RUSSIA, CHINA, AND THE UNITED STATES IN CENTRAL ASIA: PROSPECTS FOR GREAT POWER COMPETITION AND COOPERATION IN THE SHADOW OF THE GEORGIAN CRISIS

Despite the fissures within the SCO and the competitive tendencies within the Sino-Russian partnership, the United States will not have an easy time achieving its aims in Central Asia. Building on her previous Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) monographs, Growing U.S. Security Interests in Central Asia (2002) and Strategic Consequences of the Iraq War: U.S. Security Interests in Central Asia Reassessed (2004), Dr. Elizabeth Wishnick documents how American policy goals—energy cooperation, regional security, and support for democracy and the rule of law—continue to run at cross-purposes with one another.
In particular, she asserts that competition to secure basing arrangements and energy contracts only benefits authoritarian regimes at the expense of enduring regional security. She argues further that the rhetoric about a new Cold War in the aftermath of the Georgian crisis, and the more general tendency to view U.S.-Russia-China competition in the region with 19th century lenses, as some sort of “new great game,” obscures the common interests the great powers share in addressing transnational problems in Central Asia.