US Increasingly Unwelcome in the former Khan Empire

Yes, the plucky new governments of Central Asia are apparently learning that they can use Russia and China to push against the US:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit Central Asia next week to try to wrest influence from Russia and China over an unstable region increasingly cool to Washington.

Rice will make her first trip as secretary of state to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan -- former Soviet states and neighbors of China which have joined Moscow and Beijing to press Washington to withdraw troops from the area....

Pointedly, Rice will not visit nearby Uzbekistan, which has deteriorating ties with the United States after stonewalling U.S. calls for an investigation into a massacre by troops in May and ordering American forces out of an air base....

Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan joined Russia and China in a declaration earlier this year from a regional grouping, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, asking when Washington would withdraw its troops from the region.

China wants good relations with the three bordering nations which could help meet the energy demands of its growing population, while Russia views all former Soviet states as part of its sphere of influence....

But suspicion has spread in Central Asia that the Bush administration is encouraging people-power revolts after it backed the ouster of governments in Kyrgyzstan and other ex-Soviet states Georgia and Ukraine in recent years....

Kimberly Marten, a political science professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, said the countries preferred to align themselves with China and Russia because those powers did not press them to enhance democracy and economic transparency.

Now, before the right begins crowing about this incredible success of the Bush doctrine, we should consider what's really happening here. Zero to little actual democracy has been spread in Central Asia. We're not talking about Georgia and Ukraine, we're talking about the "Russian 'Stans". While the leader of Kyrgyzstan was sent in to Russian exile last April in the Tulip Revolution, there's been a long period of unrest following that. New elections are currently scheduled for November or December. And no serious analyst thinks that the Bush doctrine had anything to do with the Tulip revolution, even if Presidents Putin and Hu are happy to embrace that fiction to scare the small, unloved governments of Central Asia.

Moreover, the reality is that this is a huge - huge - strategic failure for the US. If US interests get pushed out of the oil industry's "final frontier" (as some have referred to Central Asia) because of Bush's delusions of relevance, that will be a massive blow to US power. Especially if the Chinese manage to fill the vacuum.

None of this is to say that I would oppose the democratization of these countries - far from it. (Turkmenistan, anyone?) But the realpolitik of the situation is simple.