Reimagining Eurasia

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Essay

Europe's Eastern Promise

Ronald D. Asmus

After the Cold War, NATO and the EU opened their doors to central and eastern Europe, making the continent safer and freer than ever before. Today, NATO and the EU must articulate a new rationale for enlarging still further, once again extending democracy and prosperity to the East, this time in the face of a more powerful and defiant Russia.

Essay

The Five-Day War

Charles King

The August war over South Ossetia has rekindled a superpower rivalry and showed the West that Moscow no longer heeds multilateral institutions.

As Kyrgyzstan descended into chaos after President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was ousted in April 2010, most observers were focused on the fate of the key U.S. airbase there. They feared that Moscow had orchestrated the unrest as revenge for Bakiyev reneging on his alleged promise to shut down the base and would now demand that the new government follow through on that pledge. But instead of indulging in geopolitical gamesmanship as usual, Russia and the United States actually worked together, pursuing back-channel talks that facilitated Bakiyev's safe escape into exile. Periodic consultations since April have thus far managed to prevent conflict between the Cold War adversaries in the one country where both have military outposts. This marked a tectonic shift in the geopolitics of Eurasia. For the first time in over a decade, what Russia calls its "near abroad" was a locus of cooperation, not confrontation, between Russia and the United States.

This shift has opened a window of opportunity to fundamentally rethink U.S. foreign policy in Eurasia -- a term used here to refer to the countries of the greater Black Sea region and Central Asia -- a strategically situated area with massive natural resource wealth and great economic potential. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has formulated its approach to countries as diverse as Azerbaijan and Ukraine through a Russia-centric lens; U.S. policy toward the region as a whole became a function of its plans for dealing with Moscow. Although Washington focused on ensuring Eurasian states' independence in the 1990s, the past decade saw U.S. policy toward these countries devolve, becoming mired in outright U.S-Russia strategic competition. Although that competitive dynamic has diminished significantly over the past year and a half, its legacy still defines Washington's engagement with the states of the region.

U.S. policymakers must abandon the tired Russia-centric tack and develop new individualized approaches to the states of the greater Black Sea region and Central Asia. By treating each country based on its merits, as opposed to approaching the region as a set of contested territories, Washington can serve long-term U.S. interests and avoid re-creating a nineteenth-century-style Great Game. The Obama administration may have "reset" relations with Russia, but it must now develop a clear parallel strategy to reimagine its policies toward Eurasia -- ones tailored to the specific U.S. interests at stake in each country and transparent to all other states.

In the first few years following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States embraced Boris Yeltsin's Russia as an aspiring market democracy -- a stance that entailed prioritizing relations with Moscow over ties with other regional capitals. But soon the U.S.-Russia relationship soured, largely as a result of Russian meddling in the affairs of the other newly independent states. So-called Russian peacekeeping missions in Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan came to resemble military occupations, while Moscow at times openly supported separatist movements in areas with high concentrations of ethnic Russians, such as Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and northern Kazakhstan. Russian elites clearly had not reconciled themselves to their neighbors' independence. As Moscow's ambassador to Washington put it in 1993, Russia's relations with Ukraine were to be like "New York's with New Jersey." In short, the sovereignty of the newly independent former Soviet republics was under genuine threat.

The United States moved to counter this threat and prevent a Russian-led anti-Western bloc from emerging in the Soviet Union's wake. Although Washington claimed it was interested in bolstering state sovereignty, encouraging regional and international integration, promoting democratic governance, and supporting economic reform, it was, in fact, mostly concerned with the first goal. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, the United States pushed for new pipelines that would break Russia's export monopoly and provide both producer and transit countries independent revenue streams. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline heading from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey was considered by many in Washington, as the scholars Svante Cornell and Mamuka Tsereteli put it, "a crucial factor in building true sovereignty and independence for these states and enabling them to freely choose their foreign and security policy strategy and orientation." The U.S. military embarked on bilateral defense cooperation with most of the states of the region, in large part to groom a new generation of officers whose worldview would not be Moscow-centric. Aid budgets were apportioned in order to prevent a Russian resurgence: despite being home to half the population of the newly independent states, Russia received only 17 percent of assistance funds earmarked for the region in 1998.

By the end of the 1990s, this independence-minded strategy had largely succeeded. Although territorial disputes and so-called frozen conflicts remained threats to regional security -- and some in the Kremlin harbored dreams of "gathering the lands" like their imperial predecessors -- the independence of Russia's neighbors had been firmly established. At the same time, however, then Russian President Vladimir Putin began to assert Moscow's influence throughout the region in ways that set off alarm bells in the West. Likewise, "color" revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, which brought ostensibly pro-Western leaders to power, and the George W. Bush administration's decision to champion these leaders angered the Kremlin. As a result, competition between Washington and Moscow quickly spun out of control.