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Major geopolitical shifts and internal dynamics are setting the stage for possible increased great-power competition in Central Asia between Russia and China at a time when the region is becoming less hospitable to the projection of U.S. power and to the promotion of democracy. U.S. policy will need to adapt to these changes in order to bring Washington’s ambitions in Central Asia into better alignment with limited U.S. interests and means. Overpromising and setting ambitious but unrealistic goals will lead to mutual frustration, cynicism, and disappointment among the five states of Central Asia. A policy grounded in a realistic view of the region and U.S. interests there will better serve everyone’s interests.

The Case for Rebooting U.S. Policy

• As the United States continues on a glide path toward a substantially smaller military footprint in Afghanistan, Central Asia’s importance as the gateway to Afghanistan will decline in America’s strategic calculus.
   
• Central Asia’s first quarter century of independence was marked by a geopolitical orientation toward the West. The United States helped the five Central Asian states establish their independence and sovereignty. America fulfilled its promise of partnership at that crucial stage, and these states have been important partners to the United States at critical times.
   
• Central Asia is on a different trajectory now. The region is in the midst of a major geopolitical shift that will diminish its ties to the Euro-Atlantic community and will elevate China’s influence in and importance to Central Asian states. For the foreseeable future, Beijing and Moscow will be the region’s principal economic, political, and security partners due to China’s preeminent regional economic power and Russia’s residual presence.
   
• These developments portend declining American presence in and influence over the region—and greater difficulty in transforming Central Asian states into democratic, free-market economies knitted together by regional economic integration.
   
• Advancing Washington’s priorities in this new environment will require significant changes in U.S. policy.

Recommendations for U.S. Policy

• Prioritize U.S. regional engagement with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
   
• Recognize that the United States shares some interests with Russia and China and seek to harness Russian and Chinese actions to advance U.S. interests.
   
• Let demands for change be locally driven and focus the U.S. reform agenda on improving social and economic conditions rather than on democracy promotion.
   
• Do not condition security cooperation on human rights performance.
   
• Avoid militarizing U.S. policy by overreacting to the threat of Islamic extremism.
   
• Use leverage more effectively by playing harder to get and pursuing more realistic and prioritized goals.

Introduction

U.S. policy toward Central Asia has passed through two phases since the five countries comprising the region—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—gained their independence in 1991, and it has recently entered yet another phase that remains a work in progress. During the first period, which lasted from the dissolution of the Soviet Union until the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, U.S. policy focused on three priorities: securing the legacy of Soviet weapons of mass destruction; helping the Central Asian countries attain and defend their newly won sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity against a potential resurgence of Russian neoimperialism; and breaking up Russia’s monopoly over pipelines and transit routes for Central Asian oil and gas as a means of ensuring the region’s independence from Russia. The United States explicitly rejected the geopolitical approach to Central Asia, and instead embarked upon a long-term effort to support the creation of democratic governance, free-market economies, and regional economic integration. Despite at times lofty rhetoric, U.S. policymakers generally viewed the region as a relatively low priority, and American engagement to achieve greater stability, security, and prosperity as well as better governance remained limited. This approach can best be described as U.S. policy toward Central Asia 1.0.

Washington’s perspective on and engagement in the region changed dramatically after September 11, when U.S. policy toward Central Asia 2.0 began to take shape. To be sure, there was continued interest in pursuing the long-term political and economic reform agenda of the previous decade, but military and security considerations became more important factors in U.S. engagement in Central Asia. The logistical requirements of supporting large-scale U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and the resulting heavy dependence on access to regional military facilities took precedence over commitment to the promotion of political and economic reforms and human rights. The United States elevated the importance of security cooperation with basing countries and, more broadly, America’s geopolitical position in the region. Central Asia changed from an area of peripheral interest to one that commanded a much higher priority in America’s strategy, although the region’s importance was based primarily on its role as an adjunct to Afghan stabilization efforts rather than a priority in and of itself.

The first two phases of America’s encounter with an independent Central Asia had one theme in common: the region’s significance to the United States was largely derivative of interests that were not indigenous to Central Asia itself but rather were functions of U.S. policies, priorities, and relationships with countries around the region. As the United States transitions to a substantially smaller footprint and role for U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan, Washington will once again need to define and prioritize its interests and relationships in the region at a time when Russia is showing greater willingness and capability to intervene in the internal affairs of its neighbors. Furthermore, the long-term goal of both Moscow and Beijing to expand their influence in Central Asia could increase tensions between these two powers and possibly among regional states. The competition between the two powers has encouraged Central Asian states to seek continued Western involvement in the region to check Russian and Chinese ambitions. All these developments provide the backdrop for U.S. policy toward Central Asia 3.0.

The United States’s approach to Central Asia, of course, will not be made in a vacuum: U.S. engagement in the region will be defined in the context of America’s other global interests and priorities, limited defense spending and foreign assistance, and competing demands on the bandwidth of senior U.S. government officials. Indeed, the outbreak of multiple crises elsewhere at the same time is crowding out Central Asia from the West’s foreign policy and security agenda. The campaign against the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the crisis in Ukraine, civil wars in Yemen and Libya, implementation of the nuclear agreement with Iran, and dealing with a more assertive China have taken precedence over the region, which is neither the scene of a major disaster nor a source of major threats to U.S. security. In fact, with the drawdown of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Central Asia offers few major opportunities to advance important American interests. In this context, there are several key questions that should shape U.S. policy and strategy for Central Asia:

• What are U.S. interests and objectives in Central Asia, and how important are they to U.S. security and prosperity or to the attainment of critical foreign policy and national security objectives?
   
• How should the United States prioritize these objectives, given the tension between some of them? What trade-offs should the United States be prepared to make among these goals?
   
• Of the objectives that are most important to the United States, which are the most realistic and attainable in the next ten years and which are more long-term and aspirational?
   
• What is the most effective and sustainable strategy for achieving these objectives and what means does the United States have at its disposal?
   
• What are the sources of U.S. influence over the policies of Central Asian states? What steps can the United States take to enhance its leverage and employ it more effectively?

These questions and the answers to them should be considered against the backdrop of America’s encounters with the region over the past quarter century and the successes and failures of American policy. Together, this record, coupled with domestic and geopolitical trends in the region, suggests that future opportunities to advance American interests will be limited, and U.S. relations with Central Asian countries will be challenging.

A Retrospective on U.S. Policy

The United States has accomplished some of the major strategic objectives it set for its policy in this region but has fallen short on others.

Successes

• U.S. support for Central Asian countries has paid off; they have established their sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence.
   
• The United States secured the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Kazakhstan and the dismantlement of the nuclear infrastructure it inherited from the former Soviet Union.
   
• No single country has established its hegemony over the region.
   
• Russia no longer has a monopoly on the flow of Central Asian oil and gas.
   
• The United States was able to effectively use facilities in the region to support military operations in Afghanistan and the drawdown of U.S. forces.

Failures

• Central Asia has made little progress toward democratic, open societies based on free markets, the rule of law, and respect for human rights. To the contrary, there has been backsliding across the region on all these issues.
   
• The U.S. project to connect Central Asia to Afghanistan and Pakistan via the American vision of the New Silk Road has failed to get off the ground thus far.
   
• Progress toward greater regional economic integration and security cooperation under U.S. leadership has been scant.

Regional Currents

There are five interrelated factors that will shape the internal evolution of the five countries of Central Asia: leadership succession, economic challenges, corruption and poor governance, political repression, and the threat of Islamic extremism.

Leadership Succession

The prospect of leadership changes has cast a long shadow across the region, particularly in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, Central Asia’s two most powerful countries. Elderly leaders rule both countries—Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan and Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan—and they have been in power since the late Soviet era, maintaining domestic stability through the force of their personalities, patronage, and political skills. Both leaders lack designated successors despite their advanced ages and questions about their health.¹ The process of succession in both countries has been the subject of widespread speculation based largely on secondary clues and gossip. In Uzbekistan at least, the looming leadership change has led to infighting among the country’s political elite,² highlighting a potential challenge to the country’s domestic stability.

Most of the attention regarding succession focuses on what will happen in Astana and Tashkent, but there are questions about political succession elsewhere in the region as well. Kyrgyzstan, the region’s one nominal democracy, has been perennially unstable. Since 2005, it has seen two governments overthrown, a major outbreak of ethnic violence, and a series of smaller protests.

President Emomali Rahmon of Tajikistan is sixty-three years old. He has run the country since 1992. Rahmon has spent much of his time in office consolidating his—and his family’s—control over the country’s economic assets in order to secure his and his successor’s hold on power. His custom is to squeeze out political and economic rivals—often provoking outright rebellions by his targets, as happened in September 2015.³ With socioeconomic problems on the rise, the threat of instability bubbling over from Afghanistan, and a history of civil war, Tajikistan’s political institutions are fragile and could collapse under the weight of a succession struggle after Rahmon departs the scene, if not before.

Turkmenistan underwent a smooth succession in 2006, when its megalomaniacal leader Saparmurat Niyazov died suddenly, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov was elected president. Berdimuhamedov faced no meaningful opposition, and the electoral process was completely nontransparent to Turkmenistan’s citizens and the outside world. It is precisely this lack of transparency that virtually guarantees that the next political succession—whenever it takes place—will be marked by as much uncertainty as the previous process.

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Economic Challenges

With most of the region’s main exports (oil, natural gas, cotton, and gold) at historic low prices because of major changes in global commodities markets and the slowing Chinese economy, it has become increasingly evident that Central Asian states have not succeeded in diversifying their economies and most of them now must cope with severe budgetary pressures and a slowdown in economic growth.⁴ The current and next generation of leaders in Central Asia will increasingly confront new economic challenges, some the result of price fluctuations in the international commodities markets and others a product of poor governance. The failure of Central Asian governments to diversify and modernize their economies to reduce their heavy dependence on natural resource extraction poses a major long-term challenge to the region’s growth.

The economic contraction in Russia and the drop in the value of the Russian ruble have also dealt a major blow to Central Asia. Remittances from Central Asian guest workers in Russia have been essential to the survival of their home countries. For Tajikistan, remittances from migrant laborers in Russia amount to the equivalent of approximately 50 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).⁵ In Kyrgyzstan, the figure is over 30 percent.⁶ But these have seen a steep decline7—as much as one-quarter in some countries—and are projected to drop even more. The effects of the ruble’s devaluation on Kazakhstan’s exports to Russia have been severe,⁸ leaving the government with no choice but to let the value of its currency drop as well,⁹ a decision that continues to send shockwaves through the country’s economy and political system. As prices for hydrocarbons remain low, there are indications that Turkmenistan is struggling to sustain its social-welfare network, a bulwark of its repressive regime.¹⁰

All Central Asian countries have major barriers to attracting foreign investment. Kazakhstan, the country with the best business climate in the region, was ranked 77 out of 189 countries in the World Bank’s Doing Business 2015 report.¹¹ The worst, Tajikistan, was ranked 166.

Corruption and Poor Governance

According to the World Bank’s governance indicators, all five Central Asian states suffer from poor governance. Corruption and the absence of rule of law and transparency, both deep-seated problems, are also a drag on economic growth.¹² Billions of dollars have been siphoned off by the governing elites across Central Asia who are adept at dividing the economic spoils among their families and various economic, political, and clan interests—often at the expense of more productive economic uses.¹³ Combined with the lack of an independent judiciary, corruption can be an expedient tool of governance, allowing Central Asian autocrats to enforce the political loyalty of some insiders and to punish rivals.¹⁴

Without a transparent judicial system, there is no reliable mechanism to enforce contracts or protect private property from either the state or more powerful figures in governing structures. Economic crimes are often prosecuted selectively, effectively enabling ruling elites to sideline either political or economic competitors.¹⁵ The absence of basic rule of law retards investment, economic growth, and the development of new industries that are not based on the extraction and export of hydrocarbons or other natural resources.

Corruption is not confined to large-scale graft by political elites but permeates all sectors and levels of life in most Central Asian countries.¹⁶ Levels of corruption across all five countries have seen little improvement over the past decade. Corrupt practices diminish the ability of Central Asian states to provide quality goods and services to their citizens. These include quality healthcare, adequate education, comprehensive drug addiction prevention and treatment, reliable electricity, widespread sanitation, and more effective and transparent border controls.¹⁷ Shortcomings in all of these areas endanger the security of Central Asian citizens and impede their social mobility and individual economic prospects. Pervasive corruption, poor governance, and few economic opportunities for large sections of the population are a toxic mix that often increases state and regime fragility.¹⁸

Notwithstanding the ill effects of corruption and poor governance, quality of life indicators in all five Central Asian countries have shown slight improvements over the past decade in both life expectancy and Human Development Index ratings. These positive trends, however, are modest and the outlook is uncertain.

Political Repression

To varying degrees, most Central Asian leaders actively, and at times brutally, seek to prevent viable political alternatives¹⁹—either in the regime or the opposition—from challenging authoritarian rule.²⁰ Opposition parties and politicians are harassed,²¹ intimidated, incarcerated, or run out of the country. Most forms of civil society have been brought under government control.

State-run media outlets are the main source of information for most residents of the region.²² A number of independent media outlets face harassment or operate from overseas. Journalists who have questioned the leaders and their policies have often been pressured to stop writing, and some have suffered the same fate as political opponents and activists, a reality that promotes self-censorship. Furthermore, uneven Internet penetration, which is partly due to the high costs of Internet access for many of the region’s impoverished citizens,²³ limits the scope of online media.²⁴

Civil rights and individual liberties of ordinary citizens in Central Asia are severely curtailed.

Civil rights and individual liberties of ordinary citizens are severely curtailed, and most forms of social and economic protest are prohibited, subjected to strict limits, or explained away as the result of outside interference—either that of Western governments or Islamic radicals. With few exceptions, these actions have pushed dissent underground, complicating efforts to accurately gauge the extent of popular dissatisfaction with ruling regimes or the presence of extremist ideologies or groups throughout the region.²⁵

Threat of Islamic Extremism

Central Asian governments have voiced growing concerns about the threat of Islamic extremism in the region,²⁶ but they often exaggerate these risks and misrepresent legitimate political protest as extremism in order to justify repression and to deflect Washington’s criticism of human rights abuses.²⁷ Several militant Islamic groups, like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and its splinter group Islamic Jihad Union, have moved from Central Asia to South Asia, largely due to the success of Central Asian governments in driving them away. In fact, the extremist threat to the region has thus far been managed and contained largely south of the border. Nonetheless, the threat is there, and these groups could potentially exploit a crisis in the region caused by economic problems, leadership succession, or some other development to raise their profile.

In addition to these deeply rooted internal problems, the governments of Central Asia now have to contend with a rapidly shifting external environment that will present new challenges and opportunities in the years to come.

From Eurasia to Aseuria: Shifting Geopolitical Realities

A major rebalancing is taking place in the heart of the Eurasian landmass. Central Asia is undergoing a fundamental geopolitical shift that entails new roles for and new relationships with China, Europe, Iran, Russia, South Asia, and the United States. Together, these changes will move Central Asia’s geopolitical orientation toward Asia and away from Europe and the United States. Despite the Kremlin’s rhetorical emphasis on promoting Eurasian integration on its own terms, Central Asia’s neighbors to the east, south, and southwest will play an increasingly important role in its economic and political development and security environment. Over the next decade, five trends will generate far-reaching consequences for Central Asia.

The China Factor

China has emerged as the region’s most significant geopolitical and economic actor. The country’s economic footprint in Central Asia has increased dramatically, and its ambitious plans for expanding it further will have important economic and political implications.

Trade has been the principal driver of this new relationship. The geographic proximity of China and Central Asia’s mineral wealth make the two natural partners. Trade statistics tell a compelling story of the rapidly expanding relationship. Trade between China and Central Asia is estimated to have been between $350 million and $750 million a year in the early post-Soviet period of the 1990s.²⁸ In 2013, it passed the $50 billion mark, far surpassing the region’s trade with Russia.²⁹ Energy exports have been a major factor in the expanding economic relationship between Central Asia and China. Since the mid-1990s, Beijing has invested billions of dollars in energy-related infrastructure projects and acquisitions in the region’s energy sector. Central Asia is projected to supply 20 percent of China’s gas consumption by the end of 2015,³⁰ and this share is expected to grow as China continues to expand its pipeline network in the region.³¹

The scale of potential Chinese investment projects in Central Asia betrays an ambition for expanded economic influence over the region. In 2013, the Chinese government announced $64 billion in infrastructure deals in the region. These plans were followed in 2015 by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s announcement of the ambitious Silk Road Economic Belt initiative—a nearly $46-billion project that, if it materializes, promises additional infrastructure development funds for Central Asia, intended to link China, Central and South Asia, and Europe with a network of road, rail, and maritime routes.³² China’s growing economic and political clout has made Beijing a regular destination for Central Asian leaders.³³

China’s emergence as the dominant actor in the region’s energy sector has profound geopolitical and geoeconomic consequences. Prior to Central Asia’s opening to China, the landlocked region had only one outlet for its energy exports—through the Soviet-era pipeline network and Russia. Although Russia remains an important outlet for Central Asia’s exports, including energy exports, its monopoly over trade with and access to these markets has been broken, and with it Russia’s ability to dictate its will to Central Asia.

However, while China’s emergence as the leading economic and geopolitical force in Central Asia is unmistakable, how Beijing will exercise its influence remains to be seen. Chinese leaders have not yet declared any naked geopolitical ambitions in the region—for example, unlike Russia, China has not claimed neighboring countries as a Chinese sphere of privileged interests, which is how Russia has framed its relationship with countries on its border.³⁴ Beijing has also maintained a low profile on security issues. Again, in contrast to Russia, China has not sought to project its military power or maintain military bases in Central Asia. Nor has it sought to create a military or collective security organization for the region, and it does not belong to the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which currently includes Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan.

Chinese security activities are channeled primarily through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which comprises China, Russia, and all the states of Central Asia except Turkmenistan. Established in 2001 as a jointly led Chinese-Russian forum for Central Asia, it is neither a military alliance nor a security organization. Rather, the SCO’s initiatives are focused on counterterrorism,³⁵ reflecting Beijing’s interest in securing its own restive northwest provinces rather than ambitious plans for military expansion beyond its border.³⁶ Nonetheless, Beijing can be expected to protect its economic stakes in the region, and it could develop capabilities to play a security role. This role could include the potential for military intervention in Central Asia, if instability in the region makes it necessary to protect Chinese investments there. Given Moscow’s failure to intervene during the 2010 interethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan, China is cognizant that it cannot depend exclusively on Moscow to be the regional security provider. For the time being, however, China prefers to rely on political rather than military means to protect its equities, and some analysts have even argued that Beijing has ruled out military intervention in Central Asia under any circumstances.³⁷

Beijing will keep a watchful eye on the region’s domestic politics and succession scenarios to make sure that new Central Asian leaders take care to protect Chinese interests. To the extent that outside actors will play a role in the region’s opaque leadership politics, few will be more important than China. Gaining Beijing’s assurances of political and economic support will be an essential precondition for any new leader in Central Asia to consolidate and remain in power. Whereas in the past Moscow was the sole capital determining the political fortunes of the region, its monopoly as the arbiter of Central Asia’s politics has been broken. It has not yet been supplanted by Beijing, but China has become the region’s indispensable partner and patron.

Russia’s Retreat

Russia’s economic troubles and the lasting repercussions of its aggression in Ukraine are likely to further shrink its already reduced footprint in Central Asia and its political influence in the region. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Russia’s unchallenged monopoly over the region’s economic, political, and security affairs was helped by its ability to control oil and gas export routes from the region to Russia and through its pipelines to Europe. China’s economic penetration of the region filled a vacuum left by the contraction of Russia’s economic presence, and China’s oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia broke the Russian monopoly on export routes. Central Asia is still an arena of zero-sum competition between its two largest neighbors. The relentless expansion of China’s footprint in the region has come largely at the expense of Russia’s influence.

Russia’s economic troubles and the lasting repercussions of its aggression in Ukraine are likely to further shrink its already reduced footprint and its political influence in Central Asia.

To be sure, Russia remains an important trading partner for Central Asia, but China’s trade with the region has grown even more rapidly over the past decade, surpassing Russia’s.

Nonetheless, Russian investment in Central Asia still plays an important role in the region’s economic development,³⁸ and Moscow has also struck several major debt forgiveness deals with Central Asia, providing cash-strapped governments with much-needed relief.³⁹ However, when compared with China’s multibillion-dollar schemes in Central Asia, Moscow’s prospects for building on existing economic ties with the region appear modest.

The reversal of Russian economic fortunes, the current recession, and the outlook for slow growth in the years to come portend a bleak future for Russia’s ties with Central Asia, and it likely will continue to be eclipsed by China as an economic partner to Central Asia. Further, Beijing’s dominance in the economic sphere is accentuated by Russia’s own increased desire for closer economic ties to China as a result of sanctions Western countries imposed on Russia in response to its aggression against Ukraine. Moscow’s pivot to Asia and pursuit of an economic partnership with China restrict its room for geopolitical maneuver in Central Asia.

Russia has achieved a measure of success in asserting itself in Central Asia through its latest economic and geopolitical construct—the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Intended to enhance Russian influence in the former Soviet space, the union now counts Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan among its members. The government of Tajikistan has expressed lukewarm interest in the union and has yet to join.⁴⁰ Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have shown no interest in joining.

The impact of membership in the EEU for Russia’s partners has yet to be felt, as its common market is not planned to go into effect until 2025.⁴¹ Nonetheless, trade between several EEU members and Russia has declined over the past year, raising doubts about the long-term viability of the bloc.

Arguably, military security is the only sphere where Russia continues to play a unique and leading role in Central Asia.

Ironically, the EEU could become a vehicle for Chinese rather than Russian influence in Central Asia. In May 2015, Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China discussed the possibility of coordinating and even integrating China’s Silk Road Economic Belt with Russia’s EEU with the goal of cre