The Return of Marco Polo's World Read online

  Turkish and Iranian influence, because of the deep religiosity of the regimes in Ankara and Tehran, is strikingly limited in the post-Soviet Caucasus and Central Asia. The energy powerhouse of Azerbaijan helps illustrate what I mean. Azerbaijan’s ethnic and linguistic affinity with Turkey resulted in extremely close relations between Baku and Ankara in the 1990s, when Turkey, like Azerbaijan, was secular. But the more Islamic that Turkey becomes, the more it becomes estranged from Azerbaijan, which still unabashedly reveres Atatürk’s devotion to secularism, even if Turkey itself no longer does. Then there is Turkey’s decision to work with Russia to develop a gas pipeline from Siberia to Europe under the Black Sea, which competes with Azerbaijan’s own gas export plans.*17 As for Iran, theoretically it should wield considerable influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia—owing to its demographic, cultural, and linguistic weight—for Persia remains, in historical terms, the organizing principle of this entire region. Moreover, Iran is traditionally a Central Asian power as much as a Middle Eastern one. But Tehran’s sterile Islamic ideology repulses these countries, whose traditions are still influenced by Soviet atheism, as well as by Turkic syncretism and shamanism (which, along with the brutal repression of regime opponents, are the real reasons why Islamic rebellions have not taken hold, at least yet, in the region). This is where Iran’s Islamic ideology interferes with its largely pre-Islamic imperial tradition. Thus, as we move eastward along Marco Polo’s path and leave behind the faded imperial influence of Turkey and Iran, we very quickly run up against that of China, whose prestige here is greater than that of either Turkey, Iran, Russia, or America for that matter.

  The Russian invasion of Greater Georgia in 2008 was a pivot point in this process. Until then, Armenia was aligned with Russia, and Georgia was aligned with the United States and Europe. Also aligned with the West was energy-rich Azerbaijan, owing to its oil and natural gas pipelines that bypass Russia and run from Baku through Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean. But the Muslim Azeris saw the American desertion in 2008 of Georgia—a Christian nation, no less, during its hour of need—and realized that Washington no longer could be trusted in a crisis, even if the Azeris themselves continued to detest the Russians. And yet the Russians now sell arms to the Azeris, even while they take the Armenians for granted. In the late 1970s, Moscow deserted its ally Somalia for Somalia’s archenemy Ethiopia, because the latter was a wealthier and more populous country. Moscow would like to similarly trade up in the Caucasus, from Armenia to Azerbaijan. But it cannot as yet since the regional situation is actually far more complicated still.

  Here is the context: The Azeri leadership, as well as the leaderships of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and other former Soviet republics in inner Asia—secular and authoritarian all—have been terrified by the Arab Spring and the Islamic uprisings that subsequently have taken advantage of it. They also have been terrified by Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, as well as by tensions between Russia and Turkey, and by the drop in energy prices. They have no friends in this unraveling world, it seems, and the United States appears to matter increasingly less to them, especially as its eventual withdrawal—perhaps in defeat—from nearby Afghanistan could leave a vacuum there. So gradually, with the help of Chinese economic and political support, these former Soviet republics have been strengthening their institutions, quietly removing pro-Russian elements from their bureaucracies and delinking their economies measurably from Russia’s. In general, they have been standing up to the Russians—so that Russia’s leverage only remains pivotal in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (because of the former’s very long border with Russia and the latter’s institutional weakness). The larger picture here is that state legitimacy in Central Asia, despite the artificial creation of many of these republics by Stalin, in the short run at least has proven somewhat stronger than expected. (The small states of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, with their divisive mountainous geographies, are obvious exceptions. Uzbekistan, following the death of leader Islam Karimov, will be the real test case, though.)*18 In sum, Russia, with its own declining economy, is stymied in the region, and the Chinese, with the roads, railways, bridges, tunnels, and pipelines they are building, are recalling the days of the Tang Dynasty in the eighth and ninth centuries, when Chinese imperial influence extended across Central Asia into northeastern Iran. In 2013, China moved demonstrably ahead of Russia in terms of regional trade, doing $50 billion in commerce with the five former Soviet Central Asian republics, compared to Russia’s $30 billion. Chinese companies now own almost a quarter of Kazakhstan’s oil production and more than half of Turkmenistan’s gas exports.*19

  “Central Asia is unique in that it is the only place where all the great powers converge,” writes Zhao Huasheng, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. After all, historic Central Asia consists not only of the former Soviet republics, but also of Mongolia, Chinese Xinjiang (East Turkestan), and Afghanistan. And in addition to the impact of China and Russia in the former Soviet republics (shaped, in turn, by their own imperial legacies), the United States remains militarily engaged in Afghanistan, while Iran through much of its imperial history has been dominant in western Afghanistan, as has India in eastern Afghanistan.*20 Indeed, while we have been accustomed to conceptually seeing the former Soviet republics as a separate unit, their destiny increasingly will be interwoven with what happens next door in restive Xinjiang and war-torn Afghanistan.*21 This does not mean that Central Asia is where world power will be predominantly decided, but it does mean that Central Asia will be a register of those power relationships. That is, Central Asia will show us who has the upper hand, and who does not.

  Russia and the Intermarium

  To the north of all this complexity and turmoil lies Russia, whose Eastern Orthodox imperium did not take part in the historical ages (the Renaissance and the Enlightenment) that made Europe what it is today, even as the medieval czars long before Napoleon and Hitler faced invasion from Swedes, Poles, and Teutonic Knights—and thus chose to ally with the Mongols. Vladimir Putin’s Eurasianism is deeply rooted in this past, and so “empire is the Russian state’s default option.”*22 Putin knows that the mid-seventeenth-century czarist imperial expansion south into the medieval heartland of Kievan Rus (Ukraine, that is) toward the Black Sea paid great dividends, for it marked the early disintegration of Russia’s ultimate enemy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.*23 Stalin knew this history in his bones, too, and was therefore guided by a so-called revolutionary-imperial paradigm to defend Russia against real and perceived threats, especially those coming from Central and Eastern Europe. And because the Middle East adjoins Central-Eastern Europe, its anarchy is something that Putin also cannot now ignore, especially given Russia’s equities in the adjacent Caucasus. Therefore, Putin looks at the Greater Middle East and Central-Eastern Europe and sees a single region. Russia’s own Eurasian geography lends itself to this realization.

  What all this adds up to is that the geographical heart of the challenge posed by Russia becomes the Black Sea Basin: here is where Russia intersects with Ukraine, Turkey, Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus. Or explained another way, where Europe meets the Near East and where the former Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg imperial conflict systems all merge. To be sure, the Greater Black Sea region constitutes a geopolitical concept that unites the wars in Syria and Ukraine, and puts Turkey front and center alongside the Caucasian and Balkan pivot states of Azerbaijan and Romania to counter Russia.*24 The Black Sea is no less a conflict system than the Caribbean was in the nineteenth century and the South and East China seas are today. Yet the Black Sea does not register within the logic of Cold War area studies around which the U.S. defense and security bureaucracy remains organized. This is because the Black Sea falls within and among other regions, and thus emblemizes the fluid and organic geography that now gives definition to Eurasia in the first place. Putin intellectually grasps this better than we do. His tactical skill is rooted in an accurate geographical conception.<
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  Thus, both Ukraine and Syria are inseparable from Putin’s challenge to the Baltic states and the Balkans. This reality rejuvenates the 1920s concept of the Intermarium, Latin for “between the seas”—the Baltic and Black seas, that is. The Intermarium constitutes the contested rimland from Estonia in the north to Romania and Bulgaria in the south, and to the Caucasus in the east that once framed the conflict zone between Germany and Russia and now frames the conflict zone between the United States and Russia.*25 American power worldwide will therefore be heavily determined by its ability to keep Russia from “Finlandizing” this contested rimland.

  Meanwhile, Europe is no longer geopolitically protected from Russia the way it was during the Post Cold War: nor, as I’ve said, is Europe protected from the Levant and North Africa, as the Mediterranean Basin by way of Muslim migration becomes truly unified for the first time in hundreds of years. Thus, we are back to a much older cartography that recalls the High Middle Ages, in which “the East” did not begin in any one particular place because regions overlapped and were more vaguely defined, even as the sense of a homeland was strictly local, limited to a city or town and its surrounding countryside. To wit, the Near East, however much it may be denied, begins inside Europe itself now, given the comparatively weak institutions, the comparatively high levels of corruption, and the demonstrable presence of Russian organized crime groups that burden the states of the Balkans with a higher level of political instability than the states of Central and Western Europe. This is itself a legacy of communism and the Long European War. Yes, the dichotomy of the Orient and the Occident is breaking down the world over, even as subtle gradations continue to persist.

  Tang China and the Lesson of Afghanistan

  In Eurasia, Russia will be contained by China much more than by the United States. In fact, the whole underlying logic of Russia’s Eurasian Customs Union is to limit, to the extent that it can, Chinese influence.*26 China constitutes a very distinct imperial mindset. Because it was a vast empire for thousands of years under many dynasties, China simply takes for granted its superiority, and consequently has never sought to influence others in the proper way of governance. (This puts it at odds with the democratic universalism of the United States, which has sought religious-like conversion to its principles worldwide.)*27 China’s particular imperial tradition allows it to deal with all sorts of regimes, good and evil, without any notion of guilt. For untold centuries, Beijing’s only problem was the so-called barbarians on the steppelands partially encircling Han China’s arable lowland cradle: the Tibetans, the Turkic Muslim Uighurs, the Inner Mongolians, and others, who either had to be violently subdued, bribed, or demographically overwhelmed, exactly as they must be today.

  China’s twenty-two urban clusters, each containing at least one megacity, all happen to be located within Han China’s arable cradle, which constitutes the territory of Chinese imperial dynasties throughout history and excludes this semicircle of steppelands. It was only in the mid-eighteenth century that the last of those dynasties, that of the Qing or Manchus (who were themselves outsiders), expanded into the barbarian desert and steppe regions, thus preparing the geographical context of the current Chinese state—a state that overlaps with Muslim Central Asia. And yet this dangerous periphery that has threatened the Han cradle still exists—not only inside China, but beyond its current borders.*28 China hopes its Silk Road development strategy can make a political end run around these volatile minority regions, economically pacifying these minorities as it were, though it also might bring Muslim Uighur separatists in western China into greater contact with radical Islamists in South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Uighur separatists already have received training in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.*29 In other words, connectivity does not necessarily lead to a more peaceful world, especially because changes in the status quo, even for the better, can lead to more ethnic unrest.

  For example, in Xinjiang (East Turkestan), the very process of economic modernization, in which the Muslim Uighurs actually can benefit, plays a part in shaping a more radical identity for them, immersed as the Uighurs are in economic competition with the Han Chinese.*30 Whereas the Han have viewed the Tibetans somewhat like the Americans have viewed the Navajo—as exotic reminders of how they successfully conquered a continent—the Han view the Uighurs with absolute dread. For Islam represents an alternative identity for the Uighurs, one unconnected to the Chinese state. Unlike the Tibetans with their Dalai Lama, the Uighurs don’t have an elite leader and educated bureaucracy with which to communicate with Beijing; rather, they represent an inchoate, undirected force of upheaval that could be triggered by an environmental or other emergency. The Uighurs, as one astute China observer told me, are the bomb under the carpet of the Chinese state. Remember that the core argument of the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington’s theory of a clash of civilizations—which those who criticized Huntington either overlooked or completely failed to grasp—was that ethnic and cultural tension is central to the process of modernization and development itself.*31 China’s rapid-fire modernization is now mightily testing Huntington’s thesis.

  China’s infrastructure expansion across Central Asia is directly related to its maritime expansion in the South and East China seas. After all, China is only able to act aggressively in its adjacent seas because it is now, for the time being, secure on land to a degree it has never been in its history. Threatened constantly by the peoples of the steppe in the west, southwest, and north, with the exception of the voyages of Admiral Zheng He during the Ming Dynasty in the early fifteenth century, China never actually did have a maritime tradition in the east. But globalization, with its exaggerated emphasis on sea lines of communication, has necessitated Chinese power projection into the blue-water extensions of its own continental landmass. Because that requires China to remain secure on land, it also means the permanent subjugation of the Muslim Uighurs, Tibetans, and Inner Mongolians. And thus we have the One Belt, One Road strategy. In short, China’s ethnic demons within its borders lead it to push out militarily and economically well beyond its borders.

  China’s new Silk Road is very much in keeping with its medieval precedent, when Tang armies threaded their way through the space between Mongolia and Tibet to establish protectorates as far as Iranian Khorasan. Indeed, almost touching China’s dangerous steppeland periphery through much of Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern era was Persia, whose linguistic and imperial domain stretched from the Mediterranean to Central Asia. Both China and Persia were rich, settled agricultural civilizations besieged by warlike desert peoples, even as they were in contact with each other because of the Silk Road. And both were great empires humiliated by Western powers during the modern era. Such is the emotional and historical bedrock for sustaining Sino-Iranian relations today.*32 Iran’s deputy head of railways, Hossein Ashoori, says, “Our goal in the Silk Road plan is first to connect Iran’s market to China’s [rather than to Central Asia per se].”*33 Thus, even as the theme of the Eurasian interior is weaker and weaker states, with the great former empires weakening at a somewhat slower pace than the rest, there also will be more intensified linkages and interactions between all of them.

  So forget the dichotomy between the pessimists who predict anarchy and the optimists who predict greater connectivity: Both trends will happen simultaneously. And there is no contradiction in this, as long as one thinks outside the paradigm of linear progress with which the liberal mind is obsessed. Think again of Marco Polo’s world: one of great, overwhelming danger for the traveler in which a Silk Road nexus—with all its sinews of wealth creation—nevertheless existed.

  Of all these countries, Pakistan will be the chief register of China’s ability to join its Silk Road across Eurasia with its maritime Silk Road across the Indian Ocean. This branch of the Silk Road will require the full force of China’s proposed $46 billion investment, in order to build an 1,800-mile superhighway
and high-speed railway from Pakistan’s Arabian Sea port of Gwadar (a port that China already has built) north across the Baluchistan desert and the Karakoram mountains into China’s western Xinjiang Province. Nothing since independence in 1947 has the potential to help stabilize Pakistan—calming its frontier insurgencies—than the completion of this project, and nothing would do more to firm up China’s domination of its own steppeland periphery. In fact, Chinese pressure, much more than American pressure, may have caused the Pakistanis to crack down on terrorist networks in North Waziristan some years back, since the proposed Silk Road gives Beijing leverage in Islamabad that Washington can only dream of having.

  It is doubtful, however, that China can save Pakistan. While it is true that Pakistan’s government is increasingly being held accountable by a burgeoning media and nongovernmental organizations—thereby expanding civil society at the top end of the spectrum in Islamabad and Lahore—and it is also true that interparty warfare in Islamabad has lessened somewhat, the country in fundamental ways continues to deteriorate. Electricity blackouts (“load shedding,” as they are called) are more persistent now than ever, and water shortages are worsening. The situation is fluid. Nuclear power and coal imports may soon alleviate the power blackouts, even as the army has reportedly moved away somewhat from encouraging Islamic radicalism. But Pakistan’s population growth is still above 2 percent annually, meaning its population doubles every thirty-five years. (The median age is 22.7 years old.) Corruption is rife, even as there are no significant anticorruption drives. Karachi, a sprawling city of slums and fortified villas with a population of 24 million, is defined by criminal networks and refugees from the violent tribal areas abutting Afghanistan. Because of security concerns, more and more Pakistani political conclaves have been held not in Pakistan at all, but in Dubai. Still, the Pakistani state will not collapse, as it basically consists of around one hundred wealthy families. (It is such families who will benefit the most financially from the Silk Road project.) This oligarchy is actually similar to the one in the Philippines, another vast, institutionally weak, overcrowded state with a difficult geography. Of course, Pakistan, unlike the Philippines, has a reported two hundred nuclear weapons, even as it is reportedly building smaller, tactical ones and dispersing them around the country, so that they may be harder for the Americans to locate.