by Peter Zeihan
The Turks can draw upon many groups of similar ethnicities across the northern Caucasus region, most immediately the Ingush, Dagestanis, Kabards, Circassians, and Chechens, and farther abroad the Kazakhs and Uzbeks as well. Committed Turkish opposition would be more than enough to unravel Russia’s entire southern rim. Which isn’t to say that the Russians would take it lying down. Russia would repay the effort by using its world-class intelligence skills to destabilize Turkey from within, stirring up every minority the Turks control whether in territories new or old.
Uzbekistan: Survival of the Fittest
The Uzbeks are one of the oddities of the modern world. They didn’t exist as a truly separate, self-defined ethnicity until the Soviet period when the Russians were busy bringing socialist ideology to the arid ranges and ancient Silk Road cities of Central Asia. Since then the post–Cold War government has done much to trump up the Uzbeks’ “ancient cultural roots” by talking up historical “Uzbeks” such as Tamerlane in order to justify and solidify their rule. In reality, Uzbeks owe more to clan and village than country. Yet as weak as the Uzbek national identity might be, all of their fellow Central Asians suffer from even weaker identities. There are also a lot more Uzbeks than anyone else in their region—more, in fact, than all of the neighboring Kazakhs, Turkmen, Tajiks, and Kyrgyz combined.
If there is a truly independent and self-sufficient country in the world beyond the United States, it is Uzbekistan. Bretton Woods and the entire free trade architecture could burn, and it would cause but a ripple in the Uzbek pond. Uzbekistan is one of the few countries not just in its region but in the Eastern Hemisphere that is broadly self-sufficient in oil, natural gas, and grains. While Westerners keep Kazakh energy flowing and Russians manage the Kyrgyz hydropower system and guard the Tajik border, the Uzbeks are not dependent upon foreigners to operate key portions of their economy. Even Chinese influence is largely limited to the purchase of some natural gas.
But this does not make the Uzbeks a happy, secure people. The country faces three particularly ugly problems.
First, Russia sees the Central Asian region as a problem, specifically in that there is an access corridor from western Siberia to South Asia that passes through the Uzbek heartland. Since Uzbekistan boasts the densest population concentration in the broader region, the Russians are naturally suspicious both of the Uzbeks themselves and anyone they might partner with south of the corridor. The unsurprising result is a competition for the loyalties of Uzbekistan’s many clans. The Russians favor the cloak, the Uzbeks the dagger.
Second, the Uzbek government is, well, horrid. Like any new government—Uzbekistan only became self-governing in 1992—it makes a lot of mistakes. But the Uzbek leadership was born and bred in the Soviet communist ranks, complete with the penchant for political oppression that the Soviets were known for. Add a training in tyranny to general incompetence and you get one of the world’s most brutal and backward countries, with a standard of living less than one-tenth that of the United States. Anywhere else in the world it would have been torn down by its neighbors, but the most progressive neighbor Uzbekistan has is… China. No one local criticizes Tashkent when it boils its dissidents alive.2
Third, Uzbekistan is the quintessential example of a marginal state that geopolitics has pushed to the breaking point. The region’s two major rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, flow through Uzbek lands, but they start in the mountains of next-door Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Normally this would not be a major issue, but the 1973 Yom Kippur War set the Uzbeks on the path to ruin. In the war’s aftermath, Egypt switched allegiance from the Soviet bloc to the West. Soviet industry thus lost access to Egyptian cotton. Moscow’s solution was a massive hydrological project that rerouted much of the Amu’s and Syr’s waters to huge cotton plantations across the region, most of which were located in the then Soviet republic of Uzbek SSR, which in time became Uzbekistan.
Right from the beginning the system overdrew water from the rivers. Upon independence, the Uzbeks, now cut off from Soviet subsidies, doubled down on the cotton scheme. Leaks in the irrigation system are omnipresent, but the Uzbeks lack the technical skill to repair them and instead increased irrigation throughput to compensate. Water now only rarely reaches the rivers’ terminus at the Aral Sea. As of 2014, 95 percent of the sea’s volume has evaporated away.
Without the Aral to moderate the region’s climate, Central Asia’s deserts are rapidly expanding. This has raised temperatures throughout the region and quickened the rate at which the glaciers of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are melting. By 2025 the glaciers will be but seasonal nubs. Those glaciers are the primary water sources for both the Amu and the Syr, and when those rivers dry up, so too will downstream Uzbekistan.
This will leave the entire region with a very interesting situation (if “interesting” is the correct word): There will only be enough water left for maybe half of the region’s population. Uzbekistan has the food, energy, military, and above all the coherent state apparatus required to make sure it is the Uzbeks who get that water.
The competition isn’t exactly stiff. Stalin drew all of this region’s borders to ensure maximum conflict should any of the republics gain independence, ergo their spaghetti-like characteristics. He wielded his pen with skill.
• Tajikistan is not even a functioning state. The country’s northern neck separates Uzbekistan proper from its Fergana territories, holds all of the connecting road and rail infrastructure, and is populated by Uzbeks. Additionally, the Amu’s headwaters are all in Tajikistan, along with several hydroelectric dams that control its flow. The Uzbeks will take Tajikistan in its entirety.
• Kyrgyzstan controls nearly all of the slopes and highlands of the Fergana Valley, as well as all of the Syr’s headwaters and several hydroelectric facilities that both control the water flow on the river and supply electricity to Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan will want the entire southern half of the country.
• Turkmenistan’s defining characteristic is the Soviet-built Karakum Canal, which floods portions of the desert country to grow cotton. Nearly all of the 1 million Turkmen Uzbeks live in the Amu border zone, while nearly all the Turkmen live along the canal. It would be fairly simple for the Uzbek military to seize this Uzbek-heavy border region and shut off the flow to the Karakum. Turkmenistan will simply dry up and blow away.
• Kazakhstan is nearly as large as the continental United States, but with a population less than Florida’s. Its population is also scattered in clusters hundreds of miles apart. The only portion of Kazakhstan the Uzbeks want is the bit hard on their border that houses the lower reaches of the Syr, home to nearly all of Kazakhstan’s Uzbeks.
• That just leaves Afghanistan, but there is little there that threatens Tashkent. The only piece of infrastructure in the region happens to be the only bridge that crosses the Amu at Turmez, and it is already under Uzbek control. The Uzbeks can simply work through local Afghan Uzbeks—of which there are 2 million, concentrated in the border region—to make sure that nothing south of the border impinges upon Uzbek wishes.
The only regional power that will have the interest and proclivity to perhaps intervene is Russia—not for humanitarian reasons, but rather because Uzbek success in consolidating control of the region’s water would make Uzbekistan a regional hegemon. While such a power would still be on the other side of the Central Asian steppe, the Russians have good reason to be worried.
First and most immediately, the Uzbeks are Turkic peoples and the governments of Uzbekistan and Turkey enjoy broadly positive—if currently distant—relations. Any strategic cooperation between the Turks of Turkey and the Uzbeks of Central Asia would present the Russians with an allied opposition on both their Caucasus and Tian Shan flanks.
Second, and ultimately of more concern to Russia, the Uzbeks are not the only Turkics in the former Soviet Union. Several of Russia’s subject peoples originated from similar stock. All told some 17 million Russian citizens are of ethnic groups that feel kinship with th
e Turks and Uzbeks. An Uzbek-Turk alliance could set fire to Russia’s carefully policed ethnic balance.
Plenty of questions arise as to how much force the Russians will expend to hold off the Uzbeks. Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan lack the capacity to contribute to their own defense in any appreciable way. The region is over a thousand miles removed from the Russian border and two thousand miles removed from populated Russia. The only thing going for the Russians in this fight is that the Uzbek’s drought-driven invasion might occur before Russia’s own demographic-driven twilight. But if the Amu and Syr don’t force the Uzbeks’ hand before 2020, then Russia will have utterly lost its capacity to compete meaningfully in distant Central Asia. And a wave of young Uzbeks will wash asunder all foolish enough to stand in their way.
Saudi Arabia: Wrath of the Righteous
Saudi Arabia is a quintessential example of the sort of oddities that Bretton Woods encouraged to proliferate. Over 90 percent of the country is hard desert. Most of the region’s agriculture is based on a series of oases on or near the country’s western coast, generating a line of fortress cities, the most notable of which are Mecca and Medina. Even this western fringe—the Hejaz—is only heavily populated by the standards of the surrounding desert. Overall there is no capacity to support large populations, and insufficient capital to allow more than the most basic of infrastructure. There is no industry. No real educational system. The Saudi portion of the Arabian Peninsula simply lacks the features that allow a country to take root.
But there is oil. Anything is possible when you are willing to apply an unlimited amount of capital to your labors. Bretton Woods created a global market for Saudi oil, and the Americans guaranteed the security of both Saudi oil shipments and Saudi territory itself. The Saudis had all the money they needed to carve their magic kingdom out of the harsh desert landscape.
This transformation was—and remains—utterly dependent upon the current global setup. In the Bretton Woods world, the Americans guarantee Saudi security in order to protect energy flows, guarantee energy flows in order to enable trade, and guarantee trade in order to maintain their security alliances. But in a post–Bretton Woods shale era, the Americans have no need for the security alliances or the trade or the energy flows, which means they have no need for the Saudis. The no-questions-asked protection that the Americans have extended to Riyadh is about to be lifted wholesale.
Dealing with the aftermath will require admitting Saudi Arabia’s fundamental weakness: It doesn’t have an indigenous workforce.
Since the discovery of oil, the Saudis have been able to end their nomadic existence, hire outsiders to do all their work for them, massively expand their population under the aegis of a generous welfare state, and in general become impressively lazy and gloriously fat. The tendency to import labor has become so omnipresent that roughly one-third of their entire population—some 8 million people—are expatriates and guest workers. There are so many foreigners working in the kingdom that the twenty-and thirty-something bulge in the Saudi population pyramid is actually entirely made up of temporary foreign workers, particularly men.
Because of this quirk, the Saudis lack many of the advantages of a modern state, most notably an industrial base or a tax base. They have no navy to speak of, much less one that could guarantee the security of their exports and by extension their income. They also lack a (meaningful) army and so cannot guarantee the security of their state.3
Consequently, the Saudis’ existential challenges fall into two categories: naval threats and local ones.
In terms of naval challenges, anyone who needs oil and has the ability to reach Saudi Arabia will be both a threat and an opportunity to the Saudis. The Saudis will want countries to come to them to purchase their oil, but they won’t want countries to come to them to take their oil. Unfortunately for the Saudis, their oil complex is eminently seizable. Nearly all Saudi oil production is in the country’s extreme east. The Ghawar superfield, which currently produces some 5 million bpd, is in fact less than a hundred miles from the country’s major exporting infrastructure on the Persian Gulf. But nearly all of Saudi Arabia’s population is in inland Riyadh or the country’s extreme west. Convincing any country that has the power to protect sea lanes for Saudi Arabia that it should not simply seize the relevant bits of Saudi Arabia may prove a hard sell. The Saudis cannot even count upon their own citizens to resist. The Saudis who live in the oil-producing eastern regions are predominately of the Shia minority rather than the Sunni majority.
As for local challenges, Saudi Arabia faces a single massive problem: Iran. Whether under the empires of old, the shah, or the ayatollahs, the Iranians have always desired to control the territory that is currently Saudi Arabia. In part this is due to the ideological split between the two branches of Islam: The Saudis are Sunni and the Iranians are Shia. In part it is due to the presence of the holy cities of Islam; the Persians covet the religious authority that flows from their control. In part it is economic; control of the Saudi oil fields is an end unto itself. And while the Saudis do not have a capable military, the Iranians certainly do. Without an external sponsor or an army, the Saudis’ entire defense strategy relies upon the Arabian Desert being too harsh a barrier to cross. In the industrial age, that doesn’t count for as much as it used to.
The core of Saudi Arabia’s Iran problem is that there is no one to replace the Americans as the Saudi security guarantor, certainly not in the short term. Bretton Woods meant that no one needed a navy, so there is no alternative naval force with an interest in protecting Saudi interests. For nearly every country out there, it will take years to build the sort of navy that can handle even regional needs, which means that for at least a decade (or two) there will mostly be local navies. Any Saudi cargoes that sail will have to negotiate their way through endless local naval authorities. And as the Somali pirates have shown, it doesn’t take much naval acumen to capture a slow-moving supertanker.
Options for new friends are so thin as to be nearly nonexistent:
• China might want to become Saudi Arabia’s new protector—or new overlord—but it lacks the military capacity and geographic proximity to try.4
• India is fairly close and might serve as a potential customer, but it lacks the military capacity to grant any sort of meaningful protection beyond perhaps convoys to India itself.
• Turkey is probably the best possibility for the Saudis, but it is not an automatic fit: Gaining a Turkish alliance would require that Turkey first control all of Iraq, otherwise it couldn’t project military power into the Persian Gulf. A Turkey that pushed that far south not only would face a grinding war with Iran but would also have control of so much Iraqi oil that it wouldn’t need Saudi oil at all. Saudi Arabia might be able to induce Turkish interest with a sufficiently attractive offer, but it would have to be huge.
• That just leaves the European powers, of which the United Kingdom and France are the logical candidates. Unfortunately, they are far more likely to source their energy needs from more proximate North Sea and North African sources—or, in a pinch, Central African locations like Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon—rather than make the long run to the Persian Gulf.
The bottom line is that the Saudis are most likely going to have to grope their way forward on their own. Preparations have already begun.
As the keepers of the holy sites, the Saudis hold considerable religious sway throughout the Islamic world, and they use the power of the pulpit to induce Islamic-minded fighters5 to flock to this or that cause. You may have also noticed that the Saudis are absolutely loaded, and they can use the power of the checkbook to shape political forces at the local level far and wide. Since the Americans completed their withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, Saudi foreign policy has become substantially more aggressive and militant. In particular:
• The Iraqi government is sliding toward becoming a satellite of Iran, the country that the Saudis see as their nemesis. To prevent that
, the Saudis are using their paramilitary connections and financial muscle to empower the Sunnis of central Iraq who are resisting the Iranian encroachment. To date they have successfully spawned an insurgency that is already as bloody as the worst years of the American occupation.6
• The Syrian civil war is another place where Iranian power is under threat. Syria has long been an ally of Tehran, and the Saudis are using their one-two punch of militants and money to attack the Syrian government at every opportunity. Saudi support has become so omnipresent that they are now bigger backers of the rebels than all other foreign forces combined. The nature of the Saudi-aligned militants—extremely violent and extremely Islamic—has also reached such extremes that it has caused American, European, and Turkish support for the rebellion to become more circumspect.
• Pakistan has been at best a halfhearted partner in the United States’ war in Afghanistan. As American interest in South Asia plunges to the level of “meh,” the Americans are highly likely to completely cut the Pakistanis loose. Saudi Arabia is increasingly stepping in to be Pakistan’s new partner. As the two states share a general antipathy to both Iran and India, there is considerable room for dovetailing. Pakistan needs less than a half million barrels of crude daily; Saudi Arabia has plenty. Pakistan desperately needs outside financing to compete with India; Saudi Arabia is well moneyed. Saudi Arabia’s workforce needs huge volumes of skilled and unskilled labor; Pakistan has long been the largest source of foreign labor for the Saudis, in 2014 hitting 1.5 million workers. Pakistanis even serve in the Saudi military, in particular the air force, which would be the branch most likely to be able to protect Saudi oil installations or forestall an Iranian assault. There is even the possibility that under the right circumstances Pakistan might share its nuclear technology with Saudi Arabia, up to and including a functional nuclear weapon.