Page 1 of
2 The 'not an
anti-American' bloc By Yu Bin
Great-power competition in
Central Asia ebbs and flows in a timeless and
tireless fashion. Unlike in Europe and East Asia
during the Cold War and after, the fault line for
the current jockeying for position in Central Asia
between Washington and Beijing is not easily
discernible. Instead, fluidity, uncertainty, and
even outright reversal of fortunes among the major
players have been the norm.
Since
September 11, 2001, the world's sole superpower
made a massive strategic return to the region,
only to make a partial exit
to
Iraq for its Greater Middle Eastern project.
China, though rising, has no such option to
disengage. It tries to cope with a volatile region
while dealing with its "strategic" partner of
Russia, the more seasoned player of power games in
Central Asia. Under these circumstances, the
US-China strategic interaction in Central Asia is
bound to be asymmetrical, complex, and open-ended.
While competition is somewhat inevitable,
compromise and even cooperation are and should be
part of the geostrategic equation.
Specifically, the United States pursues
its security goals with largely unilateralist and
military means. In contrast, China carefully plays
its diplomatic, economic and cultural cards in
multilateral and bilateral ways. In other words,
Beijing's soft power faces off against
Washington's hard power in the heartland of
Eurasia. In recent years, the locus of this
asymmetrical competition has been the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO), a new institution
that Washington fears is a vehicle for Chinese
power projection in the region.
The
'sins' of the SCO As a platform from which
China is seen to be able to deflect, frustrate,
and neutralize America's influence, the SCO is at
best an irritant to Washington.
It was
originated in 1996 with the Shanghai Five (China,
Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan), to
which Uzbekistan joined in 2001. Not only did the
SCO survive the post-September 11 era of US
preemptive action, it developed considerably more
organizational cohesion and even thrived in
non-security areas such as economics and culture.
If observer states India, Pakistan, Iran and
Mongolia are counted, the SCO is the largest (in
terms of population and size), though not the
strongest, regional group in the world.
The SCO has appeared to compete with the
United States for influence in Central Asia. For
fear of an indefinite US military presence, the
SCO urged North Atlantic Treaty Organization
forces in Afghanistan in July 2005 to set a
timetable for withdrawing their troops from
Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Since then, US forces
have left the Uzbek base and worked out a
bilateral basing plan with Kyrgyzstan. More
recently, the SCO seems to have developed some
real teeth as several rounds of military exercises
(2003 in Kazakhstan and 2005 in China) have gone
on in the name of anti-terrorism. A joint SCO
drill will be held in Russia next July.
To
date, the SCO remains the world's only regional
security mechanism without direct US
participation. Washington's suspicion and
negativity toward the SCO are therefore not a
surprise.
Not an anti-American bloc
The SCO's "anti-Americanism", however, is
not as strong or real as Washington perceives. The
SCO's founding had less to do with the United
States than with deep concerns regarding
instability in the former Soviet republics. For
Beijing, dealing with a group rather than separate
parties for the stability of the
thousands-of-kilometers border with those former
Soviet republics was both convenient and
necessary.
If anything, the SCO actually
anticipated Washington's "war on terror" by
declaring its organizational goals from the very
beginning to combat the perceived threats of
"terrorism, separatism and extremism" rising from
the ashes of the Soviet empire. For China and
other SCO members, the US war against the Taliban
served, at least temporarily, to further their own
individual and collective goals of countering
religious extremism in Central Asia.
The
SCO repeatedly claims that it is not a military
bloc against a third party, nor does it want to be
one. This is not mere rhetoric to calm Washington,
but reflects a strategic fact of life. In their
complex interactions with the outside world, the
SCO member states need the United States as much
as they need one another. Their joint venture need
not, is not, and should not be an open forum to
counter Washington's influences, short of an
extreme situation in which US actions gravely
jeopardize the core interests of the SCO member
states (for example, if the United States changes
its policy and supports Taiwanese independence).
With these constraints in mind, the July
2005 motion for a timetable of US withdrawal from
some Central Asian bases was not "made" but
"emerged" from a "consensus" within the SCO.
Russia and China denied that they took the lead,
even if they helped to shape such a consensus. In
retrospect, the withdrawal timetable was actually
a rather restrained request in the wake of the
"color revolutions" that disrupted the
socio-political stability of several SCO member
states.
In this regard, the world's sole
superpower casts a long shadow as a silent but de
facto participant in the SCO. Any of the SCO's
major decisions regarding external linkages,
expansion of membership, and ongoing definition of
function will not be made without some
consideration of US interests. For smaller and
weaker SCO members, a more sustained, if not
overbearing, US regional presence may even be
desirable in their strategic bargaining with China
and Russia.
Survival of the slowest
The SCO is also unlikely to become an
anti-American bloc because its decision-making
procedure is based on equality and
consensus-building. While politically sound, such
procedures are by no means operationally
efficient. And the record of SCO's
institution-building is not very impressive.
It took more than five years to convert
the original Shanghai Five into the current bloc
when the SCO Declaration was signed in 2001. It
took another year for the SCO to initial its
charter for organizational and operational
purposes. Although the SCO agreed to set up an
"anti-terrorist structure" in Tashkent in 2002,
member states were still working on the definition
of "terrorism".
China and Russia are
unquestionably more powerful than the other
members. They are, nonetheless, far from
completely dominant. Maybe this is a trade-off for
a new type of inter-state relations based on
equality, consensus and cooperation. Coordinating
such a bloc of members with equal status but
