ABSTRACT
Central Asia appears a highly fertile region for producing inflated imaginaries aimed at both domestic and external actors. Since the 1990s and more openly even since 2011, official Washington embraced the evocative and romantic concept of the Silk Road in formulating US policy for Central Asia. This article uses the critical geopolitics approach to understand US foreign policy assumptions and projections about post-Soviet Central Asia and its broader environment. I argue that the US version of the Silk Road can be interpreted as a geopolitical imaginary, in the same vein as Russia’s Eurasian narrative. I first situate the discussion by briefly exploring the many uses of the Silk Road allegory by external actors and Russia’s rival terminology of Eurasia. Then, I move to analyzing the birth and framing of the US Silk Road narrative, its administrative and policy locus. Finally, I investigate its elusive geopolitics, and its role as a vehicle for the US selective projection of what Central Asia is and should be.
