Another indication of just how complicated is the balance of
interests in the region is the fact that the Abkhaz war, in which
Russian forces supplied the Abkhaz, proved adisaster for Russia. The
de facto separation of Abkhazia meant that Russia no longer had a
means of putting pressure on Georgia from within. Even more
important, the severing of what had been one of the main
communications routes to the southern Caucasus from Russia
contributed greatly to the decline of Russian economic influence.

Indeed, Russian influence throughout the former Soviet south now
depends mainly not on enforced hegemony, nor on the increasingly
meaningless "Commonwealth of Independent States", but on a set of
bilateral relations in which most of its partners are engaged for
their own very good reasons. In the northern Caucasus, for example,
Russian rule is increasingly based not on military power or
administrative control mechanisms, but on the support of various
local peoples (notably the Ossetes, most of the Dagestanis, and above
all the local ethnic Russians themselves) who fear their local ethnic
and religious adversaries far more than they do Moscow.

Russians like to convince themselves that the decline of their
influence in the southern Caucasus and Central Asia is above all the
result of American and Turkish strategies, and certainly U.S.
rhetoric has furthered that impression. In fact, this is only
partially true. I spent long periods in the southern Caucasus between
1990 and 1993, and, like many of my colleagues, my feeling at the
time was that the new states had made such a mess of their
independence and mutual relations (with some help from Moscow) that
the creation of a new Pax Russica, a regional security order under
Russian supervision, would be the inevitable result.

Russia, of course, failed to establish such a stable order, and for reasons having little to do with American influence. As for Turkish influence, it suffered a severe setback with the collapse of the anti-communist regime in Azerbaijan in 1993. Since then, Ankara has pursued a much more cautious policy based on a series of important lessons. Although the Turkic states of the region certainly welcome links with Turkey, they have no desire for a new big brother to replace Moscow. The Turks have come to acknowledge both the extreme difficulty of profitable investment in these states, and their own lack of funds for such investment.

If, nonetheless, Russian hegemony has also crumbled, one obvious reason for this was that Russia was simply not strong enough to assert such a hegemony. It possessed neither sufficient economic weight nor military force to compel states in the region to submit to its will, at least when alternative patrons became available. This has proved equally true in Central Asia. In Chechnya, the Russian withdrawal in 1996 resulted not just from Chechen military victory, but from a belief that a new leader, General Maskhadov, would reach an accommodation with Russia. For this, however, the Russians would have had to subsidize him very heavily--a course that was precluded not just by chaotic conditions in Chechnya and short-sightedness in the Kremlin, but by the poverty, corruption and weakness of the Russian state itself.

Equally important was the discovery by the Russians that they could not satisfy the competing demands of their different client regimes. They could not, for example, restore Abkhazia to Georgia while retaining Abkhaz support; they could not help Azerbaijan regain sovereignty over Karabakh while keeping the support of the Armenians. In the northern Caucasus, they could not satisfy the demands of both Ingush and Ossetes (nor, more recently, Karachai and Cherkess) for the same piece of land.

False Assumptions

RUSSIAN weakness notwithstanding, the United States has neither the reason, the power, nor the will to replace a largely vanished Russian hegemony in the Caspian region with a hegemony of its own. This argument, of course, runs flatly counter to the assumptions on which U.S. policy in the region has been based for the past three years. These assumptions are false in just about every particular. Some are indeed so historically and even geographically illiterate that it is difficult not to see their proponents as blinded either by a truly pathological degree of russophobia, or by personal ambition.

As to the first of these, a feeling exists both among some would-be Republican foreign policy leaders and among the more russophobe present policymakers that a much more ambitious U.S. policy in the Caspian region has been thwarted by the malign influence of "russophiles" led by Strobe Talbott. In small part, perhaps; but the real reason is that if you go to a senior Pentagon official, or the great majority of congressmen, and suggest the deployment of U.S. troops to the Caspian region--to bases or as peacekeepers, let alone in conflict--they look at you as if you had sprouted a very large pair of hairy ears.

Even if for a while U.S. rhetoric over a "forward policy" in the Caspian region intensifies under a future administration, this severe restriction will continue to apply, for it reflects two fundamental realities: that as soon as you compare the Caspian to Europe, East Asia, Central America or the Middle East, its "vital importance" is immediately revealed as nonsense; and that the great majority of U.S. educated opinion, let alone of the general public, is overwhelmingly indifferent to developments there. A small but telling example of this appeared at the time of the attempted assassination of President Karimov of Uzbekistan in February 1999, allegedly by Islamist extremists. His death would have caused a political earthquake in the region--but the attempt was barely noticed by the U.S. media.

In fact, the only sizeable portion of the American public that has a significant emotional stake in the Caspian region is the Armenian-American community--and they, like the government in Yerevan, are increasingly alarmed by the present trend of U.S. policy. An exponent of a forward U.S. policy in the region once told me that the United States ought to "twist the Armenians' arms till they break" in order to get them to submit to U.S. priorities. Not, I think, if you are a congressman from southern California. The existence of the Armenian-American lobby (and its Greek and other allies) means that in any future war over Karabakh, the United States would not be able simply to back Turkey against Russia. It would in fact find itself on both sides at once. In recent months, intensified U.S. mediation has led to hopes that an agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan might be imminent; but at the time of writing, the assassinations in Yerevan have thrown this into doubt again.

There is also the matter of personal ambition. For as a U.S. diplomat told me recently, in the past few years the Caspian region has been seen as "seriously sexy" in terms of Foreign Service careers, less because of the presumed economic future of the region than because of the romance of the new "Great Game", and the feeling of being a pioneer on a new frontier of diplomacy and geopolitics. I felt the same way myself as a young freelance journalist back in the early 1990s. Nonetheless, it is perhaps now time for older and cooler heads to take an objective look at the region.

The lessons for U.S. policymakers when it comes to Central Asia are twofold: the first is that, to adapt Palmerston's well-known dictum, "the United States has neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies. The United States has only permanent interests." The second is to be clear as to the exact nature of those interests. There are in fact only two that are vital in this region. The first is that the Caspian states should not provide safe havens for terrorists. The second is that the region should not become the source of major conflict, above all between a militarily superior Turkey and a nuclear-armed Russia.

The chief U.S. priority in the area should therefore be the engagement of Russia and Iran, particularly in an attempt to reach a settlement of the Karabakh conflict. Although this war is not in immediate danger of resuming, Turkish arms supplies to Azerbaijan, and Russian ones to Armenia, are deeply worrying. Realizing this, the next U.S. administration should seek greatly intensified dialogues with both Russia and Iran--irrespective of what precise regimes are in power in these countries--in order to serve U.S. interests in a settlement of the Karabakh conflict, in the prevention of Islamist terrorism, and in the stability and development of the region. Where America's truly vital interests are concerned, like any other state it has a duty to be ruthlessly egotistical. But where lesser and more complex interests are at stake, collective security and enlightened self-interest should be the order of the day.

Anatol Lieven is editor of Strategic Comments at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. As a correspondent for the Times (London), he covered developments in the Caucasus and Central Asia between 1990 and 1996.

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