United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio is arriving in Samarkand, the fabled Silk Road city in what is now central Uzbekistan, for talks with key regional ministers on Saturday. The C5+1 – Central Asia plus the US – summit to be held from Saturday to Tuesday heralds Washington’s new approach to the ex-Soviet region – pragmatic, purely transactional and devoid of speeches about democratisation and human rights. At the dawn of Central Asia’s independence, Americans used to show up in the mostly Muslim region strategically stretched between Russia, China and Iran, bearing gifts – and giving lectures.
After the 1991 Soviet collapse, amid the region’s economic degradation, joblessness and poverty, US and European diplomats and businessmen were seen as ambassadors of the brave new world of capitalist prosperity. They wanted reforms – and not just the economic ones. Western diplomats made sure that former Communist apparatchiks-turned-new regional leaders understood that they’d get investments, technologies and international recognition only in exchange for abandoning the Soviet-era totalitarian ways of governing and building the economy.
The West held forums and workshops on human rights, democracy and decentralisation of governance, and sent thousands of students and officials to Western schools. And the West accused regional leaders of losing their moral compass and threatened sanctions when they began to amend their nation’s constitutions to extend their presidential terms, appoint their family members and friends to key government jobs and help them create business empires that often competed with Western investors. Uzbekistan, the region’s most populous nation of 37 million, offers a perfect example.
Its iron-fisted President Islam Karimov was the first ex-Soviet leader to allow a US military base on its soil in 2001. But four years later, he kicked it out after Washington lambasted his brutal suppression of a popular revolt in the eastern city of Andijan that killed hundreds of unarmed civilians. In 2005, a leaked US diplomatic cable called Karimov’s daughter, Gulnara, a “robber baron” who forcibly took over lucrative businesses and was seen as her father’s successor.
As to moralising and lecturing, the tables have turned since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, observers say. Moscow still has plenty of soft power in Central Asia – from movies and pop music to theatre festivals and propagandist TV shows that constantly lie about the war. The Kremlin also uses its economic clout to promote the imperialist concept of the “Russian World”, where the region is seen as Moscow’s “near abroad”, and its pre-Russian heritage is snubbed as backwards and insignificant.
In 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that Kazakhstan had “never had statehood”, and his ideological allies repeatedly threatened to annex its Russian-speaking northern part. This year, Kazakhstan began extraditing Kremlin critics and supplying gas to Russia amid Ukrainian drone attacks on its oil refineries. In January, Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov said Moscow should launch a “special military operation” – a term reserved for the war in Ukraine – in Central Asia and Armenia.
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