With the current presidential administration in Washington having turned against Volodymyr Zelensky and, it would seem, the people and sovereign nation of Ukraine and having apparently embraced Russian President Vladimir Putin and his neo-Soviet worldview, it appears that the world, or at least the West – and the way it views the world – has come to the end of an era that began its most intensive period with the fall of the Soviet Union at the very end of 1991 – the Pax Americana.

As a former American diplomat who spent many years on assignments in the former Soviet Union, including at the American Embassy in Moscow and also in the newly independent states in Central Asia and the South Caucasus, I can tell you that the fundamental statement of U.S. policy for the post-Soviet region was etched into my brain:  “The United States supports the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of the newly independent states.”  In every policy statement, in every policy review, in every minor revision or update of U.S. policy for the region, these words were always first and foremost up front.  That, now, is no longer true.

As a relatively young diplomat, I was assigned to our fledgling embassy in Tashkent in 1993 and worked there for two years before moving on to an assignment in Moscow.  As an American citizen who had grown up internalizing the harshest rhetoric of the anti-Soviet Cold War in the United States, I was delighted to experience that Uzbeks (and other ethnic nationalities in Central Asia) – who only months earlier had been Soviets – were not, as human beings, all that very different from the people I’d grown up with in the American Midwest in the state of Indiana.  All over the world, people are people.

And yet, over time, I learned that there were indeed subtle but significant differences in the region from what I was used to in the West, especially in how people viewed the world and organized their own societies and cultures.   The primary intellectual foundations of culture and social organization in the west are the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the 18^th-century English Enlightenment.  These three great historical/intellectual events came together over time to guarantee that the individual would always be more important than the state, that the role of the state was to serve the individual, not the other way around.  

By contrast, the intellectual-historical heritage of the lands of the former Soviet Union go directly back to Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire, almost entirely bypassing the great intellectual experiences of the West.  Or, lacking that history, they go directly back to ancient Mongol tribalism.  And those non-Western cultures generally make the individual the servant of the state.  The difference between the East and the West is not just fundamental – it’s radical.

That’s one of the reasons that the Cold War was the all-consuming foreign-policy element of the West throughout most of the 20^th century.  To put it in the over-wrought and over-simplified everyday terms of that era, the West was good, but the [Soviet] East was evil.  [During the Cold War, China was beginning to emerge but was still too weak to be seen as a World Power and so was not really a significant part of the global game at that time.]  As part of the so-called “goodness” of the United States, after World War II, Washington created the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and soon enough, nearly every American Embassy throughout the world had a USAID Mission to provide various kinds of economic and humanitarian assistance to our embassies’ host countries.  And that was certainly true in the countries of Central Asia and the South Caucasus from the beginning of their independence. 

Very recently, a senior official from Central Asia noted in passing, during an off-the-record discussion at the Caspian Policy Center in Washington DC, that roughly 60% of all foreign assistance in Central Asia originated in the United States.  Does that mean that Washington was trying, in a way, to buy the friendship and loyalty of these states?  And does that mean every penny of American assistance was always well spent?  No, certainly not is the answer to both of those questions.  But what that assistance – and the accompanying American presence – did was make us a real player in a part of the world that the majority of contemporary American citizens know little about.

In fact, the United States, as a so-called World Power, was significant enough in the countries of the Caspian region that Kazakhstan early-on in its independence devised what it called multi-vector foreign policy that other countries in the region eventually adopted to varying degrees.  What that term, multi-vector foreign policy, really means is that the government in Astana worked to maintain good and balanced relations with the four great powers of the era – Russia, China, the European Union, and the United States – so that the two “great powers” of the West would balance the powers based in Moscow and Beijing.  This was true even when President Putin in Moscow declared that the independent states that were once Soviet Socialist Republics are still part of Moscow’s privileged sphere of influence, an assertion that Washington blithely tossed aside when it paid any attention to it at all.  Further, it remained true when a rabble-rousing Russian Duma member once declared that the northern third of Kazakhstan is traditionally Russian and that Moscow, therefore, has every right to annex that territory, and it should do so pronto.  In hindsight, that seems like a precursor for Russia’s initial annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and now its current occupation of Luhansk and Donetsk (and beyond) in southeastern Ukraine.

All of this is why I say that the current Trump administration’s policy toward Russia-invaded Ukraine is a dramatic –and some would say dangerously unsettling – change in how the world is organized.  If official Washington is now cuddling down in the Moscow bed, well over three decades – actually an entire century – of consistent American foreign policy has now come to an end.

What comes next?  Stay tuned.