Routes and Bases: Developments in Central Asia

22 April 2009, 1222 EDT

I’ve been hearing rumors to the effect that US negotiators have cut a deal with the Kyrgyz government to allow continued use of Manas. But media sources remain silent, except to note that the Russians are sending additional warplanes to their own base in Kyrgyzstan.

Instead, they report on a new US-Tajik agreement to allow transit rights for non-military supplies to Afghanistan. This adds to existing deals with Uzbekistan and Russia.

But, interestingly enough, U.S. Assistant Secretary Of State Richard Boucher made it very clear that Washington does not consider Tajik, Uzbek, and Russian deals true alternatives to Manas.

Because the United States does “a lot of different things through the base on Manas,” Boucher said, “it is not just a matter of picking it up [in Kyrgyzstan] and putting it over there [in Tajikistan].”

He also said that the United States has six months to discuss Manas’s closure with the Kyrgyz authorities, after which Washington will decide what to do.

On Monday I presented Alex Cooley’s and my working paper on the structural dynamics of the US basing network at the Mortara Center for International Studies. My new–and extremely impressive–colleague, Matt Kroenig, suggested that we might be wrong about the advantages of “heavy footprint” bases over “light footprint” ones because the latter allow the US greater exit options: if the US loses on base it isn’t that big a deal, because it can always shift to another one in the region.

What I said in response bears repeating here: that’s great in theory, but in practice we’re vulnerable to the kinds of cascading effects we’ve seen in Central Asia. With K2 gone [for analysis before Karimov kiccked us out, see here], and Manas in jeopardy, the US has been unable to develop equivalent assets to substitute for those bases.

On the other hand, the rumors I hear suggest that any new deal on Manas won’t be particularly unfavorable to the US.

We’ll see how this continues to unfold.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.