CENTRAL ASIA - CAUCASUS ANALYST

Wednesday / February 25, 2004

AMERICAN BASES IN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION?

Stephen Blank

Since the United States acquired bases in Central Asia after the attacks of September 11 Russia, China, and Iran have all frequently attacked the idea that these bases might remain after the war on terrorism. Chinese President Jiang Zemin denounced these bases on a state visit to Iran in 2002. Since then, the drumbeat of warnings have continued. More recently, the linkage between Washington’s ongoing redefinition of its global basing structure and the likelihood of NATO’s further advance into the former Soviet Union has led Moscow to adopt still tougher rhetoric, especially with regard to Georgia and Azerbaijan, about the possibility of such bases and the threat they allegedly portend.

BACKGROUND: Even though all the former Soviet states are formally sovereign, Moscow clearly finds it difficult to accept this fact. It has never truly accepted that they have the right to accept the stationing of foreign troops or foreign military assistance from third parties other than Russia. Moreover, the Russian government has retained bases in Georgia, kept troops in Moldova, and attempted to launch various coups against other rulers or states it has deemed insufficiently subservient to Moscow.

Not surprisingly, Moscow, like Beijing and Tehran, other repressive capitals with designs on the interests of the Caucasus and Central Asia, have loudly voiced their desire for U.S. forces to leave their current bases in these states once the war on terrorism ends. Since those bases and U.S. or NATO assistance programs are there by express invitation of the countries’ governments and since this war will not be over anytime soon, this demand has only revealed the latent neo-imperialism of Russian, Iranian, and Chinese policy.

Russia’s pressure has been particularly prominent in Georgia and Azerbaijan lately. At present Washington depends on logistical access to and through these states in order to sustain its bases in Central Asia. Moreover, it is clear that these states want to affiliate with the West and NATO and have turned to the West for various forms of military assistance. As a result they, like the Central Asian states, are increasingly participating in a range of exercises, training, military-to-military and other programs intended to integrate them with Western armed forces and to create standards by which at least some of their forces can operate together with Western forces in selected contingencies. These contingencies include counter-terrorism, humanitarian relief operations, peacekeeping and border security, among other possible operations.

At the same time Moscow has hitherto refused to evacuate its Georgian bases as promised in 1999 even as its soldiers, according to Georgian officials, collaborate with smugglers and clearly use their influence to retard the resolution of Georgia’s ethnic conflicts. By using its troops as a weapon by which it could dismember Georgia as well as Moldova, Moscow clearly shows that it has yet to act according to Western security standards. Not surprisingly, these bases and Moscow’s general machinations in these states have therefore now become a matter of criticism by the EU and NATO as well as the Bush Administration.

Nor is it surprising that Russia has retaliated by launching all sorts of verbal salvos at NATO and warning about what it might do if Washington’s projected restructuring of its global network of bases includes former Soviet republics. On the other hand, Georgian and Western pressure has led it to suggest, for the first time, that it might be able to withdraw its bases within five years rather than the 14 it first suggested and then the 11 years it proposed until now.

IMPLICATIONS: Georgia and Azerbaijan’s new presidents, Mikhail Saakashvili and Ilham Aliyev, for their parts, have stated their opposition to all foreign bases on their territory, no doubt to get the Russians out as well. But it is unlikely that this is their last word because their need for Western support is too great. Moreover, NATO as an organization as well as the United States have learned from bitter experience that security in the Caucasus and Central Asia is highly relevant to their own security. As Robert Cooper, the assistant to Javier Solana, the Head of the European Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, said, ‘homeland defense now begins with Afghanistan and Iraq. And those areas are even further away from Europe than the Caucasus and Central Asia.’

It is not yet public knowledge whether or not there will be postwar U.S. bases in the former Soviet Union. In any case it is a decision for those states, and not Moscow, to make. On February 21, Uzbekistan announced the U.S. base at Khanabad would remain for the duration of the war on terrorism, and did not rule out making it permanent.

While Moscow has sought to coerce Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Moldova, and Georgia to retain existing bases or invite it to set up new bases, it has done so not to fight the war against terrorism to which it has made little contribution, but in order to hold on to the vestiges of empire. Meanwhile the U.S.’ new basing plans may not include bases like those in Germany for the former Soviet Union. Washington is moving to a vision of more austere and stripped down bases, a complex structure that could include bases manned by only relatively few forces, which are then designated as forward operating locations (FOL’s), or larger forward operating bases (FOB’s) to which it will have access in times of a conflict’s emergence. None of these bases should be a threat to a Russia which retains large nuclear capabilities and which in any case has no truly vital interests at odds with the United States.

CONCLUSIONS: Since we do not know the future evolution of either the U.S. basing program or NATO’s post-2004 expansion, if any occurs, we cannot definitively project what the shape of foreign military bases in the former Soviet Union will look like. But present trends suggest that foreign governments, China, India, America and Russia, are already engaged in a rivalry to project both military influence and power there and that bases are one form of such projections. As long as Russia remains addicted to neo-imperial pipe dreams, it will impose a military race upon itself and its neighbors that it can only lose. Moreover, they will continue to turn to the West in an effort to counterbalance Russian imperial pressure. Thus if the question of U.S. bases remains an issue for the period after the war on terrorism, the safest alternative for those concerned by those bases would be a cooperative effort at multilateral security for the entire Caucasus and Central Asia. However, given the balance of fears among the major contenders for power, it is unlikely that that they will make such moves even though an enlightened concept of their interests would suggest that it is the only way in which external rivalries will stop contributing to Central Asia’s insecurity. Absent such moves, the phenomenon of bases in these states is all too likely. Those bases and the policies of which they are a part represent the new great game, a game in many, though not all, ways unlike that of Kipling’s time.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Professor Stephen Blank, US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA 17013. The views Expressed here do not in any way represent those of the U.S. Army, Defense Dept. or the U.S. Government.

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