Chinas Rise And Reconfiguration Of Central Asias Geopolitics A Case For Us Pivot To Eurasia

China's emergence as a global actor has questioned the position of the United States as the strongest power and the future of the Washington-led global order. But achieving the status of a truly global player wielding influence in all dimensions of power would require China, among other things, to leverage its regional influence in Central Asia. This region is increasingly representing China's western leg of economic expansion and development and is of a growing strategic importance for Beijing. It is also a region that should be of greater strategic importance to Washington, which seeks to preserve its leading position in the international system and ensure China's peaceful integration in the global political, security, and economic architecture. The question of future economic and security order in Central Asia is thus of paramount importance to global stability. China is already projecting the strongest economic presence in the region and has the potential to build "comprehensive influence" across economic, cultural, political, military, and security spheres. Just as in the Asia-Pacific, it is the rise of China and its perceived efforts at domination in Central Asia that are driving the reconfiguration of the region's geopolitics and are challenging the U.S. global supremacy, requiring Washington to advance creative economic and military solutions in the heart of Eurasia. To stay relevant globally and regionally, the United States has to pursue a robust, direct, and long-term strategy of engagement in Central Asia. As it seeks to do so, Washington cannot premise its cooperation with other powers in Central Asia on the isolation of China-a global force calling for engagement where beneficial and containment where necessary. Washington should boost military engagement in the region, upgrade its New Silk Road Strategy (NSRS), advance cooperation with key partners, and shape China's global ascendance by leveraging its position in Central Asia. It should consider joining multilateral institutions involving the regional countries and China or seek the creation of new ones to shape China's regional activities. It should link its NSRS with China's "belt" strategy where it benefits the region's development while ensuring multidirectional contours of regional geo-economic forces. It should also start pondering how to leverage its potential strategic relationship with Iran, which links the Middle East with Central and South Asia, and shares growing economic ties with China. Finally, it should develop platforms of cooperation with China in economic and security spheres pertaining to both global and regional affairs. None of these tasks are easy to accomplish. This policy monograph, written in March 2015, sheds light on the crucial forces at work, assesses the possibility and implications of China's hegemony in Central Asia, and highlights the need for Washington to play real politics at the table rather than from across the high seas.

China¿s emergence as a global actor has questioned the position of the United States as the strongest power and the future of the Washington-led global order. To achieve the status of a truly global player wielding influence in all dimensions of power would require China to leverage its regional influence in Central Asia. This region is increasingly representing China¿s western leg of economic expansion and development, and is of a growing strategic importance for Beijing. It is also a region that should be of greater strategic importance to Washington, which seeks to preserve its leading position in the international system and ensure China¿s peaceful integration in the global political, security, and economic architecture.

China's global rise has prompted numerous discussions and studies of this historically monumental phenomenon and its implications for the world. On the one hand, China's emergence as a global player has generated a lot of optimism for global development and economic convergence. On the other, it has spurred concerns about possible collisions on the world stage as existing and emerging powers seek to retain and redesign their roles and influences. Related opportunities and fears have been especially pronounced in countries neighboring China, including in Central Asia where the newly independent and post-Soviet republics face a possibility of yet another imperial expansion due to strategic advances of the "Middle Kingdom." As the strongest power on the planet, the United States has a major stake in China's and the region's future because both directly affect the U.S. global standing and the U.S.-led global economic and security order. This book assesses China's global rise through the prism of geopolitical and geo-economic forces sweeping through Central Asia.

The Sino-Russian relationship has experienced several permutations in recent decades as both states have undergone radical domestic changes, including the end of Soviet communism and the abandonment of Maoism. This volume brings together scholars to address the current status of Sino-Russian relations in the political, military, energy and trade sectors. In this comprehensive new volume, authors offer a detailed account on the both the historical context and current status of relations between Russia and China and the geo-political realignments in Eurasia. This analysis of the evolving relationship addresses global strategy, energy politics, national security, human security, and Central Asian links. Individual chapters examine key issues such as China’s economic ascendancy, military relations, the geostrategic position of Mongolia, Japan’s views and historical background. With authors representing a broad range of current active experts and researchers working in Europe, the US, Central Asia, China and Japan, this book offers a long-term and in-depth analysis of the relations and potential developments in both bilateral and international relations. This work will be of great interest to scholars of international relations, Asian security, and the Eurasian region.

In this global era, Central Asia must be understood in both geo-economic and geopolitical terms. The region's natural resources compel the attention of rivalrous great powers and ambitious internal factions. The local regimes are caught between the need for international collaborations to valorize these riches and the need to maintain control over them in the interest of state sovereignty. Russia and China dominate the horizon, with other global players close behind; meanwhile, neighboring countries are fractious and unstable with real potential for contagion. This pathbreaking introduction to Central Asia in contemporary international economic and political context answers the needs of both academic and professional audiences and is suitable for course adoption.

A crucial assessment of how global and regional politics converge in the swath of Eurasia that includes South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Under the ambitious leadership of President Xi Jinping, China is transforming its wealth and economic power into tools of global political influence. But China's foreign policy initiatives, even "Belt and Road," will be shaped and redefined as they confront the ground realities of local and regional politics outside China. In China's Western Horizon, Daniel S. Markey previews how China's efforts are likely to play out along its "western horizon:" across the swath of Eurasia that includes South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Drawing from extensive interviews, travels, and historical research, Markey describes how perceptions of China vary widely within states such as Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Iran. On balance, Markey anticipates that China's deepening involvement will play to the advantage of regional strongmen and exacerbate the political tensions within and among Eurasian states. To make the most of America's limited influence along China's western horizon (and elsewhere), he argues that US policymakers should pursue a selective and localized strategy to serve America's specific aims in Eurasia and to better compete with China over the long run.

This book aims to study China's economic statecraft in the contemporary era in a comprehensive manner. It attempts to explore China's approaches to using its economic, trade, investment, and financial power for the pursuit of its political, security, and strategic interests at the regional and global levels. The volume addresses three major issue areas in particular. The first issue pertains to how Beijing has used its economic clout to protect what it perceives as its 'core interests' in its external relations. Three cases are included: the Taiwan issue, human rights, and territorial dispute in the South China Sea. The second major area of inquiry focuses on how China has employed its economic power in its key bilateral relations, including relations with Japan, North Korea, the United States, and other states in the East Asian region. The third issue concerns China's economic statecraft in the global context. It addresses the impacts of China's economic power and policy on the transformation of the global financial structure, developments in Africa, the international intellectual property rights regime, and China's food security relations with the outside world.

The Routledge Handbook of Defence Studies provides a comprehensive collection of essays on contemporary defence studies by leading international scholars. Defence studies is a multi-disciplinary study of how agents, predominantly states, prepare for and go to war. Whereas security studies has been broadened and stretched to cover at times the near totality of international and domestic affairs, and war studies has come to mean not just operations and tactics but also experiences and outcomes, defence studies remains a coherent area of study primarily aimed at how defence policy changes over time and in relation to stimulating factors such as alterations in power, strategy and technology. This new Handbook offers a complete landscape of this area of study and contributes to a review of defence studies in terms of policy, security and war, but also looks forward to new challenges to existing conceptions of defence and how this is changing as states and their militaries also change. The volume is divided into four thematic sections: Defence as Policy; Defence Practice; Operations and Tactics; and Contemporary Defence Issues. The ability to review the field while also looking forward to further research is an important element of a sustainable text on defence studies. In as much as this volume is able to highlight the main themes of defence studies, it also offers an in-depth look into how defence issues can be examined and compared in a contemporary setting. This Handbook will be of great interest to students of defence studies, strategic studies, war studies, security studies and IR.

This book addresses how to mitigate regional tensions and enhance cooperative opportunities through well-designed regional institutions and organizations among countries in geographical proximity. We use the case of Central Asia (i.e., Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) to employ our conceptual framework of ‘externally guided regionalism.’ The following questions guide the study: How and by what forces has Central Asian regionalism evolved, and what are the main characteristics and political implications of the continuously evolving regional institutions? We discuss not only the extra-regional influential actors (i.e., Russia, the United States, the European Union, and China), but also intra-regional initiatives, strategies, and struggles in securing stability and sovereignty. Extra-regional actors’ growing competition over molding their own kind of multilateralism involving this region has contributed to the current direction of Central Asia’s regionalization. Concurrently, Central Asia’s political conditions and constraints interactively contribute to ever-increasing institutional sprawl.

Officially announced by Xi Jinping in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has since become the centrepiece of China’s economic diplomacy. It is a commitment to ease bottlenecks to Eurasian trade by improving and building networks of connectivity across Central and Western Asia, where the BRI aims to act as a bond for the projects of regional cooperation and integration already in progress in Southern Asia. But it also reaches out to the Middle East as well as East and North Africa, a truly strategic area where the Belt joins the Road. Europe, the end-point of the New Silk Roads, both by land and by sea, is the ultimate geographic destination and political partner in the BRI. This report provides an in-depth analysis of the BRI, its logic, rationale and implications for international economic and political relations.