GOOD READS
Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in
Central Asia (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Alexander Cooley
Review and author interview by George Gavrilis
The drive from central Dushanbe—Tajikistan’s capital—to the
Afghan border is an easy four-hour jaunt. On the way, one
drives past Chinese high-rise construction projects, Russian
radar installations, the airport whose runway has been
resurfaced by the French military and along stretches of rural
highway built by the Turks and the Japanese. At the Afghan
border is a massive customs facility and bridge built by U.S.
taxpayer dollars. Back in Dushanbe at a popular Chinese
restaurant, it is possible to dine next to tables of Iranian
traders, Chinese construction supervisors, Russian FSB teams and American diplomats.
Taken superficially, these scenes can give the impression that Central Asia is an arena for
competition from stronger and greater powers near and far—an updated Great Game.
Refreshingly, Cooley’s book departs from impressionistic foreign policy narratives that pit
the US, Russia and China in a zero-sum competition for influence in Central Asia. Instead,
Great Games, Local Rules presents a sophisticated two-step argument about foreign policy
and domestic politics. On foreign policy, Cooley argues that Russia, China and the United
States sometimes compete with one another but more often grudgingly coexist, avoid
stepping on each other’s toes and even mimic each other’s policies.
The book devotes a good deal of attention to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO),
whose membership includes China, Russia and four Central Asian republics. Although
American and European policymakers have worried for years that the SCO will muscle them
out of the region, Cooley shows that the SCO is far from a cohesive organization. For
example, Russia wants an ever-expanding SCO that dilutes China’s imprint on the
organization; China wants a compact SCO that promotes Beijing’s foreign policy interests in
the region; Kyrgyzstan desires an SCO that shores up its sovereignty and keeps potential
threats from neighbors at bay. Based on the author’s numerous interviews with
policymakers and experts in Russia, China, Central Asia and elsewhere, the discussion of the
SCO should go a long way towards moderating speculation on what the organization does
and doesn’t do.
Good Reads: Great Games Local Rules
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A substantial portion of the book is devoted to a discussion of domestic political antics in
Central Asia as they relate to foreign policy. Cooley argues that the Central Asian
governments have become adept at manipulating outside powers and playing them off
against each other, leveraging external engagement and aid to prop up their political
fortunes. The book is chock full of good examples of Central Asian governments drawing up
their own “local rules” in dealing with Moscow, Beijing and Washington. Cooley discusses
the case of the Manas Transit Center in Kyrgyzstan, which the United States rents in order to
fuel missions and send troops to Afghanistan:
President Bakiyev and his ruling circle actively drummed up a bidding war between
Moscow and Washington, making increasingly brazen demands for economic payoffs. This bidding war provided Bishkek with non-transparent revenues that fed elite
predation, eroded institutional capacity, and limited Western actors’ willingness to
criticize deteriorating political and economic trends in the country (116-117).
The book also discusses the international
corruption scandal known as Kazakhgate
and the Giffen Affair as well as the lessknown alleged kickbacks to Central Asian
officials by Chinese energy companies
eager to lock up the region’s gas and oil
deposits. While foreign governments
and transnational corporations routed
payoffs to Central Asian officials through
offshore vehicles and murky companies,
seeing it as part of the cost of doing
business in the region. Nonetheless,
Government bling in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Photo by George Gavrilis
they found themselves frustrated by the
growing assertiveness of Central Asian
governments and the continuing
obstacles they faced in the region.
According to Cooley, “the most skillful handler of these competing foreign powers has been
Kazakhstan, which under the helm of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, has gone to great
lengths to present itself as the geopolitical crossroads of multiple identities and influences,
invoking the often-quoted slogan that ‘happiness is multiple pipelines’” (9).
The book should appeal to a variety of audiences beyond Central Asian specialists. It makes
edifying reading for students of international relations and comparative politics but also for
the think-tank community and policymakers in the United States, Eurasia and China. It
should also be priority reading for anyone whose interests or work include Afghanistan.
Even with the draw down of international troops in Afghanistan, the United States will
continue to look for erstwhile partners in the neighborhood to keep Afghanistan afloat.
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Alexander Cooley teaches political science at Barnard College and Columbia University,
writes frequently on foreign policy issues and serves on the advisory board of the Open
Society Foundation’s Central Eurasia Project and the external advisory committee of Human
Rights Watch. He recently attended the Hollings Center’s Regional Policy Dialogue in
Istanbul, Foreign Policy and Competing Mediation in the Middle East and Central Asia.
George Gavrilis sat down with Cooley to discuss Great
Games, Local Rules.
Gavrilis: You did quite a bit of field research in half a
dozen countries for the book. What were some of the
frustrations and highlights you experienced?
Cooley: Well, I think many of the frustrations were
also bizarre highlights and were certainly educational.
Several come to mind: One was meeting with Bakiyev’s
National Security Council and base negotiating team in
Bishkek. I was expecting to interview them about
Kyrgyzstan’s position on the Manas basing deals and
related negotiations, but instead they aggressively
grilled me on why Peace Corp and USAID programs
were considered U.S. aid, and they insisted that these
programs should not have been part of the $150
million basing rights package in 2006—“cash only
please!” On the basing issue in general, hardly anyone I
met thought I could possibly have a purely academic
interest on the topic.
Kyrgyz nationalism flying high.
Photo by George Gavrilis
But there were other highlights: lecturing about the importance of external actors and
international rankings and perceptions to a group of Turkmen civil servants at the
Presidential Academy of Management and then fielding their questions about the implosion
of the U.S. financial system and the decline of U.S. credibility on international economic
matters. That was a nice twist. Closer to home, I was stunned by the nasty tone of an E.U.
debate that I sat in on in Brussels about lifting sanctions on Uzbekistan, with NGOs and E.U.
officials debating whether the EU was a strategic or normative actor. At that point it hit me
that Central Asia has done its own share to influence the identities and politics of the actors
allegedly influencing it.
Perhaps my biggest fascination (and frustration) was becoming more immersed in the
Chinese dimension over the last 4 years. I’ve seen considerable evolution and growing
sophistication on the part of Chinese experts and policymakers, yet my lack of language skills
has prevented me from gaining a more nuanced appreciation of what is going on. But in
general, contrasting the diplomatic styles of China and Russia in the region– one low key,
always downplaying its role versus the other overtly trumpeting its long-held ties, backroom
deals and soft power– has been as instructive as it is entertaining.
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Gavrilis: Colloquially speaking, it seems that your book’s message to policymakers in DC is,
“Don’t worry so much about Moscow or Beijing, worry about getting played by the Central
Asian republics.” Are they receptive to this message?
Cooley: Yes, that’s definitely one of the
practical messages of the book. Some policy
makers definitely are receptive, but it also
depends on specific bureaucratic pressures
and the issue in question. Everyone has
priorities and trains need to run on time. But
the Central Asian states themselves do a good
job of masking their own agency by invoking
alleged external pressures from Beijing and
Moscow. This makes it tempting for Western
officials to offer security cooperation and
economic benefits, while toning down the
other aspects of engagement, such as the
values agenda, human rights and civil society
promotion.
Map of Central Asia. Source: UT-Austin map library
But, as I write in the Conclusion, this challenge
of dealing with the agency of small states in
multipolar settings presents a far broader challenge to U.S. foreign policymakers than just
what has been happening in Central Asia. For example, the post-Arab Spring Middle East is
an area where despite continuing U.S. engagement and significant allocations of aid, security
assistance and civil society programming, actual U.S. influence appears to be diminishing
while other external players are also getting involved.
Gavrilis: Are the Chinese frustrated about corruption in Central Asia or do they see it as a
necessary and palatable cost?
Cooley: Well, there is certainly frustration, but different Chinese actors have different
thresholds of tolerance, something I don’t do a good enough job of caveating in the book.
The small and medium-sized business community has grown frustrated at some of these
whimsical border policies and regulatory changes imposed by Central Asian governments, as
are Chinese planners who had hoped to turn the SCO into a more institutionalized legal
framework for rationalizing regional trade and investment. There is also a generation of
younger Chinese scholars and analysts that view Central Asia as ripe for implementing new
technologies and arrangements to streamline transactions and settle regional payments. Of
course, Chinese energy companies like CNPC have considerable experience working in
overseas environments with challenging governance issues—they seem to be handling their
Central Asian deals just fine.
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Gavrilis: What would Central Asia look like without U.S. development or military assistance?
Cooley: That’s an almost impossible counterfactual to consider, as both Western security
and development assistance have triggered Russian and Chinese responses and counterinitiatives—so it’s tough to disentangle the independent effects of any one outside country’s
engagement. It’s been the interaction of U.S. involvement with other external powers that
has empowered local sovereigns to use external resources for their own private political and
economic benefit. For example, Bakiyev extracted funds from Moscow in 2009 to supposedly
close Manas and then routed them to offshore bank accounts. Also, formal U.S. aid in the
region is actually not all that big, but it is accompanied by a range of contractors, third party
deals and commercial arrangements that support the U.S. military logistics effort.
There is also an incentive on behalf of the governments of the smaller states to characterize
themselves as “fragile” or in danger of failure, in order to extract more economic and
security assistance from the international community. In this context, many Western
initiatives are well intentioned but end up backfiring when implemented or brokered by
Central Asian elites. For example, I think that the latest “New Silk Route” initiative risks
heightening competition over individual projects, rather than actually fostering regional
integration. One of the central themes of the book is that different external efforts to
promote regional integration have done little to reduce informal barriers to trade and have
reified the role of borders in Central Asia.
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