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Tabish Shah
Russia is by far the most influential player in the Central Asian region. The Russian state monopoly over Soviet era pipelines ensures that Central Asia’s main source of revenue, its energy resources, are dependent upon Russia for transport as they are at present largely in the hands of the Russian state-owned energy companies Transneft, Rosneft and Gazprom. Deals involving the construction of new pipelines transporting Central Asian energy via Russia further reinforce its upper hand in the region, since even if privately-owned Russian companies are involved, they are still closely aligned with the Russian state due to its iron grip over Russia’s extractive economy. The sum of all this is essentially a future in which Russia controls a portion of one of the most crucial aspects of 21st Century development: Energy. This is a worrying situation for the Western powers, and has facilitated an increasing shift in urgency to redress this imbalance of Russian dominance in Central Asia, an area largely ignored by the Western powers since the end of the Afghan war. The Western powers, America, Britain, and Germany, are however not simply fearful of the cost that this imbalance has for energy security in supply terms, but increasingly of the potential geopolitical impact of Russia’s Central Asian resource control on relations with strategically important countries such as Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Energy cooperation with Central Asia at its core could harbour further political ties between Russia and these countries, and result in a reduced ability for the Western powers to control the direction and dynamics of global politics as a whole.
The degree to which this is an issue has been further solidified by developments in which China, one of the world’s most rapidly growing energy consumers, has aligned with Russia to form a partnership crucial to its own energy needs. China is no doubt inwardly unhappy at Russian dominance, but continues outwardly to present a foreign policy that is largely interested in ‘joining’ Russia in its development of Central Asia, as opposed to competing with it. Thus, the Western powers are faced with an alliance between China, the world’s third largest and fastest growing economy, and Russia, a country heading towards possible energy superpower status, involving handshakes not only over energy deals, but those of a more pragmatic nature concerning Russia’s regional and global aspirations. The fact such support takes place mainly on a multilateral level through institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation further complicates matters, since essentially you have a rival partnership to the Western powers dominating weaker countries and potentially influencing them towards a shared anti-Western agenda. Thus, the consequences of Russian dominance in Central Asia are not simply limited to the region or its energy supplies, but have potentially much broader geo-strategic impacts.
In explaining this central point, I discuss current Russian dominance of Central Asian energy, and consider how this has influenced its relations with China towards the powerful partnership that it constitutes today. In order to gauge the extent of imbalance in the region, I will also look at the Western Powers’ current and proposed presence in the region, and assess the extent to which the Western Powers can counterbalance Russian control if indeed trends signify that it needs to be.
Current Dynamics between Russia and
the Central Asian Republics
The post 1989 foreign policies of the petrostates have followed a broad spectrum, ranging from Uzbek hostility towards the West and Russia in intermittent phases, Turkmenistan’s ‘positive neutrality’ involving largely isolationist policies1, and Kazakhstan’s ‘multi-vector’ strategy attempting to maintain good relations with all of the major powers, America, Britain, Russia, China and the EU. In recent times, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have shifted towards Moscow, with calls for an independent investigation into the Andijon massacre2 by the EU and America alienating Tashkent, and the succession of pro-isolationist Saparmurat Niyazov in Turkmenistan by Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, a president looking to establish “a new era in bilateral relations”3 with Russia signaling “a pro-Russian trend in Turkmenistan post-Niyazov foreign policy”4. Despite these outwardly differing foreign policy approaches, all however have one core aspect in common: Russia remains the central player within them.
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