U.S. Policy Toward the Caspian and Black Sea Region

Abstract

The story of U.S. policy toward the countries on the Black and Caspian Seas is a brief one. Like other Soviet republics whose independent histories were interrupted by Russian (later Soviet) domination, the countries in the former Soviet south only regained their independence in the 1990s. During the Soviet era, Moscow’s control over its vast, eleven time-zone-sized territory was so complete that Washington’s Soviet policy barely acknowledged the diverse ethnic, cultural, political, and religious traditions of Caucasus and Central Asia, which are vastly different from those of Russia. Nor did the region’s mineral riches garner much U.S. interest, squeezed as they were under the thumb of Russian control, with a hostile Iran and an unstable Afghanistan to the south. The messy and abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union left behind a number of newly independent states with different political traditions. Some—like Armenia or Georgia—had proud histories dating back to the time of Christ. When they emerged from ruins of the old USSR, they already possessed all the attributes that make a territory a country: a history, folklore, intelligentsia and, in some cases, ready-made governments waiting in exile. Across the Caspian Sea, however, the picture was very different. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, or Kyrgyzstan did not exist until being invented by Russian or Soviet planners. Unlike Central Europe or the western reaches of the former Soviet empire, no tradition of independent nationstates, at least along current borders, existed in Central Asia until the Russian arrival. The region’s proud city-states like Bukhara or Samarkand, which were centers of power, culture, and education in pre-Russian times, have been either destroyed or relegated to obscurity. The new borders drawn up by Russia’s imperial bureaucracy and later by Soviet planners were designed to divide more than unite. Entire ethnic groups were resettled or carved apart by borders and new ones were created, all in an attempt to create areas of permanent instability and thus guarantee the need for continued Russian or Soviet military and political presence. All this made creating a U.S. policy toward the former Soviet south a nightmarish task. Each state or group of states represented a bundle of different problems. The transition to independence was anything but smooth, with civil wars breaking out in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Tajikistan. The United States not only faced the task of defining a coherent role for itself in the area, it also often struggled to simply keep up with the waves of violence that toppled governments