US standing in Caspian drips away

[FarCenter]

By M K Bhadrakumar

On Sunday, en route to Astana, Kazakhstan, after a "very nice trip to India", US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters accompanying her, "I just wish I could have stayed longer in India". New Delhi must be one of a handful of capitals where officials from the George W Bush administration receive an expectant welcome, and the doomsday warnings emitted from New York and Washington do not seem to matter.

But there was another reason for Rice's trepidation as her jet descended to Astana - US influence and prestige in Central Asia and the Caspian region has again plummeted. Rice realizes there is hardly any time left to retrieve lost ground, and the Bill Clinton administration's legacy in the Caspian and Central Asia has largely dissipated. Central to this has been the failure of the Bush administration to handle relations with Russia. The stocktaking has already begun.

Writing in The Washington Post on Wednesday, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz rebuked the Bush administration for its "drift towards confrontation with Russia" and pointed out that "isolating Russia is not a sustainable long-range policy". They said much of Europe is "uneasy". Their target was Rice, a self-styled "Sovietologist", and her inexcusably vitriolic attack on the Kremlin in a speech at the Marshall Fund of Germany in Washington on September 18.

...

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/JJ11Ag01.html

[formercia]

1. Rice is still stuck in the Cold War.

It's all she knows about Russia.


The Soviet Union is gone. Get over it.

[Leopolds Ghost]

2. Heh. Not to mention it turns out there ain't much oil there.

So why should we maintain influence there? The article does not say.