Thread by @EvanFeigenbaum

1: Good piece on competition in Central Asia with quotes from a #CarnegieAsia scholar and external author. My two cents: If the US wants to compete, it had best treat countries as subjects of their own stories, not objects of America's own competition with another external power.

https://twitter.com/Navbahor/status/1526580085427523585

2: Central Asian elites are nobody's fools about Chinese power. But they aren't naive about American power either. And with Taliban victory, much of what's happening in the region has, frankly, been de-Americanized and is instead being regionalized. They, not we, drive the play.

3: And their objectives include straightforward ones: employment, growth, development, increased bargaining power with external sources of pressure, more options, more value-added left in the region. US hectoring about China can be an abstraction; nobody is ostriching or naive.

4: If I were back in the USG, I'd be highly focused on that - the region is moving on from America in a number of notable ways. So how do you leverage uniquely American strengths to help them meet those threshold goals? Mundane example: STEM education and innovation initiatives.

5: China used to build infrastructure, extract commodities, and promote transit routes from Asia to Europe. But why should Central Asians just want to collect transit fees and wave at passing trains? They need value-added, upskilling, employment. China is making that transition.

6: This good article from @Navbahor quotes @nivayau, who was in fact the co-author of a terrific @CarnegieEndow paper on this very topic. It's a gradual shift but China's offering to Central Asia is actually evolving. It is not 2010 anymore. Read here: carnegieendowment.org/2021/10/15/how…

7: So it sure grabs my attention when a Secretary of State shows up in the region and elects not to emphasize American initiatives but mostly just to trash talk the Chinese competition. This is an error the US has made elsewhere in Asia too. Why is that a problem? Here's why:

8: It turns upside down a famous aphorism attributed to my former boss Richard Armitage. Instead of “getting China right by getting Asia right,” as Rich liked to put it, we instead make relationships and policies in Asia derivative of our approach to China. Bad move because ...

9: ... that signals to Central Asian and other Asian capitals that they are of zero interest to the United States on their own terms because Washington basically has no dedicated agenda for the region apart from enlisting them as proxies in our strategic competition with Beijing.

10: So as I've argued for something like 15 years, we end up falling short because the countries themselves think we're basically long on attitude but short on strategy. And the bar is higher now because we're out of Afghanistan and the region is moving on, just as we mostly are.

11: And it's better when designing policy not to compare American apples to Chinese oranges, anyway. America isn’t China. For instance, it doesn’t have state-backed firms that it can leverage through billions channeled through state-backed policy banks.

12: So there you go, Washington: leverage uniquely American strengths—technology, innovation ecosystems, STEM education, connections to the global capital markets, best in class services and other firms ... And it's best to treat countries you're wooing as subjects, not objects.

13: And by the way, at @CarnegieEndow we're launching a #CarnegieAsia initiative on Continental Asia to complement our extensive work on Maritime Asia. In a more "regionalized" region, local powers and players bulk larger than ever. We're going to go hard at what that means.

14: Glad to have my amazing @CarnegieEndow colleagues @jmurtazashvili @TUmarov @VGokhale59 @AlexGabuev @Rudra_81 @JamesSchwemlein @ksadjadpour and several others on the team for that ...