Central Asia: Between China and Turkey

Both countries are trying to take advantage of Russia’s waning influence

As Russia’s footprint in Central Asia recedes, China and Turkey are trying to fill the void. They approach the region from different directions, using different tools with different degrees of capabilities, and both have their own advantages and constraints. But unless the United States dramatically ups its involvement there, China and Turkey will, to varying degrees, inevitably shape the post-Russian landscape in Central Asia.

And it is very much in their respective interests to do so. For Beijing, the longer the Russians remain mired in a conflict with the West, the more space it creates for them to push into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence.

This is why Chinese President Xi Jinping is posturing as a peacemaker in the Ukraine war, even as he is slated to host the leaders of all five Central Asian nations next month in what Beijing has described as the “first China-Central Asia summit.”

Turkey is behaving similarly, playing mediator in Ukraine while hoping to capitalize on Russia’s waning influence in the Black and Caspian seas.

Ankara is in a far better position than Beijing to influence Russian behavior vis-a-vis Ukraine, as evidenced by Ankara’s diplomatic efforts to broker a deal between Moscow and Kyiv to ensure that the war does not disrupt grain shipments. Still, Ankara knows that the more Moscow is hurt by the war and sanctions the more geopolitical space it creates for Turkey.

Turkey’s efforts to assert itself at Russia’s expense predate the war in Ukraine. In 2020, Ankara identified Moscow’s vulnerability in the South Caucasus and intervened in the Nagorno-Karabakh war, providing military and intelligence support to its ally in Azerbaijan.

In doing so, Baku was able to reclaim a good chunk of territory Armenia had controlled since 1994, forcing Armenia to accept the mediation efforts of its historical enemy. Ankara thus upset the balance of power that the Russians had maintained between Yerevan and Baku since after the fall of the Soviet Union.

For Turkey, that was just the first small step in its longterm plan to extend its influence northward in the broader Black Sea basin. Ankara realizes that despite the setback in the South Caucasus, the Kremlin’s hold over the broader region remains strong, particularly in the North Caucasus, which is formally a part of the Russian Federation. Little surprise, then, that Turkey has been looking eastward, beyond the Caspian Sea and into the lands of Central Asia.

Turkey sees the oil-and-gas-rich trans-Caspian region as an important alternative to its current dependency on Russia and a way to realize its ambitions of becoming an energy transit hub. What helps is that the region is inhabited by fellow Turkic peoples with whom it has long historical ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious ties.

Hence why in 2009 it launched the regional bloc known as the Organization of Turkic States, which includes Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan. But these plans have been kept in check by the profound political and economic problem Turkey currently faces – problems that limit the extent to which Ankara can become a major player in another region.

Chinese Imperatives and Constraints

China is less constrained in this regard. As the world’s second-largest economy, it is in far better shape to take advantage of Russia’s losses and fully intends to leverage its position accordingly.

Aware that it cannot compete with the United States at sea, Beijing has instead focused its efforts in areas like Central Asia in which the U.S. is less competitive. The region has the added benefit of connecting Europe, the Middle East and the former Soviet space.

In fact, Beijing has had a major head start through its Belt and Road Initiative, which it launched in 2013 (in Kazakhstan of all places). China is already importing large volumes of natural gas from Turkmenistan via a pipeline that crosses Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. It also has a rail link with Europe that goes through Kazakhstan and Russia, albeit one that has been disrupted by the Ukraine war.

Just as it is in the interest of the Europeans to not be so dependent on Russia for energy, China is wary of relying too heavily on Russian territory for access to European markets.

This means that China will need to develop routes through Central Asia, the Caspian Sea and the South Caucasus, Turkey and then on to Europe. It’s a major undertaking rife with a number of political, economic and technical challenges. Beijing is well suited to building infrastructure but only in favorable geopolitical conditions.

The BRI was made possible largely because Washington was preoccupied with preventing the violence in Afghanistan from spilling over to the surrounding regions. Beijing was thus able to build BRI projects in Pakistan and Kazakhstan, but now that the U.S. military has left, the Taliban have returned to power in Kabul and instability is radiating into these regions, Chinese plans are mired in uncertainty.

Furthermore, there is the fragile state of the Chinese economy after the pandemic at a time when Xi is in the process of personalizing Beijing’s institutionalized autocracy. Compounding the situation are the sharply deteriorating conditions in South and Central Asia.

Pakistan, for example, is experiencing the most difficult political economic crisis in its history, due largely to misrule but also at least in part to debt incurred by the China

Pakistan Economic Corridor, the signature BRI project.

China has no solutions for problems like these because, unlike the United States, it has never provided for regional security. Nor cannot it help countries like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan that are on complicated paths toward political reform.

Meanwhile, Beijing has to worry about Tajikistan, which is the most fragile nation in the region and the most susceptible to spillover from Afghanistan. Tajikistan’s failure would create serious problems for the stability of Xinjiang, the restive area in far western China, where Beijing has spent considerable resources trying to contain the Uyghur minority.

Russia is down but not out as far as Central Asia is concerned. It retains significant economic, military and cultural tools it can use in the short term to frustrate China’s and Turkey’s efforts to move in. Then there is the United States, which is not sure how it intends to deal with Central

Asia beyond its current tactical engagements.

But in the long run, Turkey and China are the two principal actors that will increasingly be pushing into the heart of Eurasia.