank suggests that, "NATO, under
U.S. leadership, will now move closer to becoming an international
policeman and hegemon in the Transcaspian and define the limits of
Russian participation in the region's oil boom." If this were to
happen, it would be a truly catastrophic error. But it almost
certainly is not going to happen, given the profound opposition to
any such move by the Europeans, the U.S. Congress and the Pentagon.
What could well transpire, however, is that irresponsible statements
by U.S. officials may persuade Russia, Iran and the Caspian states
that such a military commitment is indeed forthcoming.
Then, too, Washington's turning a blind eye to Turkish human rights
abuses, and its sponsorship of the expansion of Turkish influence in
the region, have probably done more than anything else to convince
Russians that American rhetoric about human rights is hypocritical,
and that the United States is implacably hostile to Russian
interests. If the United States possessed vital interests in the
Caspian region, and were prepared to secure them with determination,
there would then be a case for saying to hell with Russian opinion;
in the absence of those conditions, many aspects of existing policy
seem like unnecessary and even frivolous provocations. This applies
most clearly to guuam, the U.S.-sponsored anti-Russian pact linking
Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova. Given the
internal conditions of most of these states and their limited
capacity to aid one another, the most appropriate comment on them
seems to be a variant of the old gibe about the Nonaligned Movement:
"ten drowning men holding on to each other."
If the United States is to contribute to general stability in the
region, that end will be achieved not through a policy of trying to
"roll back" or "contain" Russian and Iranian influence, but rather by
trying to engage these states in the pursuit of common interests. In
this context, it is vital to understand that even before the
massacres of Afghan Shiites by the Taliban last year brought
Afghanistan and Iran to the brink of war, Tehran was strongly hostile
to the growth of Sunni radicalism in the region. Portrayals of Iran
as standing behind the radical Islamists in the former Soviet Union
are in fact desperately wide of the mark--especially as Iran now
regards Russia as a quasi-ally against Turkey, Azerbaijan and the
United States, and would certainly not wish to witness Russian power
in the Caucasus being undermined by the Islamists. Further, the fact
that Iran is by definition a Shiite state, whereas (outside
Azerbaijan) the vast majority of Central Asians are Sunnis, places
very strict limits on the potential for Iranian dominance. As for
Iran-backed Shiite terrorism, except in the limited and very special
case of Hizballah in Lebanon, it ceased several years ago.
If U.S. policymakers could free themselves from the admittedly bitter
legacy of past relations with Iran, they would recognize that the
rise of radical Sunni terrorism creates a shared vital interest with
Tehran, one that will endure irrespective of whether its government
is a relatively liberal one or a theocracy. Indeed, for historical
and religious reasons dating back more than 1,300 years, hostility to
the Taliban and their like is even stronger among the conservative
Shiite leadership and its supporters than among Iran's liberals.
During last year's Iranian-Afghan crisis, for example, the force that
pressed hardest for military action against the Taliban was not the
Iranian Army but the conservative Revolutionary Guard.
Not Our Sonuvabitches
U.S. policy toward the Caspian states reflects two widespread
failings. The first is that it continually looks to "democracy" as a
panacea for the region's ills. The second is that it ignores the
effects of America's policies on the behavior of these states. This
may be morally convenient, but it leads to repeated missed
opportunities to influence them in a moderate and conservative
direction. The issue of future U.S. strategies in this region
therefore raises some fundamental questions concerning both the
conduct and the philosophy of U.S. foreign policy in general; above
all, to what degree the United States is or should be a "satisfied"
and conservative power, and to what degree an "unsatisfied" one,
pursuing a revolutionary program of political and economic change,
and an aggressive expansion of American influence at the expense of
other powers.
Now in many parts of the world, including Central Europe, Latin
America and East Asia (and perhaps Georgia, Armenia and to a lesser
extent Azerbaijan), a program of promoting democracy and free markets
makes perfect sense. But in much of the Caspian region, as in much of
Africa, the claim that American policy rests on the development of
"stable, free-market democracies" rings hollow, and is in fact an
illusion. For the expansion of U.S. geopolitical influence in Central
Asia is based on thoroughly rotten foundations: an opportunistic set
of dictatorships that are at once weak, brutal, unstable and
economically retrograde. The whole point of a client state is that it
should be stable. Otherwise, the patron state, far from benefiting,
risks being drawn further and further into a quagmire in order to
rescue its clients from internal revolt--as with the Soviets in
Afghanistan during the late 1970s or, for that matter, with the
British there in the early 1840s. There is also a moral aspect: faced
with threats in Central America, where its interests truly are vital,
the United States must play the "our sonuvabitch" game. To do so
where its influence is slight, its interests peripheral, and its
potential proxies extremely unpleasant is, however, immoral and
irresponsible.
This applies with particular force to proposals that Uzbekistan be
the key U.S. ally in the region and its regional "anchor." It is true
that without Uzbekistan as a base, the task of expanding U.S.
influence in Central Asia would prove exceedingly difficult--but that
truth just serves to highlight the foolishness of such a strategy.
For Uzbekistan under its current president, Islam Karimov, suffers
from just about every conceivable disqualification for such a role.
The regime's brutal repression of its domestic opposition makes it an
embarrassment, and any U.S. commitment to Karimov will be heavily,
and rightly, criticized by U.S. human rights groups. In fact,
Karimov's ruthless suppression even of moderate Islamist groups has
been a significant factor in their radicalization.
Despite, or perhaps due to, Karimov's iron rule, Uzbekistan is
increasingly unstable. Its economy is in shambles; it is reeling from
the effects of a population boom and an acute employment crisis among
its male youth; it is disliked and feared by its neighbors; and it is
mired in a set of regional conflicts and territorial claims in which
the United States has no interest whatsoever. Backing Karimov would
repeat every one of America's mistakes vis-Ã -vis the Shah's regime in
Iran in the 1960s and 1970s, and, worse, would do so for no
discernible purpose.
As in Uzbekistan, the failure of most Caspian regimes to develop
stable, new, post-communist structures derives from their highly
personalized, and in most cases extremely autocratic, structures of
governance. What will happen when the present generation of leaders
passes from the scene--which in the case of the ailing leaders of
Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan may be soon--remains uncertain. In the
absence of any clear mechanism of succession--whether democratic or
oligarchic--many of these leaders intend to establish their sons as
designated successors. But it is far from clear that other players in
these regimes will accept the notion of hereditary dynasty; and,
equally important, most of the designated sons are extremely
unimpressive characters. Under Soviet rule, they lived the lives of
playboy children of the Soviet elite, and subsequent exposure to
Western millionaire lifestyles has led them to embrace decadent
consumption on a scale not seen since the Indian Maharajas under
British colonial rule. With or without U.S. support, these rotten
vessels will not stay afloat for long once their fathers die.
At present, though, power in the region is still wielded by the old
Communist Party bosses and their personal and patronage networks. It
goes without saying that they have been unable to check their
countries' declines. Martha Olcott emphasizes
"the drastic decline in the ability of the Caspian governments to
maintain even minimal levels of public services and social welfare
protection, not to mention the kinds of benefits that the
pre-independence population enjoyed."
It is the nature of the post-Soviet regimes and the Soviet legacy,
then, not Russian or Iranian pressure, that is crippling growth in
the region.
In these circumstances, the rise of radical Islamism, especially in
the old Muslim centers of the overpopulated and ecologically ravaged
Ferghana Valley of Uzbekistan, is not hard to explain. Neither, for
that matter, is the rise of organized crime and narcotics production
and smuggling. Hence, when the present generation of leaders begins
to pass from the scene, the result is likely to be not
"democratization" but revolution and anarchy. Turkmenistan, for
example, where an extravagant personal dictatorship and "cult of
personality" around President Saparmurat Niyazov presides over a
largely tribal, pre-modern society with no local state tradition, has
more parallels with Somalia under Siad Barre than it does with Russia
to its north.
Russia's Weakening Presence
It should be clear from all this that the greatest threat to
stability in the Caspian region comes not from Russia or Iran, but
from within the individual countries. While Russian policy has
certainly contributed to the internal problems of Georgia and
Azerbaijan (and obviously Chechnya), in Central Asia the picture is
altogether different. In Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, Russian
influence has for several years been quite limited. Insofar as close
ties have endured, it is only because those countries share a common
interest with Russia in combating mutual threats, most notably that
posed by Sunni radicalism.
In Kyrgyzstan, too, strong ties with Russia are not the result of a
forced hegemony but arise from that state's extreme weakness and fear
of its Uzbek and Chinese neighbors. The Kyrgyz fear the prospect of
overlordship by these nearby states far more than they do the fading
power of Moscow. There is in fact almost no chance that Moscow will
ever possess the will or even the desire to impose hegemony over most
of Central Asia, let alone the new "empire" with which so many
Western commentators have sought to terrify us.
In the Caucasus, Russian interests remain far greater, if only
because of the greater proximity of Russia's own territory. The
threats from ethnic and Islamist revolt (in the Russian northern
Caucasus) and from expanded U.S. and Turkish influence (in the
southern Caucasus) are keenly felt by Russian policymakers. Even in
the Caucasus, however, Russia's power now rests more on local allies
than on its own crumbling strength. Thus, Armenia has by far the best
armed forces in the region but welcomes the presence of Russian
troops (only about 6,000 of them by the last estimates) as security
against any future Turkish intervention on the side of Azerbaijan. To
judge by opinion polls and a recent visit of my own, this presence is
supported by an overwhelming majority of the Armenian population. Nor
is this at all surprising, given the past history of Turkish-Armenian
relations, and the historical failure of Western powers to aid the
Armenians.
The very unwelcome Russian presence in Georgia, by contrast, stems
from the Russian desire for influence over that state--or at least
from a wish to prevent the United States and Turkey from establishing
bases there--but it is also dictated by the Russian commitment to
Armenia, which requires a military position in Georgia to ensure
Russian lines of communication. A Russian withdrawal from Georgia can
therefore only take place in the context of a general settlement in
the region, and one in which both Armenians and Russians are assured
that their interests will be protected, and that retreat will not be
followed by Turkish advance.
Russian forces in Georgia have certainly played a destabilizing role
(though they also played a key part in ousting the crazy Gamsakhurdia
and bringing Shevardnadze to power in the winter of 1991-92, and
keeping him there in the autumn of 1993). Yet, the Russian stake
there is more ambiguous than has often been recognized. For if the
Russian commitment to Armenia requires a presence in Georgia, it also
gives Russia a certain interest in Georgian stability.
As several Armenian officials pointed out to me, if a new civil war
were to break out in Georgia involving the disruption of Armenia's
only trade route to Russia and the West, this would automatically
reduce Armenia to the appalling economic circumstances of 1992-94,
from which it has only partially extricated itself with difficulty
and suffering. Thus, the nature of the plot behind the recent
assassination of the prime minister of Armenia and his colleagues is
not yet clear and may never be; but an obvious factor was the extent
to which government, security services and politics have become mixed
up with organized crime in the country. As in Chechnya--though not
yet nearly to the same degree--this development risks destroying the
entire fabric of the state. It must also be noted that a large
proportion of the "Russian" soldiers stationed in Javakhetia, the
Armenian-populated area of Georgia, are actually local Armenians. It
is therefore an open question which is better for Georgia, a Russian
presence or a Russian withdrawal leaving behind a heavily armed local
militia.
Another indication of just how complicated is the balance of
interests in the region is the fact that the Abkhaz war, in which
Russian forces supplied the Abkhaz, proved adisaster for Russia. The
de facto separation of Abkhazia meant that Russia no longer had a
means of putting pressure on Georgia from within. Even more
important, the severing of what had been one of the main
communications routes to the southern Caucasus from Russia
contributed greatly to the decline of Russian economic influence.
Indeed, Russian influence throughout the former Soviet south now
depends mainly not on enforced hegemony, nor on the increasingly
meaningless "Commonwealth of Independent States", but on a set of
bilateral relations in which most of its partners are engaged for
their own very good reasons. In the northern Caucasus, for example,
Russian rule is increasingly based not on military power or
administrative control mechanisms, but on the support of various
local peoples (notably the Ossetes, most of the Dagestanis, and above
all the local ethnic Russians themselves) who fear their local ethnic
and religious adversaries far more than they do Moscow.
Russians like to convince themselves that the decline of their
influence in the southern Caucasus and Central Asia is above all the
result of American and Turkish strategies, and certainly U.S.
rhetoric has furthered that impression. In fact, this is only
partially true. I spent long periods in the southern Caucasus between
1990 and 1993, and, like many of my colleagues, my feeling at the
time was that the new states had made such a mess of their
independence and mutual relations (with some help from Moscow) that
the creation of a new Pax Russica, a regional security order under
Russian supervision, would be the inevitable result.
Russia, of course, failed to establish such a stable order, and for reasons having little to do with American influence. As for Turkish influence, it suffered a severe setback with the collapse of the anti-communist regime in Azerbaijan in 1993. Since then, Ankara has pursued a much more cautious policy based on a series of important lessons. Although the Turkic states of the region certainly welcome links with Turkey, they have no desire for a new big brother to replace Moscow. The Turks have come to acknowledge both the extreme difficulty of profitable investment in these states, and their own lack of funds for such investment.
If, nonetheless, Russian hegemony has also crumbled, one obvious reason for this was that Russia was simply not strong enough to assert such a hegemony. It possessed neither sufficient economic weight nor military force to compel states in the region to submit to its will, at least when alternative patrons became available. This has proved equally true in Central Asia. In Chechnya, the Russian withdrawal in 1996 resulted not just from Chechen military victory, but from a belief that a new leader, General Maskhadov, would reach an accommodation with Russia. For this, however, the Russians would have had to subsidize him very heavily--a course that was precluded not just by chaotic conditions in Chechnya and short-sightedness in the Kremlin, but by the poverty, corruption and weakness of the Russian state itself.
Equally important was the discovery by the Russians that they could not satisfy the competing demands of their different client regimes. They could not, for example, restore Abkhazia to Georgia while retaining Abkhaz support; they could not help Azerbaijan regain sovereignty over Karabakh while keeping the support of the Armenians. In the northern Caucasus, they could not satisfy the demands of both Ingush and Ossetes (nor, more recently, Karachai and Cherkess) for the same piece of land.
False Assumptions
RUSSIAN weakness notwithstanding, the United States has neither the reason, the power, nor the will to replace a largely vanished Russian hegemony in the Caspian region with a hegemony of its own. This argument, of course, runs flatly counter to the assumptions on which U.S. policy in the region has been based for the past three years. These assumptions are false in just about every particular. Some are indeed so historically and even geographically illiterate that it is difficult not to see their proponents as blinded either by a truly pathological degree of russophobia, or by personal ambition.
As to the first of these, a feeling exists both among some would-be Republican foreign policy leaders and among the more russophobe present policymakers that a much more ambitious U.S. policy in the Caspian region has been thwarted by the malign influence of "russophiles" led by Strobe Talbott. In small part, perhaps; but the real reason is that if you go to a senior Pentagon official, or the great majority of congressmen, and suggest the deployment of U.S. troops to the Caspian region--to bases or as peacekeepers, let alone in conflict--they look at you as if you had sprouted a very large pair of hairy ears.
Even if for a while U.S. rhetoric over a "forward policy" in the Caspian region intensifies under a future administration, this severe restriction will continue to apply, for it reflects two fundamental realities: that as soon as you compare the Caspian to Europe, East Asia, Central America or the Middle East, its "vital importance" is immediately revealed as nonsense; and that the great majority of U.S. educated opinion, let alone of the general public, is overwhelmingly indifferent to developments there. A small but telling example of this appeared at the time of the attempted assassination of President Karimov of Uzbekistan in February 1999, allegedly by Islamist extremists. His death would have caused a political earthquake in the region--but the attempt was barely noticed by the U.S. media.
In fact, the only sizeable portion of the American public that has a significant emotional stake in the Caspian region is the Armenian-American community--and they, like the government in Yerevan, are increasingly alarmed by the present trend of U.S. policy. An exponent of a forward U.S. policy in the region once told me that the United States ought to "twist the Armenians' arms till they break" in order to get them to submit to U.S. priorities. Not, I think, if you are a congressman from southern California. The existence of the Armenian-American lobby (and its Greek and other allies) means that in any future war over Karabakh, the United States would not be able simply to back Turkey against Russia. It would in fact find itself on both sides at once. In recent months, intensified U.S. mediation has led to hopes that an agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan might be imminent; but at the time of writing, the assassinations in Yerevan have thrown this into doubt again.
There is also the matter of personal ambition. For as a U.S. diplomat told me recently, in the past few years the Caspian region has been seen as "seriously sexy" in terms of Foreign Service careers, less because of the presumed economic future of the region than because of the romance of the new "Great Game", and the feeling of being a pioneer on a new frontier of diplomacy and geopolitics. I felt the same way myself as a young freelance journalist back in the early 1990s. Nonetheless, it is perhaps now time for older and cooler heads to take an objective look at the region.
The lessons for U.S. policymakers when it comes to Central Asia are twofold: the first is that, to adapt Palmerston's well-known dictum, "the United States has neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies. The United States has only permanent interests." The second is to be clear as to the exact nature of those interests. There are in fact only two that are vital in this region. The first is that the Caspian states should not provide safe havens for terrorists. The second is that the region should not become the source of major conflict, above all between a militarily superior Turkey and a nuclear-armed Russia.
The chief U.S. priority in the area should therefore be the engagement of Russia and Iran, particularly in an attempt to reach a settlement of the Karabakh conflict. Although this war is not in immediate danger of resuming, Turkish arms supplies to Azerbaijan, and Russian ones to Armenia, are deeply worrying. Realizing this, the next U.S. administration should seek greatly intensified dialogues with both Russia and Iran--irrespective of what precise regimes are in power in these countries--in order to serve U.S. interests in a settlement of the Karabakh conflict, in the prevention of Islamist terrorism, and in the stability and development of the region. Where America's truly vital interests are concerned, like any other state it has a duty to be ruthlessly egotistical. But where lesser and more complex interests are at stake, collective security and enlightened self-interest should be the order of the day.
Anatol Lieven is editor of Strategic Comments at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. As a correspondent for the Times (London), he covered developments in the Caucasus and Central Asia between 1990 and 1996.
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