Originally published in NATO and the European Union: New World, New Europe, New Threats, ed. Hall Gardner (London: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 219–231.
To see Central Asia in perspective, it is useful to bear in mind no fewer than seven scales of analysis, even if one focuses on only a few of them at a time.[1] This chapter does not address all of them, but still a comprehensive point of departure is the best. The first and finest scale of analysis is the national scale—i.e., state level—of analysis where each of the Central Asian countries may be taken separately. (This scale of analysis may also be considered to subsume a yet finer scale, that which analyzes subnational differentiations such as the contrast between northern and southern Kazakhstan.) Second, more broadly, there is the regional scale of Central Asia itself, which takes the five former Soviet republics together as a whole and also considers their transnational cultural and demographic interrelationships. Third, the "macro-region" we may call Greater Central Asia includes "political" Central Asia (i.e., the five former Soviet republics) plus their cultural and increasing economic connections with such neighboring regions as western China, southern Russia (including southern Siberia), northern Afghanistan, and northeastern Iran.
Fourth is the "meta-regional" scale of Central Eurasia, a still broader construct. Although "Central Eurasia" is sometimes used as a shorthand designation of the former Soviet territory, it is more apposite to define that it "include[s] Turkic, Mongolian, Iranian, Caucasian, Tibetan and other peoples[, and] extends from the Black Sea region, the Crimea, and the Caucasus in the west, through the Middle Volga region, Central Asia and Afghanistan, and on to Siberia, Mongolia and Tibet in the east."[2] Conceived thus in a broader historical and cultural sense, Central Eurasia (like Greater Central Asia) includes swathes of Russia and China but not necessarily the whole of both countries. However, these latter are fully integrated at a fifth, "mega-regional" scale of analysis, including not only all of Russia and China but also the whole of South and Southwest Asia from India and Pakistan through Iraq and Turkey, and to which we may refer simply as Eurasia. A sixth scale of analysis is Greater Eurasia, which includes the whole of geographic Eurasia proper, from Spain to Sakhalin and Spitzbergen to Singapore, including the European Union and its family of institutions. Finally, the seventh scale of analysis is the global scale, which adds the United States, transnational corporations with a global reach, and worldwide international organizations having especially an economic, industrial or financial vocation.
It is hardly necessary to treat all these scales of analysis together, although it is useful to employ the first and the seventh together so as to anchor any discussion. The present chapter, for example, uses reference to the first and the seventh so as to anchor a discussion focusing on the fourth, fifth, and sixth.[3] These "scales" of analysis differ, both in conception and in application, from what are traditionally "levels" of analysis in international relations. This differences means that they are not in reality stacked upon each other in a mechanistic manner, even though it is convenient to discuss them sequentially for expository purposes. Because they are not strictly hierarchical, it also means that they are not "nested."[4] Rather, as in any "complex system," these scales of analysis overlap; and what one sees depends upon where one stands.[5]
The first three sections of this chapter look at Central Asia respectively in the context of the Central Eurasian, Greater Eurasian, and global scales. On that basis, the fourth section examines Central Asia and international order after the Cold War; and the fifth section concludes with a practical discussion of prospective relations between Central Asia and the West in the twenty-first century.
In 1995 Uzbekistan, as part of its recurrent diplomatic competition with Kazakhstan, had won official designation as a "strategic partner" of the United States. After Kazakhstan was granted the same honor a few years later, Uzbekistan replied by joining the GUAM (Georgia–Uzbekistan–Azerbaijan–Moldova) entente, turning it into GUUAM. In line with this turn away from Russia, Uzbekistan left the CIS Collective Security Treaty in May 1999. However, after the February 1999 Tashkent bombings were followed in summer by incursions from the Taliban-backed Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), Russia's profile increased. At the time, Russia appeared to be the only great power that would send troops to Central Asia to fight militants who might threaten the regimes in power there, and Uzbekistan in the first instance. Thus during President Vladimir Putin's December 1999 visit to Tashkent, Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov publicly declared his recognition of "Russia's interests in Uzbekistan," and anti-Russian propaganda in the country's mass media was subsequently toned down.[6] U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Tashkent in April 2000 during a whirlwind tour of Central Asian capitals, but when Putin followed her a month later, Karimov went still further than his already strong December 1999 statement and declared that there was no discrepancy whatsoever between Uzbekistan's strategic view of Central Asia and Russia's.[7]
Uzbekistan did not participate in the "Shanghai–5," as it was then called, when this group was set up in 1996 among China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. This was because the group focused at the time on delimiting and demilitarizing the China-CIS border, and Uzbekistan has no border with China. In the late 1990s, the Shanghai–5 shifted its focus to address Islamic militancy. Its August 1999 Bishkek summit reached an agreement on fighting terrorism. Part of that agreement involved setting up an anti-terrorist center in Bishkek itself, eventually to host a joint Sino-Russian rapid deployment force. This center, which the CIS decided would serve to coordinate its own activities in the field as well, has not yet been established. Although Karimov did not attend the August 1999 summit of the Shanghai–5, he let his interest in cooperation be known in early 2000.[8]
In June 2001, with Uzbekistan in attendance as a new member, the Shanghai grouping institutionalized itself as Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a self-standing international organization with an autonomous secretariat first planned for Shanghai but in June 2002 established in Beijing. [9] For Uzbekistan to join SCO looked in mid-2001 like part of the ongoing consolidation of regional international systems, in the context of the emergence of a networked global international system following the end of the post-Cold War transition. It seemed that Central Asia would be divided between competing Russian and Chinese spheres of influence, the latter seeking to expand westward from Xinjiang but also potentially threatening Russia interests through illegal immigration to Siberia in addition to Central Asia. At the SCO's founding meeting, China's deputy foreign minister responsible for SCO affairs emphasized to the gathered international press and diplomats that Beijing intended to use the organization to promote trade and investment in its search for influence over Central Asia. Indeed, although Afghanistan was not an SCO member, a Chinese delegation was in Kabul on 11 September 2001 to sign a long-term economic and technical cooperation agreement with the Taliban regime.
These changes in great-power politics in Central Asia are not set in concrete. But by unfreezing the earlier-emergent Sino-Russian joint hegemony over Central Asia, the U.S. has also opened up the reconnections between Central Asia on the one hand, and, on the other hand, South and Southwest Asia. Consequently, Uzbekistan is confirmed as the geopolitical pivot, and Central Asia as the shatterbelt, of the broad Eurasian landmass. Demographic and economic realities would have led to this development in about two decades, regardless of Afghanistan. Now, however, its criticality is being made manifest earlier than one might have anticipated, and therefore under different circumstances. This offers the countries concerned a respite from the earlier emerging Sino-Russian vise-grip, and chance in the early twenty-first century finally to implement serious moves towards economic reform and democratization.
On 11 September 2001, all indicators were that Russia and China were reaching an understanding that would have set the framework for geopolitical realities in Central Asia for the next several decades. Two indicators of understanding, which has not necessarily fully been sundered, are salient. First is the bilateral treaty signed in summer 2000; second is the two countries' cooperation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
The new Sino-Russian treaty only codifies bilateral relations that have been developing for over five years. It includes provisions not only for combating Islamic militancy in Central Asia, but also for increasing Russian arms sales to China, including advanced technology transfers, and the exchange of military training (up to two thousand Chinese officers to attend Russian military schools yearly). In fact, before the treaty in the early 1990s, Russian arms sales to China averaged one billion dollars per year. This figure more than doubled before the decade ended. China is following the old Soviet strategy of importing (or stealing) foreign technology to create "pockets of excellence" in its own weapons development programs. This has important consequences for China's ability to impose its own political will on Asia.[10]
Indeed, China's strategic weapons development and deployment program uncannily resembles the Soviet strategy in the late 1970s that led to the dangerous tactic of putting medium-range SS–20 missiles in Eastern Europe. These were not able to reach the U.S. but they were capable of striking West European capitals in a matter of minutes. The purpose was to sow fear among West European elites and terror among their publics, paralyzing the political will to Moscow's political, diplomatic and military move in Europe. Both the June 2000 founding of the SCO and the July 2000 bilateral treaty allowed Russia and China to demonstrate their agreement on fundamental issues of international politics, particularly the question of relations with United States.
In the SCO, Russia's interest was originally to represent itself as Asia's interlocutor with the United States. Indeed, the first Bush-Putin meeting, in Ljubljana in summer 2000, took place only two days after the end of the SCO's founding conference as an international institution (transforming itself from having been a loose grouping). The SCO also intended to create of a joint rapid deployment force at an "anti-terrorism center" in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Such an antiterrorist center was planned to function as a joint coordinating center for the SCO and the CIS, raising the specter, in some minds, of Chinese and Russian troops eventually stationed together in Central Asia at the core of a military and political bloc. That joint center has yet to be established, although Russian troops recently were stationed at an airfield near Bishkek.[11]
Russia and China were deep in the process of establishing a strategic condominium ("joint rule") over Central Asian affairs, when the sudden and perhaps long-term U.S. military presence in the region interfered, in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center. But to grasp the full significance of this unexpected development, a look back to the 1990s is necessary. The decade of the 1990s was a transitional period from the late Cold War system of international relations to a new system being born before our eyes. The first half of the decade witnessed the breakdown of old structures, especially in Central Eurasia and Central Asia in particular, not least of which was the final disintegration of the Soviet Union. The second half of the decade saw the incipient consolidation of certain trends that had begun to emerge already in the first half of the decade.
However, this is 2003. Not only would no one argue that the disappearance of the USSR reestablishes the status quo ante. The U.S.–Soviet bipolarity was not even the only significant characteristic of the international system during the last half of the twentieth century. Of equal if not greater importance in the long run was the dissolution of the British and French Empires. Without this development, regional systems of international relations would have been unable proliferate in Eurasia after 1991. In fact, such regional systems of international relations, with increasing relative autonomy of the dominant bipolar system, began to appear in evidence in other parts of the world in the 1980s.
This is no surprise to people familiar with complex systems. (This term is used in its technical-scientific, not its ordinary-language or even social-science academic sense.) New complex systems may be formed from the recombination of parts or aspects of other complex systems. Indeed, such composites permit rapid evolution. The "system-dominant" bipolarity of the late Cold War era, and its exclusive focus on military capabilities, obscures such developments in retrospect even though they were widely commented and analyzed at the time. From the early 1970s and throughout the 1980s, a system we might call Multipolar Interdependence (most notable in the economic and increasingly in the financial realms of international affairs) came to be adjoined to the bipolar Cold War system inherited from the 1950s and 1960s.[12]
Only the decolonization of the British and French Empires made possible the explosion of variety in international affairs that occurred in the 1990s. The increased worldwide levels of literacy, education, economic well-being, communication, and political participation make it much more difficult even for the new American dominance to succeed in neutralizing such mobilization, much less in reducing it to its 1948 level. The greatest danger, as we have seen, is that it this mobilization acquires a hostile profile. Such a consolidation of anti-American sentiment will not distinguish between the United States and Europe, but instead lump them together. Such a view is in fact hard to dispute from the standpoint of the longue durée. Looking back at the second half the second millennium, it is entirely justified to regard North and South America together with Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals as a socio-cultural Renaissance/Enlightenment bloc in world history.
The terrorist attack in New York on 11 September 2001 did not change the world. However, it did accentuate and intensify a trend in U.S. domestic and foreign affairs whose advocates had been struggling for influence over national policy throughout the 1990s. The terrorist attack presented an "opportunity" for the U.S. to attempt to constrain the emerging complexity of the emerging international system as a whole by shifting international focus to the relatively narrow, but no less significant, issue-area of "anti-terrorism." Since then, the U.S. has made consistent and persuasive, indeed unremitting, attempts to reduce many other items on the international political and economic agenda to an anti-terrorist essence. In this way, current American international behavior represents a return to Cold War styles of thinking and acting, even if developments in technology and communications have radically changed their implementation. The "Son of Star Wars" program is an epitome of the continuity.[13]
The events of 11 September 2001 motivated a realignment of Russia's foreign policy towards the West, meaning not only Europe but also the U.S. (which had been in doubt). As such, they clarify an important ambiguity arising out of the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union. Indeed, it is necessary to distinguish analytically between the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and that of the Soviet Union: we may refer to them in shorthand, respectively, as "1989" and "1991." The ambiguity arises from the fact that 1989 would mark the years 1989-2001 as a transition to a normatively new international order characterized by a succession of international systems, themselves animated by the tension between unipolarity and multipolarity. The year 1991, on the other hand, would mark the hiatus 1991-2001 as a transition to another bipolar system within a "Long Twentieth Century" international order.[14]
What events suggested that the international transition of the 1990s was a transition to another bipolar international system rather than to a new international order (the "1991" interpretation)? Trends in Russian foreign policy the mid- and late 1990s suggested a new emergent bipolarity, coming from a disaffection of Russian public opinion with the West in general and the United States in particular, and a turning of Russian elite opinion towards Asia. Indeed, Russian diplomacy seemed to replicate patterns its decline from Great Power status after defeat in the Crimean War. After losing Crimea in the mid-nineteenth century, Russia turned its attention to Poland, the Pacific coast (now meaning and including China as well as Japan) plus south and southwest Asia, and the Balkans. That was the same pattern that Russian diplomacy was following before Putin, with minor emendations: Poland had become Poland/Lithuania/Baltics, and the Pacific coast now included China and Japan. The orientations were regionalized but the pattern was remarkably similar. Such a revision to an old pattern had created the basis for continued bipolarity in Europe, providing a foothold on the Continent for a Russocentric geopolitical pole opposing the Euro-Atlantic community on a global scale.
To take the year 1989 as a cutpoint, on the other hand, makes it a marker of the end of bipolarity, a specifically Cold War bipolarity moreover not European in origin but rather projected into Europe (and the developing world) by the ideological and great-power confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union as superpowers in the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, the bipolar structure of the Cold War began to evaporate before 1991, with Gorbachev's 1988-89 doctrinal innovations already dissipating ideological conflict. In this view the post-1989 unification of Europe under NATO/EU then becomes, on the global level, analogous to the unification of Germany under Bismarck on the European level. Following Bismarck's exit from European diplomacy, tension arose from his successor's failure to respect a balance of interests with Austria, and in particular from their projection of German interests into the eastern Mediterranean and southwest Asia. The structural analogue to this development in the contemporary era is the disregard, if not sometimes scorn, with which American diplomacy increasingly dismisses European interests in that very same region, superposing its own upon them. The American projection of interests yet further into Central and Southwest Asia is the early twenty-first century analogue to the German projection of economic and geo-strategic interests into the Balkans and Asia Minor towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Just as the rebirth of the Holy Alliance (in the form of the Three Emperor's League) followed Bismarck's passage from the scene in 1890, so we now have a reversion to NATO in the form of enlarged-NATO-plus-PFP. Indeed, just as an ineffectual Quadruple Alliance was as like a superstructure to the Holy Alliance, so an ineffectual OSCE is superstructure to the new NATO/EU. If one follows this reasoning, then, the years 1989-2001 were a transition not just to a new international system but indeed to a new international order, an order that will be animated by the tension between unipolarity and multipolarity just as the European system was so animated from 1890 to 1914, and like it resolving into a bipolarity.
What then should we expect from such a perspective? The Concert of Europe hid an ideological (i.e., normative) opposition—republicanism vs. autocracy—that later came to the fore as the principal structural basis for the geopolitical bipolarization that led to the First World War. If we project into the future a pattern similar to the bipolarization of the European alliance system that followed Bismarck's disappearance from the diplomatic scene in the late nineteenth century, then we should anticipate: (1) that the contemporary "postmodernization" of the Enlightenment (i.e., its end as an era) will become the basis for a system-wide ideological bipolarization as was evident between England and Russia but covered over by the Concert of Europe; (2) that this bipolarization will become increasingly evident towards the middle of the twenty-first century as a now-emerging multipolarity, seeking to counter American unipolarity, disintegrates; and (3) that the unipolarity-vs.-multipolarity tension now characterizing international affairs will be replaced by a new bipolarity such as emerged in the 1890s and led to the First World War.[15]
What none of those projections suggests, is who the contending parties will be. However, let us try to guess. It is possible, without endorsing Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis, to uphold the idea that one geopolitical (or geo-cultural) bloc now consolidating itself is clearly Euro-Atlantic. Any emergent Asiatic geo-cultural unification could be the catalyst for a system-wide restructuring in the middle of the twenty-first century, reducing into a more bipolar framework the now-emerging multipolarity. In fact, this unification need not even be political like Bismarck's of Germany; it may be transnational and social. Will Central (and Southwest) Asia lean to the "East" or to the "West"? If the major blocs in the twenty-first century will be geo-cultural (which is not the same as their being civilizational), then the centrality of Central and Southwest Asia becomes evident.
Thus Central and Southwest Asia together represent a potentially emergent entity, where cultural evolution may later influence the normative bases of any future international order and play a critical role in determining the identities of the actors (including alliances and coalitions) in any future international system. In this context, the conflict with Iraq represents an American attempt to pre-empt hegemony over a strategic part of Eurasia, not just to motivate a political transformation of autocratic Muslim regimes, but moreover thereby to socialize their next political generation and so deny their populations, as a geopolitical resource, to Chinese influence later in the twenty-first century.
Tautological as it sounds, the geopolitical significance for Central Asia, of the strong U.S. military presence in southwest Asia, is the on-the-ground foothold that it gives the American military in the region. Certainly China views the U.S. presence as a hindrance to its strategic objectives of dominating the region. Beijing and a number of European capitals believe that the U.S. does not have the staying power or dedication or focus to remain in the region for a long time. It is quite possible that such a view is wrong. But it is indisputable that even the current, relatively short-term presence has monkey-wrenched the impending closure of Sino-Russian hegemony over Central Asia and, still more significant, motivated the beginning of a rapprochement between Moscow and Washington. Moscow tacitly recognizes, if no one else does, that Washington has basically solved, at least for the time being, the problem of Islamism and the CIS's porous southern border.[16]
It is not unusual to find references to Central Asia as the "backyard" of, variously, Russia or the United States, or even China. However, the seemingly neutral analogy of a "backyard" carries cultural and spatio-temporal baggage. To speak of Central Asia as a "backyard" evokes the neatly mown lawns of early twentieth-century small-town America or its post-World War Two suburban orderliness and middleclass conformity. But Central Asia is not a backyard; vast reaches of it will remain forever a hinterland: the difference is significant. A hinterland—literally a "behind-land"—is neither so well defined nor well manicured. It extends indefinitely beyond an ill-defined boundary. A more Anglo-American equivalent of "hinterland" is "back country": think rather of a settlement along a riverbank, behind which there is wooded land where flourish other forms of life having the effrontery to consider the domain their own. The more one seeks to domesticate a hinterland and transform it into a backyard, the more acute and inevitable becomes the confrontation with the increasingly agitated autochthones. Such an extended metaphor is not a useless reflection of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Accreted as it is around the conceptual nucleus of Lockean appropriation, it is all the more apposite as an image of Western ingress into what was once called Inner Asia. But that does not mean that it is a model to be emulated.[17]
So has the global anti-terrorist coalition formed by American diplomacy in the wake of September 11 rendered obsolete and meaningless the Sino-Russian rapprochement marked by the creation of the SCO and the bilateral treaty signed earlier this year? Hardly. Rather, it is necessary to recognize that this rapprochement is oriented not only against Washington's best intentions (not to speak of its "interests") but also against the interests of people living in Asia. It favors only the interests of the Russian and Chinese military-industrial elites and their representatives in the national political executives. No U.S.-sponsored "war on terrorism" will change this hard fact, which, after the overthrow of the Taliban regime, is perhaps today the greatest long-term threat to Central Asian stability from outside the region.
The greatest long-term threat to Central Asian stability from within the region as a whole is to be found in Uzbekistan. The increasing destitution of Uzbekistan's larger population and their lack of either political or economic freedoms, combined with the country's situation as a geopolitical key to both Central Asia and the broader international environment, becomes a cauldron of discontent. The appearance of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in the late 1990s was a symptom of this syndrome. Uzbekistan is also key to a growing security schism within Central Asia itself, separating itself and Turkmenistan (which may be grouped together geopolitically despite their recent bilateral diplomatic conflicts) from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, with Tajikistan falling inbetween.
The presence of ethnic Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan and Taijikistan in particular, together with a regional foreign-policy profile that is hard to describe as conflict-averse, makes Uzbekistan a security problem externally as well as internally.[18] Uzbekistan does not fall easily in to any local sphere of influence—be this Russian, Chinese, Turkish, or Iranian—but it does have a special relationship with the United States. Indeed, the U.S. recognizes the acuteness of the domestic situation in Uzbekistan and has for years been pushing President Karimov to marketize and democratize, yet without much success. The entrenched elite gains too much from the status quo and fears to lose too much from significant change.[19]
The formation of a U.S.-sponsored "global anti-terrorist coalition" has not undercut the basis for the Sino-Russian rapprochement signalled by the signature of their bilateral friendship treaty and the institutionalization of the SCO. These developments favor the interests of the Russian and Chinese military-industrial elites and their representatives in the national political executives. As such, they are oriented against the interests of the peoples of Central Asia. Insofar as NATO intends or decides to enhance its profile in Central Asia, maintaining a long-term and increasingly influential presence in the region, the challenge before it is to do more than promote the "war on terrorism" in the region.[20]
As the same, time the current marginalization, indeed exclusion, of the publics in Central Asia from influence upon their own fates will not last forever. Although indigenous North American peoples were eliminated as political contenders in the nineteenth century, nevertheless they have in South America emerged since 1991—in alliance with the economically disadvantaged strata in Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina—as among the most important actors determining their countries' political course not only domestically but moreover internationally. This development should stand as a warning against the myopia of any view that seeks to minimize the significance of the Central Asian citizenries in their national political life. The continual acceleration of history in our era means that they will become important within the professional lifetimes of current observers of the scene.
It is perhaps therefore proper that the existing doctrine and practice of "cooperative security" receives renewed emphasis. With the United States fixated upon the military and strategic instruments for executing the "war on terrorism," NATO might organize itself and the international community—and its European members should lobby the EU—so to offer specific, well-considered assistance in realms that go well beyond purely military issues. This is the only way to persuade the citizenries and future elites of the Central Asian countries that NATO's relations with the region can be to common long-term advantage. The explicit declaration and pursuit of such a focus will be the only and most persuasive evidence that the West's interests in the region differ at all qualitatively from Russia's and especially China's focus on cajoling the elites currently in power through constant psychological pressure so as to appropriate choice sectors of their national economies.
[Note 1]. All URLs (web addresses) are verified to be correct as of 25 February 2003.
[Note 2]. Central Eurasian Studies Society, "About CESS," <http://cess.fas.harvard.edu/CESSpg_org_info.html>.
[Note 3]. For a complementary analysis, which uses the first and the seventh scales to anchor a more extended discussion of the second, third, and fourth, see Robert M. Cutler, "The Caspian Energy Conundrum," Journal of International Affairs 56, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 89–102.
[Note 4]. For a discussion of what does and does not make games nested, see George Tsebelis, Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).
[Note 5]. Robert M. Cutler, "Complexity Science and Knowledge-Creation in International Relations Theory," in Institutional and Infrastructural Resources, in Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (Oxford: EOLSS Publishers for UNESCO, 2002), <http://www.eolss.net>.
[Note 6]. "Uzbek–Russian Positions Coincide, Uzbek Head Tells Russian Premier," Uzland News, 18 December 1999, <http://www.uzland.uz/news/12_18_99.htm#putin5>.
[Note 7]. "Uzbek–Russian Presidents Hold News Conference in Uzbek Capital," Uzland News, 20 May 2000, <http://www.uzland.uz/2000/05_20.htm#putin13>.
[Note 8]. Gregory Gleason, "Inter-State Cooperation in Central Asia from the CIS to the Shanghai Forum," Europe–Asia Studies 53 (November 2001): 1077–95.
[Note 9]. See "Declaration of Shanghai Cooperation Organization," People's Daily, 15 June 2001, <http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200106/15/print20010615_72738.html>.
[Note 10]. Stephen J. Blank, "Military Capabilities of the People's Republic of China," Testimony to the Armed Services Committee, U.S. House of Representatives, 19 July 2000.
[Note 11]. L[iz] F[uller], "Russia Deploys Fighters at Airbase in Kyrgyzstan," RFE/RL Newsline, 3 December 2002.
[Note 12]. For fuller discussion of these and subsequent points, see Robert M. Cutler, "The Complex Evolution of International Orders and the Current International Transition," InterJournal, Article 255 (1999), <http://www.interjournal.org/cgi-bin/manuscript_abstract.cgi?38855>. Compare Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds.), The Expansion of International Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1984).
[Note 13]. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (London: Oxford University Press, 1982); for interesting afterthoughts, see Gaddis, "Strategies of Containment, Past and Future," Hoover Digest, 2001, No. 2, <http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/digest/012/gaddis.html>.
[Note 14]. Compare Ian Clark, Reform and Resistance in the International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Cutler, "The Complex Evolution of International Orders and the Current International Transition"; James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, "The Institutional Dynamics of International Orders," International Organization, 52 (Autumn 1998): 943–69; Hendryk Spruyt, "Institutional Selection in International Relations," International Organization, 48 (Autumn 1994); 527–57.
[Note 15]. Compare Michael Mastanduno, "Preserving the Unipolar Moment: Realist Theories and U.S. Grand Strategy after the Cold War," International Security, 21, no. 4 (Spring 1997), 49–88.
[Note 16]. Compare Lincoln Bloomfield, "Competing 21st Century Threats: Scenarios and Realities," in Willem J.M. van Genugten et al. (eds.), Realism and Moralism in International Relations (The Hague: Kluwer International, 1998), chap. 14.
[Note 17]. See Cyril E. Black et al., The Modernization of Inner Asia (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1991).
[Note 18]. For a good summary of some of the contemporary complications, see International Crisis Group, Central Asia: Fault Lines in the New Security Map, Asia Report No. 20 (Osh and Brussels: International Crisis Group, 4 July 2001), pp. 3–9; those seeking authoritative and exhaustive detail should consult International Crisis Group, Central Asia: Border Disputes and Conflict Potential, Asia Report No. 33 (Osh and Brussels: International Crisis Group, 4 April 2002), pp. 2–17.
[Note 19]. See, for example: Shahram Akbarzadeh, "How the Elite Survives in Uzbekistan," Political Expressions 2 (No. 1, 1998): 31–45; International Crisis Group, Uzbekistan's Reform Program: Illusion or Reality?, Asia Report No. 46 (Osh and Brussels: International Crisis Group, 18 February 2003), pp. 22–25.
[Note 20]. For a prescriptive policy analysis in the field of military cooperation, see Stephen J. Blank, The Future of Transcaspian Security (Carlisle Barracks, Penna.: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, August 2002), <http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/2002/trnscasp/trnscasp.pdf>