Journal of Eurasian Studies 9 (2018) 125–133

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Journal of Eurasian Studies

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s e v i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / e u r a s

What is Eurasia to US (the U.S.)?

Andrew C. Kuchins
Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CERES), Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Article history: This article examines U.S. policy toward the supercontinent of Eurasia from the collapse
Received 18 April 2018 of the Soviet Union to the present. The baseline for U.S. policy was established in 1992, the
Accepted 15 June 2018
prevention of a peer competitor emerging in Eurasia. The initial focus for ten years was
Available online 17 July 2018
on assistance to promote Russia’s transition to becoming a market democracy while si-
multaneously hedging against the return of a revanchist Russia through promotion of
expansion of NATO and the European Union.
The 9/11 attack in 2001 shifted the attention of the Bush Administration to the
War on Terror with the United States military getting bogged down in two wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. The Obama Administration sought to end both wars and withdraw
U.S. troops with mixed success. In 2011/2012 with growing concern over China’s
more assertive policy in East Asia, U.S. foreign and security policy aimed to put more
military, economic, and diplomatic resources toward East Asia. These efforts, however,
were distracted by Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, the civil war in Syria, and the emer-
gence of ISIS.
Almost in the background over this quarter century, a far more significant phenome-
non has been developing – the reconnection of Eurasia. With the rise of China, India
and Russia, as well as the emergence of middle powers including Turkey, Iran,
Pakistan, Indonesia, and others, the Eurasian supercontinent is being “rewired” economi-
cally, politically, and strategically. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has garnered
the most attention, but virtually every state – large, medium, and small – are adjusting
their national interests and foreign policies in a very fluid environment. To date
Washington has struggled to grasp the breadth and depth of change and failed to develop
its own strategy as well as allocate adequate analytical and policy tools to advance U.S.
interests.
Copyright © 2018, Asia-Pacific Research Center, Hanyang University. Production and
hosting by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

The United States has responded quite skeptically and
critically to various non-U.S.-led efforts to promote Eur-
asian integration without being able to offer an attractive
and compelling alternative in the post-Cold War era. Russia-
Corresponding author. Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European
Studies (CERES), Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057.
E-mail address: ack5@georgetown.edu.
led efforts such as the Collective Security Treaty Organization
(CSTO) and more recently the Eurasian Economic Union
(EAEU) are seen in Washington as thinly veiled means to
promote Russia as a regional economic, political, and/or se-
curity hegemon. For example, in December 2012, then
Secretary Clinton described the Eurasian Union as an effort
“to re-Sovietize the region. . .” “It’s not going to be called that.
It’s going to be called a customs union, it will be called Eur-
asian Union and all of that. . . But let’s make no mistake about

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euras.2018.07.001
1879-3665/ Copyright © 2018, Asia-Pacific Research Center, Hanyang University. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article
under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
126 A.C. Kuchins / Journal of Eurasian Studies 9 (2018) 125–133
it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out
effective ways to slow down or prevent it,” (Clover, 2012).
U.S. government officials actively urged future members of
the EAEU, such as Kyrgyzstan, not to join.1 The U.S. govern-
ment and NATO have refused for more than 15 years to
engage with the CSTO as an institution and thus legiti-
mize it in the West.
The Bush II and Obama Administrations essentially
ignored and downplayed the Shanghai Cooperation Orga-
nization (SCO) since its founding in 2001. The announcement
of China’s Silk Road Economic Belt and Maritime Silk Road
in late 2013 (which have subsequently been combined under
the moniker Belt and Road Initiative or BRI) was essential-
ly ignored by the Obama Administration. When the Chinese
announced the founding of a new multilateral bank, the
Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank (AIIB) in 2015, the
Obama Administration urged its Asian and European allies
not to join and was very embarrassed when many major
partners ended up joining the new venture. And now it
appears from highly critical statements of the BRI from Sec-
retary of Defense Mattis and Secretary of State Tillerson in
October 2017 that the Trump Administration intends to take
a much more critical posture toward the BRI.
Conversely, the United States has been supportive of
Western organizations such as NATO, the OSCE, and the
EU to engage more with its not so close neighbors to the
East. For example, Washington strongly urged Kazakhstan
during the year of its chairmanship of the OSCE in
2010 to back off the notion of a new European security
framework initially promoted by then Russian President
Dmitri Medvedev to focus on Afghanistan as a priority.
Washington has also encouraged the Central Asian states
in particular to work together institutionally without
Russia and China. Interestingly, this kind of cooperation
(states in the region are allergic to the word “integration”
as it is seen historically as forced integration Soviet style
and/or a means to diminish newly won sovereignty) may
now be more possible with rapidly shifting policies of
Uzbekistan.
This article will analyze U.S. efforts to promote Eur-
asian integration since the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1991 to the present as well as how Washington has reacted
to integration efforts led by other major powers, notably
China and Russia. The narrative draws special attention to
the period after 2001 since this marked a dramatic depar-
ture for U.S. policy toward Eurasia to support Operation
Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. We will conclude with
an effort to examine more closely U.S. policy debates and
responses to China’s Brick and Road Initiative since its
initial articulation in the Fall of 2013. The central argu-
ment suggests U.S. efforts while experiencing some modest
success at times have been limited first by Washington’s
lack of strategic vision and willingness to allocate ade-
quate diplomatic and material resources as well as growing
pushback from Russia and finally what appears to be an
overwhelming initiative from China designed to play out
1 Author discussions with Kyrgyz government officials in July 2014. One
official greeted the author saying “Andy, can you please ask the State De-
partment to stop telling us not to join the EAU?”
over the Eurasian supercontinent2 over the next three
decades.
1. From the collapse of the Soviet Union to 9/11: The
unipolar moment
With the collapse of its superpower rival, the Soviet
Union, of more than 45 years in 1991, the United States stood
atop the global hierarchy to an extent perhaps not seen since
the acme of the Roman Empire 2000 years ago. In re-
sponse to this rapid and nearly unimagined position of
predominance, the George H. W. Bush Administration, in
what turned out to be its final year in office, developed a
new strategy document that in many ways has served as
the fulcrum of U.S. foreign and security policy for the next
25 years. The key concept of the strategy called for pre-
venting the emergence of a “peer challenger” who could
challenge U.S. dominance of the international system
(Cheney, 1993, p. 1; Tyler, 1992, p. 1). And just as the famous
British geographer Halford Mackinder presciently articu-
lated more than 100 years ago, given the vast mineral,
economic, demographic, and military resources through-
out the Eurasian supercontinent, this was the only place on
the globe from where an imaginable peer competitor could
emerge to challenge Washington.
At the time of the Soviet collapse, one could only imagine
three potential candidates – Europe, Russia, and China – but
for different reasons, neither Europe nor China appeared as
either realistic or imminent threats. However, a revanch-
ist and nationalist Russia where democratic and market
reforms had failed was a possibility, admittedly or not, that
U.S. policymakers had to consider. This is one reason why
the United States and its European allies immediately rec-
ognized the historically arbitrary borders of the 12 non-
Baltic Soviet republics as virtually sacrosanct. This left
Moscow with about one-third less territory than that of the
Soviet Union, one-half of the population, and 25 million
ethnic Russians living outside the borders of the Russian Fed-
eration. The collapse of the USSR 3 also broke down
production chains developed over 70 years of Soviet rule
that added to the massive economic woes of Russia and its
neighbors. While Moscow maintained a nuclear deterrent
of parity with that of the United States, by virtually any other
index of power, the new Russian Federation was vastly
weaker than the Soviet Union.
U.S. strategy toward the new states of the former Soviet
Union revolved around promoting market democracies in
the region, and especially promoting the sovereignty of the
neighboring states around Russia. None of them had been
sovereign ever before in their new borders. Several con-
flicts broke out in Georgia, Moldova, and the territorial
dispute between Armenia and Azerbajian intensified. The
2
There are multiple definitions and conceptions of the shape-shifting
term “Eurasia.” For the purposes of this article, the author’s focus will be
the supercontinent stretching from Europe in the West to East Asia and
from Russia in the North to South Asia, bracketed by the Middle East and
Southeast Asia.
3 The new reformist Russian government was quite comfortable ini-
tially to not be encumbered by its neighboring republics that it viewed
as likely to slow down and complicate reform in Russia. By no means should
the Soviet collapse be viewed as the result of some Western “plot.”
 A.C. Kuchins / Journal of Eurasian Studies 9 (2018) 125–133
new Russian government used various military, intelli-
gence, and what we now call “hybrid” means to intervene
in these conflicts in 1992/1993 with very little pushback
from Washington. This probably reflected both the more
hands-off approach to the region of the Bush Administra-
tion and sensitivities to not undermine the fragile liberal
Yeltsin government. This perspective shifted with the elec-
toral defeat of the Russian reformers in the December 1993
Duma elections that fueled Western fears of a “Weimar
Russia” and/or a “red/brown” coalition of communist and
nationalist forces coming to the fore that would reject that
results of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This led the Clinton Administration to increasingly hedge
its bets against a Russian revanche by strongly insisting on
Russia following its agreements to remove troops back to
Russia, open the door to the expansion of NATO first
to former Warsaw Pact members, and more actively seek
to promote the sovereignty of the new states. A strong
feature of promoting their sovereignty was to reduce their
dependence on Russian infrastructure for access to inter-
national markets. The most strategic aspect of this policy
was the development of new oil and gas pipelines that
avoided the territory of the Russian Federation. The biggest
success in this regard was the building of the Baku–Tiblisi–
Ceyhan oil pipeline completed in 2006.
For its part, Russian efforts to reintegrate with its neigh-
bors both militarily and economically resulted in many
agreements on paper that were mostly paid lip service to
by its partners. The weak state of the Russian economy
allowed for virtually no resources to be devoted to the
task, and Moscow had its hands more than full with an
insurgency on its own territory in Chechnya. In sum, Russia
felt its interests during the 1990s for the most part under
some degree of encroachment from the expansion of
Western institutional, commercial, and infrastructural de-
velopments with little means to stop the process. This
was most vividly illustrated for Moscow in 1998 with the
financial crisis and even more pointedly in the 1999 NATO
war against Serbia.
During the 1990s, the term “Eurasian integration” was
virtually non-existent. Almost immediately after the col-
lapse, sharp debate inside Russia about foreign policy
orientation emerged between what some called “the
Atlanticists” and the “Eurasianists.” From the standpoint of
the United States, the game then was about European and
Western integration according to norms and institutions con-
trolled by the West. After 9/11, however, the focus of U.S.
policymakers turned to Afghanistan (and later Iraq of
course), and the term “Eurasia” began to return to the lexicon
of international relations.
2. 9/11 and the return of Eurasia
The inflection point in U.S. policy in Eurasia was 9/11 and
America’s War on Terror, which embedded it in the region
with the war in Afghanistan. The initial military effort in Af-
ghanistan in the Fall of 2001 was very successful thanks to
support from key NATO allies, notably Great Britain, and key
regional powers, India, Iran, and Russia which had been sup-
porting the Northern Alliance operations against the Taliban
for several years. Northern Alliance fighters together with
127
Russian intelligence and logistical support as well as Uz-
bekistan and Kyrgyzstan allowing allied forces use of military
air bases in their countries for easier access to Afghani-
stan were all essential for the rapid defeat of the Taliban.
The international Bonn conference in December 2001 pro-
vided the initial agreement for the re-establishment of the
Afghan state. The Iranian delegation played a critical role
in bringing various Afghan regional and warlord leaders to
reach agreement in Bonn in support of the United States and
its allies and partners.
For more than a decade, the war in Afghanistan domi-
nated U.S. policy toward Eurasia given its central position
and the presence at one point in 2011 of more than
100,000 U.S. troops. Since Afghanistan borders on states that
are, to put it mildly, not natural partners or allies of Wash-
ington (China, Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and
Uzbekistan) and nearby major powers India and Russia, man-
aging logistical support and some degree of regional
coordination required highly skilled diplomacy on the part
of Washington. This informal coalition of partners already
began to break down when President Bush in his State of
the Union address in January 2002 included Iran in the
strange grouping tagged the “axis of evil” along with Iraq
and North Korea. Given that Iraq was Iran’s biggest secu-
rity threat at the time, linking the two together in any fashion
defied logic and needlessly alienated and weakened the rel-
atively moderate Khatami government. The Bush
Administration’s decision to pivot attention from Afghan-
istan to attack Iraq in March 2003 in the context of its War
on Terror lost Washington a great deal of good will and
support around the world.
Both military efforts after initial success experienced
serious pushback that led to a large and long-term milita-
rization of U.S. policy in Eurasia. The “surge” of U.S. forces
into Iraq in 2007 prevented defeat before Bush left office.
But as U.S. forces were focused on stabilizing Iraq, begin-
ning in 2006 the Taliban began to regain ground in
Afghanistan. Newly elected President Barack Obama in 2008
had campaigned on the notion that Iraq was the “bad war”
and Afghanistan was the “good war”—frankly it is unclear
how “good” Obama thought the war in Afghanistan was, but
as a presidential candidate with virtually no military and
national security experience, it was not a viable option to
oppose both military efforts initiated by his predecessor.
After two lengthy reviews during his first year in office, Pres-
ident Obama reluctantly signed on to a dramatic increase
of U.S. military forces in theater, seeking to apply some of
the success of the Iraqi surge strategy to Afghanistan. In De-
cember 2009, President Obama announced that U.S. forces
deployed in Afghanistan over the next 18 months would in-
crease approximately by a factor of three to more than
100,000.
This much larger military footprint created a huge lo-
gistical challenge to support the troops. More than 85% of
goods to support U.S. troops are non-lethal goods tran-
sited by commercial carriers. Before increased military
presence, virtually all non-lethal goods were being tran-
sited through one ground lock of communication (GLOC in
military parlance – basically a transit corridor) from the port
of Karachi through enemy territory in Southeastern Af-
ghanistan. To accommodate the new demand and alleviate
128 A.C. Kuchins / Journal of Eurasian Studies 9 (2018) 125–133
the vulnerability of dependence on one GLOC, the U.S.
devised a set of three additional corridors involving Central
Asian and South Caucasus states, Russia, and Latvia that col-
lectively was termed the Northern Distribution Network
(NDN) and started to become operational in 2009. The
success of the NDN during a pivotal time in 2009 when the
new Obama Administration catalyzed a team of non-
governmental team of experts in Washington and a working
group on Afghanistan based at Central Command
(CENTCOM) in Tampa, Florida to begin developing a re-
gional economic cooperation strategy to promote Afghan
economic development as well as strengthen economic and
political cooperation with its neighbors that they called a
Modern Silk Road Strategy (MRS).
The MRS really emanated from Afghans themselves as
the notion of Afghanistan as a transit hub in the center of
Eurasia was a major feature of the Afghan National Devel-
opment Strategy (ANDS) that successive U.S. administrations
had not taken very seriously. Public debate in Washington
was narrowly focused on military strategy, but it seemed
obvious to many that whatever military success was
achieved on the ground, it would not be sustainable without
robust economic growth that was not derived primarily from
foreign assistance. To the extent that the United States had
an economic development strategy for Afghanistan, the
debate early in the Obama Administration boiled down to
those who wanted to focus on (non-poppy) agriculture and
others who emphasized development of the mineral and
metal wealth of Afghanistan. The problem with each ori-
entation was that if either goods did not have a reliable
means to get to domestic and international markets, then
they would provide little value for the Afghan commercial
sector or tax revenue for the state. The MRS sought to
address this core challenge. In addition, it was designed as
a regional economic cooperation strategy that would engage
all six of the bordering states of Afghanistan with a greater
stake in its economic growth and stability from which they
would benefit as well in a strategy that was broader than
simply focusing on Pakistan.
After considerable debate in 2010/2011, Secretary of State
Hilary Clinton announced in Chennai, India in July 2011 a
very truncated version of the MRS that was dubbed the “New
Silk Road Vision” (NSR) that focused on a few projects to
build economic connectivity between Central Asia, Afghan-
istan with Pakistan and India. While the projects and goals
of the “Vision” were admirable, they were really insuffi-
cient to make much of a difference for Afghanistan if
implemented (which they have not been for the most part),
and it was also clear that the administration’s commit-
ment both financially and politically was modest. It is
significant, for example, that President Obama himself never
spoke about the NSR, and this did not go unnoticed by states
in the region.
The NSR also did not include two of Afghanistan’s most
important neighbors, China and Iran. China was already
working bilaterally extensively with Central Asia, Paki-
stan, and to a lesser extent Afghanistan, where it was
reluctant to engage too much while the U.S.-led military
coalition was essentially running the show (Zhao, 2012).
Iran was explicitly excluded from the strategy as both the
Bush Administration (after 2002) and the Obama Admin-
istration consistently sought to keep Iran out of multilateral
discussions about Afghanistan and regional security. This
was a deeply counterproductive position as it is impossi-
ble to imagine any successful regional cooperation strategy
for Afghan stabilization without Iran’s participation (and
the same applies to Syria). The Central Asian states were
also unenthused because they quickly sensed a lack of
commitment in Washington, and perhaps more impor-
tantly, they much preferred transit options to the South
through Iran or East through China rather than South to
Afghanistan and Pakistan.4 There was also a powerful Afghan
fatigue in Washington and the Obama Administration. After
the successful operation to kill Osama Bin Laden in May
2011, there was little energy for new initiatives as the
main focus was on the scheduled date for the withdrawal
of U.S. troops by 2014. It is not unfair to conclude this
section that the United States spent enormous resources
in blood and treasure in two wars over 15 years in Afghan-
istan and Iraq with little broader strategic thinking or
attention to the dramatically shifting dynamics of Eurasia
taking place right for all to see.
3. The U.S. pivot to Asia and China’s emergence as a
Eurasian power
It is highly ironic that most Chinese experts on the United
States and security issues were deeply skeptical that Wash-
ington was deploying so many military resources to
Afghanistan for so long only to fight terrorism. Rather, they
(and many Russians shared this concern) viewed U.S. mil-
itary deployments to Afghanistan as a convenient
justification for a long-term military presence in China’s stra-
tegic rear, an area of relative vulnerability given significant
Muslim populations in Western China as well as the prox-
imity to Tibet. With the Bush-43 Administration’s new-
found enthusiasm for democracy promotion in the wake of
the “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyz-
stan from 2003 to 2005, the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization in its July 2005 in Astana expressed its dis-
comfiture with the allied military presence in the region by
demanding that ISAF declare a planned withdrawal date
from Afghanistan (Shanghai Cooperation Organization,
2005).
China had no interest in militarily working with ISAF in
Afghanistan, but over the course of the first decade of that
war, China did get much more economically engaged with
Central Asia and Pakistan, displacing Russia’s status as largest
economic partner and investor. By 2010/2011, China was
behaving more aggressively in the South China Sea, leading
to territorial conflicts with Japan, the Philippines, and
Vietnam. Concern was growing in Washington and with U.S.
allies and partners in Asia about China’s rapidly growing eco-
nomic clout and military assertiveness. Despite increasing
friction with the United States in the Asia-Pacific, Beijing
regarded the United States more as a potential partner as
4
The author traveled extensively in Central Asia in 2014/2015 and con-
sulted with hundreds of governmental and non-governmental experts.
There was a strong consensus on their part that the United States was not
really committed and that Washington’s NSR Vision remained too tied to
the war in Afghanistan.
 A.C. Kuchins / Journal of Eurasian Studies 9 (2018) 125–133
it expanded activities to its West into Central and South Asia.
One of China’s leading strategic thinkers, Wang Jisi, sum-
marized the argument and justification for a strategic
consolidation of Chinese foreign policy in this direction in
his October 2012 article entitled “Marching Westwards: The
Rebalancing of China’s Geostrategy” (Jisi, 2012). One year
later in Astana, Kazakhstan at Nazarbayev University, part
of a five-nation tour of Central Asia, President Xi an-
nounced his new policy initiative “The Silk Road Economic
Belt (SREB)” (Xinhua, 2013). One month later in Malaysia,
Xi announced the “Maritime Silk Road” project, which to-
gether with SREB was dubbed One Bridge, One Road (OBOR)
and more recently the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Wu
& Zhang, 2013).
It was clear that entering 2011/2012 the Obama Admin-
istration very much wanted to reduce its military presence
in the Middle East and Afghanistan in order to allocate more
military, economic, and diplomatic resources to East and
South Asia to address the rapidly growing concerns about
China’s increasing power and influence (Chollet, 2016). The
new Obama policy, “The Pivot to Asia” (later renamed “Re-
balancing to Asia”), was previewed in an article Secretary
of State Hilary Clinton authored in FP in November 2011
modestly entitled “America’s Pacific Century” (Clinton, 2011).
It is interesting to note that the main regional accent in Sec-
retary Clinton’s article is “Asia-Pacific,” but the term “Indo-
Pacific” is also used several times to indicate the increasing
importance of India in U.S. foreign and security strategy in
Asia. The key military component of the “pivot” was raising
the allocation of our global military resources in Asia to 60%
by 2020 and strengthening, and in some cases elevating
(Australia for example), our alliances and partnerships in
the region. The main economic component was the Trans-
Pacific Partnership (TPP), a multilateral trade grouping dating
back to 2005 that the United States joined in 2010, and later
bringing in Japan and South Korea. The principal mission
behind the TPP was to raise and define the norms and stan-
dards of regional trade in the region and protect members
from being overwhelmed economically by China and vic-
timized by unfair trade practices. China was notably not
included in any of the negotiations for the TPP, and obvi-
ously is not a member.
Many analysts have suggested that China’s BRI was de-
veloped in response to the United States’ “Pivot to Asia” and
TPP. We must look at BRI in a number of ways. First, this is
a major legacy project of President Xi Jin-Ping as it was con-
solidated and launched already in his first year of power and
most recently included as a core part of “Xi Jin-Ping thought”
that was elevated at the October 2017 Chinese Party Con-
gress to the status of Mao Tse-Tung and Deng Xiao-Ping. Its
plans have been set, albeit very loosely, decades ahead to
conclude in 2049, not coincidentally the 100th year anni-
versary of the Chinese Communist Revolution. Already 70
countries have signed on as partners of BRI, and the Chinese
have committed to allocating more than a trillion dollars
with the hope of attracting additional major partnership co-
funding. While the Japanese, Indians, Australians, and others
are responding with their own and in some cases joint or
multilateral initiatives, it is clear that as long as Xi Jin-
Ping is in power, BRI will be the “elephant in the room” of
Asian and Eurasian economic integration.
129
4. U.S. debates and policies on BRI and Eurasian
integration
U.S. policy toward BRI and Eurasian integration more
broadly lacked coherence, commitment, and consistency in
the Obama Administration and even more so in the first year
of the Trump Administration. U.S. policy has been more note-
worthy for its contradictions and muddled strategic
framework. For example, in August 2015 U.S. Special Rep-
resentative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (a position initially
created for and held by Richard Holbrooke until his un-
timely death in December 2010) Dan Feldman stated that
“We welcome China’s engagement in Afghanistan and Pa-
kistan, which we see not as competitive, but complementary
to our own efforts,” (Hudson, 2015). Yet, at the same time
earlier in 2015 the Obama Administration was advising our
allies and regional partners not to join China’s new multi-
lateral financial institution, the Asian Infrastructure and
Investment Bank (AIIB). Ironically, the Chinese pushed
forward with the AIIB to some extent from frustration that
the U.S. Congress was blocking approval for increased voting
rights of China and other emerging economies in the leading
Western-led multilateral institutions, the World Bank and
the IMF.
By 2016, the Obama administration had adopted a more
nuanced and insightful view on the AIIB when in June Trea-
sury Secretary Jacob Lew acknowledged the acceptable
standards of the AIIB, but that the U.S. continued to harbor
doubts regarding the lending standards of China’s devel-
opment and policy banks (Lew, 2016). In fact, perhaps we
should view the AIIB as the exception that proves the rule
regarding concern about transparency and high standards
in lending practices of Chinese financial institutions sup-
porting BRI projects. As the AIIB has only a capitalization
of $100 billion, already and in the foreseeable future it is
Chinese development and policy banks, whose lending prac-
tices are far different than established multilateral financial
institutions like the World Bank and the ADB, let alone
private Western financial institutions, that are funding the
lion’s share of BRI projects.
The Obama Administration did not so much react to BRI,
but more importantly contributed to China’s decision to
move forward with it in response to the U.S. “Pivot to Asia”
and its support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership which were
both perceived by Beijing as part of a China containment
policy. Aside from the initial negative response to the AIIB,
Obama’s broader reaction to BRI was one of cool detach-
ment. Although the Asia Pivot was announced with
considerable fanfare in 2011/2012, the reality is that the
Obama Administration’s attention during its second term
was dominated in foreign and security policy by the Arab
Spring, Syria, the rise of ISIS, and Ukraine. This is not to say
that the Asia Pivot was bereft of achievements – certainly
the successful negotiations on the TPP was a very signifi-
cant development – but the series of crises in the Middle
East and Europe took up a lot of bandwidth in the
administration.
The ambivalence of the Obama Administration’s re-
sponse reflected a dissonance in the U.S. policy community
about BRI and uncertainty about China’s long-term goals and
intentions on the global stage. Chinese officials and
130 A.C. Kuchins / Journal of Eurasian Studies 9 (2018) 125–133
commentators to some extent contribute to the uncertain-
ty by shifting the narrative about BRI, but usually selling it
in overly glowing public relations terminology highlight-
ing it as a “win-win” initiative that marks a “new type of
international relations” that is totally devoid of geopoliti-
cal interests. This kind of saccharine posturing only heightens
the skepticism among those already inclined to view Chinese
regional intentions darkly.
Responses in the U.S. policy community tend to various
degrees of alarmism, concern, skepticism, and hope. More
alarmist interpretations of BRI will focus on geopolitical goals
that BRI and the AIIB and other institutions are tools for
China to expand its influence and eventually displace U.S.
leadership not only in Asia but globally. Nadege Rolland of
the National Bureau of Asian Research described China’s
goals in terms reminiscent of the eminent Yale geo-strategist
Nicholas Spykman in the 1940s to transform Europe into
“a mere peninsula at the end of the Asian continent” and
relegate the U.S. “to the position of a distant island” (Rolland,
2015; Spykman, 2017). While a report published in 2016
by the Peterson Institute for International Economics de-
scribed BRI as a “purely mercantile endeavor” without
geopolitical goals, it also concluded that if BRI succeeds, it
will transform Eurasia into “the largest economic market
in the world and may effect a shift away from the dollar-
based global financial system,” (Peterson Institute for
International Economics, 2016).
Somewhat less alarmist yet quite concerning assess-
ments of BRI will emphasize the danger that many of the
poorer states signing on to large BRI projects with dubious
economic fundamentals will find themselves deeply in-
debted to Chinese companies and banks that will
compromise their economic and political sovereignty. The
recent case of the Sri Lankans being forced to hand over sov-
ereignty of the port of Hambonata to the Chinese because
they could not finance the debt is a strong case in point.
Many analysts raise the issue of low quality construction
and environmental standards and point to failed Chinese
development projects in Africa and Latin America. There is
also a strong view that much of BRI is motivated by do-
mestic economic and political concerns in China, such as
support for mammoth state-owned enterprises in
construction-related industries who need to export their over
capacity, rather than on sustainable development. Even those
more inclined to ascribe more benign intentions on China
suggest that Beijing will be too tempted to allow political
ambitions to get in the way of economic and commercial
goals. As longtime China hand Michael Swaine put it,
“perhaps the foremost danger is that in developing and
implementing such an action plan, this enormously ambi-
tious undertaking will run afoul of the strong tendency of
the Chinese political system to overlook deficiencies and
outside sensitivities for the sake of pleasing the top leaders,”
(Swaine, 2015).
More skeptical views of BRI suggest that it is nothing
more than a Chinese public relations exercise that has no
real financial or logistical support and will inevitably fail.
Many U.S. analysts are traditionally skeptical of state-led eco-
nomic programs and see BRI as an “overextension” or
“hubris” on the part of China. In a 2015 article, William
Overholt stated that BRI is “jeopardized by economic hubris
and by China simultaneously antagonizing virtually all of
its maritime neighbors,” (Overholt, 2015). The 2016 PIIE
report well documents the many barriers to BRI’s success,
including the fact that security threats in volatile areas may
provoke a reaction from the Chinese government and lead
to a serious conflict in Pakistan, for example (Peterson
Institute for International Economics, 2016).
Hopeful and optimistic assessments of BRI usually start
with the premise of the massive needs for infrastructure in
Asia alone in the coming decades amounting to more than
$8 trillion according to the Asian Development Bank. Ob-
viously the Chinese cannot do this all alone, but their efforts
can make a significant and positive impact. The optimists
are inclined to believe that BRI projects will provide incen-
tives for Eurasian governments “to provide political stability
and a positive investment climate.” Certainly a major goal
for China is not only to promote greater economic connec-
tivity with its neighbors, but that increased economic growth
will contribute to greater political stability. There also may
be commercial opportunities for U.S. companies. A number
of projects will also align with U.S. interests to stabilizing
and strengthening areas near conflict zones. In a 2015
Brookings report, David Dollar wrote that “there is a risk
that the competing initiatives of China and the United States
will lead to regional blocs and a disintegration of trade, but
it is more likely that Sino-American competition will lead
to strengthened institutions and deeper integration through-
out the Asia-Pacific,” (Dollar, 2001).
5. The Trump Administration perspectives on BRI and
Eurasia: A work in progress
The Trump Administration initially appeared more pos-
itively inclined toward BRI in the first half of 2017. In May,
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross released a statement
regarding the U.S.–China Economic Cooperation 100-Day
Plan in which he said that “The United States recognizes the
importance of China’s One Belt and One Road initiative and
is to send delegates to attend the Belt and Road Forum in
Beijing May 14–15.” The Belt and Road Forum was at-
tended by nearly all heads of state involved in BRI, although
Japan, India, Australia, Singapore, and most many Europe-
an countries joined the U.S. in not sending their heads of
state. The U.S. was represented at a more junior level by
Matthew Pottinger, senior director for Asia at the NSC.
Pottinger spoke at the conference, calling for increased trans-
parency from China with regards to bidding for contracts.
He added that U.S. companies have much to offer BRI. While
Pottinger provided tepid support for BRI, he also criticized
the debt burdens, lack of transparency, and potential en-
vironmental issues surrounding the initiative.
The administration’s lukewarm and ambivalent initial po-
sition is complicated by the fact that several large U.S.
companies are angling for a piece of the action. Citibank,
GE, and Honeywell International are all currently involved
in BRI projects. Both GE and Honeywell have indicated that
they are looking for ways to produce more goods in China
in order to improve their chances in bidding for BRI proj-
ects. This position would appear to be at odds with the
administration’s strong push for bringing more U.S. com-
panies’ manufacturing back home.
 A.C. Kuchins / Journal of Eurasian Studies 9 (2018) 125–133
Beginning in June with the visit of Indian leader Modi
to Washington, the administration began to outline a new
Indo-Pacific Asia strategy that elevated military, econom-
ic, and political cooperation with leading democracies of
Asia, India and Japan. Trump and Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi released a joint statement on June 26th ex-
pressing
. . .support bolstering regional economic connectivity
through the transparent development of infrastructure
and the use of responsible debt financing practices, while
ensuring respect for sovereignty and territorial integri-
ty, the rule of law, and the environment; and call on other
nations in the region to adhere to these principles (The
White House, 2017b).
The statement was seen as a thinly veiled reference to
China and the BRI and seemed to suggest that the U.S. had
joined India in opposition to certain parts of the project.
In October on the eve of President Trump’s visit to Asia,
Secretary of State Tillerson gave an important speech in
Washington before the trip that elaborated the adminis-
tration’s new Indo-Pacific strategy.
We ought to welcome those who want to strengthen the
rule of law and further prosperity and security in the
region. In particular, our starting point should contin-
ue to be greater engagement and cooperation with Indo-
Pacific democracies. We are already capturing the
benefits of our important trilateral engagement between
the U.S., India, and Japan. As we look ahead, there’s room
to invite others, including Australia, to build on the shared
objectives and initiatives (Tillerson, 2017).
In discussing the importance of regional connectivity, Sec-
retary Tillerson also expressed concern about countries
taking on unsustainable debt burdens and the problem of
non-transparent financing arrangements. While claiming
that the United States was not competing with China, he
indicated that together with other Asian allies Washing-
ton is seeking to provide alternative financing means for
regional infrastructure building.
Earlier in October, Defense Secretary James Mattis in tes-
timony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on
Afghanistan was more straightforward in his criticism of
China’s BRI saying
Senator, regarding “One Belt, One Road,” I think in a glo-
balized world, there are many belts and many roads, and
no one nation should put itself into a position of dic-
tating “One Belt, One Road.”That said, the “One Belt, One
Road” also goes through disputed territory, and I think
that in itself shows the vulnerability of trying to estab-
lish that sort of a dictate (United States Senate Committee
on Armed Services, 2017).
It should be noted, however, that both Secretary Mattis
and General Dunford expressed that the United States and
China do share common interests on counter-terrorism and
supported cooperation in this realm.
The Indo-Pacific orientation and prioritization is also fea-
tured in the new U.S. National Security Strategy released in
December 2017 (The White House, 2017a). The document
is quite traditional in its format, but it does frame the com-
131
petition between the United States and its democratic allies
in the Indo-Pacific in quite stark adversarial and ideologi-
cal terms.
A geopolitical competition between free and repres-
sive visions of world order is taking place in the Indo-
Pacific region. The region, which stretches from the west
coast of India to the western shores of the United States,
represents the most populous and economically dynamic
part of the world. The U.S. interest in a free and open
Indo-Pacific extends back to the earliest days of our
republic.
The BRI is not directly referred to as such, but the re-
gional section of the document is peppered with critical
comments of Chinese trade practices, threats to sovereign-
ty of its neighbors, and other more oblique phrases, such
as the call for quality infrastructure, that are implied criti-
cisms of BRI. In the regional section on South and Central
Asian, there is mention of the importance of promoting eco-
nomic connectivity, but it sounds a lot like the Obama
approach.
We will encourage the economic integration of Central
and South Asia to promote prosperity and economic link-
ages that will bolster connectivity and trade. And we will
encourage India to increase its economic assistance in
the region.
One should not expect details about real actions to be
taken in such platitudinous documents, but to date we have
little other evidence to understand actually what our policy
is. The Indo-Pacific framing appears to be an answer to
China’s Maritime Silk Road, and the new quadrilateral se-
curity dialogue with Australia, India, and Japan was
formalized on the sidelines of the East Asian Summit in No-
vember 2017. But the administration appears bereft of a
regional economic strategy having abandoned the TPP.
It is ironic that TPP had played a role in Beijing think-
ing to launch BRI, and with the Trump Administration
abandoning it in January of 2017, the U.S. is left to respond
economically primarily with bilateral trade pacts to address
China’s growing regional economic power. Stable democ-
racies have a comparative advantage, mainly thanks to trust,
in building alliances and multilateral institutions that are
more difficult for authoritarian states to build and main-
tain. While Beijing likes to promote the BRI as a harmonious
collective of more than 70 member states, all of which are
equal, the reality is that the Initiative functions on a bilat-
eral basis in which Beijing holds disproportionate power in
relation to its partners.
Two of our Asian allies, Japan and Australia, have taken
a less resistant stance to BRI since the United States with-
drew from TPP (Harris, 2018). Without U.S. economic
leadership in Asia, the likelihood is that allies and part-
ners will feel more pressure to work with the Chinese
despite many reservations about the strategic nature of the
Initiative and questionable commercial value of many
projects.
In contrast to some of our Asian allies, the EU has re-
cently taken a more overtly critical posture toward the BRI.
Notably, in April 2018, 27 out of the 28 national EU am-
bassadors to Beijing signed a report sharply criticizing BRI,
132 A.C. Kuchins / Journal of Eurasian Studies 9 (2018) 125–133
denouncing it as a ploy to hamper free trade and give
Chinese companies a competitive edge (Heide, Hoppe,
Scheuer, & Stratmann, 2018). European states benefit from
less dependence on the Chinese economy and geographic
distance. Also, EU regulations about transparent and com-
petitive bidding for infrastructure building make them less
vulnerable to deals favoring Chinese companies.
One institutional option the Trump Administration should
consider is adding a regional economic strategy and coop-
eration component to the “quad.” This could make the
Australia–India–Japan–U.S. “quad” a more relevant region-
al grouping that should emphasize the Japanese focus on
building “quality infrastructure” in line with the best fi-
nancial practices of leading multilateral assistance banks,
including the AIIB, and private sector.
6. Conclusion
We do need to be careful not to overly focus how we
think about Eurasian integration to the Chinese BRI. China
is and will be the most active player, but there is no guar-
antee that the Initiative will even outlive the leadership of
Xi Jin-Ping. And as Russian analyst Alexander Gabuev has
pointed out, BRI is more of a conglomeration of past and
current projects rather than a strategy (Gabuev, 2017). But
there is no question that the supercontinent of Eurasia is
reconnecting, and every county, large and small, as well as
commercial and non-governmental actors, is developing
strategies and policies to advance its interests. One of the
most interesting recent developments, for example, has been
the shift in Uzbek policy toward intra-Central Asian coop-
eration and policy coordination.5
The Eurasian supercontinent is genuinely multipolar;
bookended in the West by Europe and the East by China with
a number of established and emerging powers through-
out including Japan, India, Russia, Turkey and others. It is
frankly hard to imagine how in the coming decades China
could somehow emerge as a continental hegemon. If China’s
foreign economic or security policy is viewed as threaten-
ing or dominating, states will likely look both to self-
strengthening and balancing relationships as well as
multilateral institutions to secure their sovereignty. The
United States holds a natural advantage as being an off-
shore balancer in this regard, but its foreign economic and
security strategy needs far more calibration and coordina-
tion to play this role effectively in an increasingly challenging
environment.
Successive post-Cold War U.S. administrations have had
a difficult time managing a coherent policy toward a
reconnecting Eurasia that transcends the typical
regionalization of policy to Europe, the Middle East, Russia,
South and Central Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia. This
mattered less in the 1990s as the key drivers behind the his-
toric phenomenon, the rapid growth of the Chinese and
Indian economies and the collapse of the Soviet Union were
just beginning to make their impacts. But with the begin-
5 A major step forward was taken at the November 2017 conference in
Samarkand where the five Central Asian states agreed to regular foreign
ministerial and head-of-state meetings.
ning of the new century, the regional stove-piping of our
thinking and bureaucratic and academic organization has
been exposed as increasingly obsolete and confounds efforts
to develop a strategic framework adequate to address the
rapidly shifting dynamics we face. For decades U.S. foreign
and security policy has been most preoccupied with Europe,
the Middle East, and Asia. Those regions are no less impor-
tant today or in the future, but the key difference is greater
interactivity between them and others on the superconti-
nent of Eurasia. It is a cliché to say that we need to see the
“big picture,” but if the United States does not take steps
to educate new generations of policymakers and does not
take organizational steps that capture the “big picture” of
a reconnecting Eurasia, our policymaking will remain dis-
jointed, contradictory, and non-strategic.
Conflict of interest
None.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Rianna Jansen, Alexan-
dra Memmott, and Kate Baughman for their superb research
assistance and the students of Georgetown graduate seminar
“Reconnecting Eurasia” in the Fall of 2017 for their many
insights and contributions to the conceptualization of the
topic. The author would also like to thank the Carnegie Cor-
poration of New York for their generous support that made
this research possible.
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