In “Eurasia: A New World Order?” Eugene Rumer talks Central Asia, Russia, China and the U.S. (h/t Registan.net).

Some choice bits:

One of the key aspects of President Putin’s new line has been renewed attention to the former empire. Russian tensions with Ukraine and Georgia over gas supplies, opposition to their respective Orange and Rose revolutions, as well as renewed partnership with Uzbekistan and an open challenge to continuing U.S. military presence in Central Asia, have given rise to speculations about Russia’s “return” to its neighborhood.

However, these speculations and Moscow’s new image of confidence and prosperity ignore the many systemic factors that have put an effective limit to Russia’s neo-imperial ambitions. Those factors are many and grave, and include the lack of structural reforms in its economy; underdeveloped and crumbling infrastructure; an obsolete industrial base; declining population; difficult investment climate; and last, but not least, a military institution that by all accounts lacks credible capabilities for power projection and for over a decade has not been able to restore peace in Chechnya. Moreover, the people of Russia still remember the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. They are reminded on a daily basis of the threat of terror from Chechnya, where after two wars and thousands of casualties, peace and stability are nowhere in sight. They are unlikely to exhibit a strong appetite for new conquests in Central Asia even in the name of rebuilding the old empire.

Simply put, Russia is weak. So it has relied on a tacit alliance with China to thwart U.S. presence in the area, but…

Moreover, Russia and China, united in their opposition to U.S. policy in the new Eurasia, are hardly each other’s natural allies. Russian-Chinese relations, normalized and much improved in the 1990s after a protracted period of tensions in the 1960s, 1970s and much of the 1980s, harbor the seeds of future tensions that are coming to the surface. In the simplest terms, Russia is a declining power. Its population is shrinking and its eastern provinces are becoming depopulated. The topic of Chinese expansion has become routine on the pages of Russian newspapers and academic publications. How to manage its relations with China—the rising giant of Eurasia—is Russia’s biggest foreign policy headache. Increasingly, Russian foreign policy experts view this challenge as exceeding Russia’s capacity to handle it alone. The prospect of junior partnership with China, be it in Central Asia, or in Russia’s own Far East, is hardly an attractive one for them.

I addressed this issue before in an entry titled “Russia’s Foolish Alliance with China“:

Some readers may remember what I wrote about China and Central Asia in RealClearPolitics previously.

Contrary to my advice, it seems that Putin’s Russia is heading toward an alliance with China in order to reduce American influence in Central Asia.

This Russian strategy is extremely short-sighted. By cooperating with China, Russia is hoping to retain its influence, or even control, of its past empire in Central Asia and the Caucasus. What Russian leaders seem unable to understand, however, is that American influence in Central Asia is far less dangerous for Russia than an economically and militarily powerful China will be in the future.

If the nascent Central Asian nations became cohesive, stable nations under American aegis, they might not always do Moscow’s bidding, but they will — out of enlightened self-interest for autonomy — serve as strong buffer states against China that will surely become more assertive in the region as it becomes more powerful.

Under the current strategy of an alliance with China, with an eye toward keeping the Central Asian states weak and unaffiliated with the West, Russia will end up making the region ripe for increased Chinese influence and, possibly, control.

It seems that some Russian elites are beginning to awake to this potential problem.