Kyrgyzstan is in an unfamiliar, lonely position for a
state on the much-fought-over southern rim of the former Soviet Union. The
country has issued a call for the help of a superpower, any superpower, in implicit exchange for all the influence a savior
can handle -- and there are no takers. A reasonable amount of humanitarian aid has
arrived from both the
U.S. and Russia,
but not the muscle necessary to end Kyrgyzstan's current crisis, in which
President Roza Otunbayeva says as
many as 2,000 people have been slaughtered in the south of the country.
This is strange: Kyrgyzstan has never before had much trouble
attracting the attention of great powers. In his 1938 classic Alone in the Forbidden Land, former
Austrian prisoner of war Gustav Krist describes a winter spent in yurts with
what he calls the Free Kyrgyz before they flee on horseback over the Chinese
border in front of the Red Army. Fifty-five years later, the International
Monetary Fund got the Kyrgyz to lead the way toward post-Soviet independence by
dumping the ruble -- and hence Russia -- and creating Central Asia's first
independent currency.
That was the first salvo in an almost two-decade rumble
between the United States and Russia over influence in the oil-drenched
Caucasus and Central Asia, pipeline
politicking that still goes on today. Most recently, the two countries have been tussling over whose military base will endure in Kyrgyzstan,
the U.S. Manas Air Base or Russia's Kant. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal's Greg White published today, Russian
President Dmitry Medvedev offered his view that Kant will prevail,
diplomatically stating that Manas should not be considered a "permanent"
installation. (Next week, Medvedev travels to Washington for his first state
visit to the United States, although Kyrgyzstan no doubt won't occupy much of his
face time with President Barack Obama.)
But since the ethnic clashes began last weekend, the
playing ground for the fabled Great Game seems to have suddenly fallen off everyone's map. In
a meeting with the U.S. ambassador
to Kyrgyzstan, Tatiana Gfoeller, Otunbayeva asked directly for U.S. military
assistance. But the United States signaled that it wasn't in the cards.
Otunbayeva then turned to Moscow, a development that I
initially viewed as the United States explicitly ceding Kyrgyz turf to Russia after
years of implicitly suggesting that Kyrgyzstan and the rest of Central Asia was
safely in American hands. But Russia gave her the cold shoulder, too.
The dual U.S. and Russian rejections say something different from the traditional zero-sum
understanding of Great Power calculus, not just to Kyrgyzstan but to the rest of the region: They say
that the Great Game is ultimately one of convenience, and nothing more. It's a
harsh message, but probably a useful one for the Central Asians, and all
resource-rich nations that are targets of foreign courtship.
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