ABSTRACT
The March/April 2014 issue of Politico Magazine featured an article about ‘America’s 25 Most Awkward Allies’. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan were listed among these. Akayev-and Bakiyev-era Kyrgyzstan also made the list. Turkmenistan was the region’s sole exception.1 Its president was instead listed among the ‘Five human rights abusers backed by the U.S. whom you never heard of ’ in a September 2015 article in the Washington Post. This article also criticised the Barack Obama administration’s policies towards Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.2 Both publications noted that the US was using its relations with these undemocratic governments to pursue its security and energy interests. There are strong parallels between these criticisms and those which were directed at Obama’s predecessor. The continuities between the two administrations’ policies and the resulting controversies are, to a great extent, the results of several inherited factors. This chapter draws on the previous analyses of major influences on the Bush administration’s policies to trace the effects of many of these on his successor. This is accomplished by analysing their influences on some of the administration’s most prominent policies. These include its ‘enhanced engagement’ policies and, more specifically, the US-Uzbek rapprochement; the establishment and use of the Northern Distribution Network; attempts to save the Manas airbase; the promotion of economic interdependence through the New Silk Road initiative; and the administration’s interactions with Russia. These were affected by interests, ideas, relationships, actors, and contexts inherited from the Bush era.
