A thousand poles are blooming as new international blocs like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS Development Bank emerge to challenge Western economic and military hegemony.
I delivered the following remarks at an anti-NATO conference held in Moscow on May 15, 2012. I was the only North American speaker at an all-day conference, having been invited in connection with the appearance into Russian of my book Drugs, Oil, and War. As a former diplomat worried about peace I was happy to attend: as far as I can tell there may be less serious dialogue today between Russian and American intellectuals than there was at the height of the Cold War. Yet the danger of war involving the two leading nuclear powers has hardly disappeared.
The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, in a move initiated by the Obama administration, has voted to waive Bush-era human rights restrictions on military aid to the Islam Karimov dictatorship in Uzbekistan, one of the most brutal and repressive regimes on the planet. The lifting of the restrictions, now part of the Foreign Operations bill, is before the full Senate and appears to have bipartisan support. The Obama administration has indicated that it intends to provide taxpayer-funded military assistance to Uzbekistan once the legislation passes both houses of Congress.
Just weeks after widespread ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan killed hundreds of people, destroyed thousands of houses, and caused hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uzbeks to flee their homes, widespread abuse by Kyrgyzstan’s law-enforcement agencies is again fueling tensions.
Over a decade of persistent repression in Uzbekistan has left the country’s political life under the firm control of President Islam Karimov. No political party or movement that can be classified as in opposition to Karimov’s administration is able operate openly today.
For much of the 1990s Boris Shikhmuradov was the most acceptable public face of Turkmenistan’s dictatorial regime, traveling the world as Foreign Minister. An Armenian by birth and a former journalist, the suave and jovial Shikhmuradov spoke English fluently. He made a sharp contrast to his dour boss, President Saparmyrat Niyazov, who goes by Turkmenbashi the Great (Father of all Turkmen) and presides over an extreme Soveit-style personality cult. Shikhmuradov countered this bizarre image of Central Asian governance. Now–like other former elites–he is opposing it.
On March 12, President Bush plans to greet his Uzbek counterpart, Islam Karimov, in the White House. Uzbekistan has emerged as a key strategic partner to the United States after September 11, not only due to its frontier with Afghanistan. For years, some strategists in Washington have considered the Tashkent regime as an important regional player. It is the most populous nation in the region, with 24 million citizens, and serves as the homeland for significant Uzbek minorities in all its neighbors, including Afghanistan.
Uzbekistan has sought a special relationship with the U.S. since the early 1990s. The country received designation as an American “strategic partner” in 1995 in a bilateral communique. This “strategic partner” relationship has, until recently, been largely a rhetorical designation.