Kazakhstan: the final move in thirty-year new Great Game?

The Washington Examiner published a piece on December 18 called Why Kazakhstan is strategically important for Washington written by Janusz Bugajski, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation and co-author of Eurasian Disunion: Russia’s Vulnerable Flanks with Margarita Assenova.

While not attempting to reduce a complicated, multi-factor situation like that in Kazakhstan to solely external dynamics, or even to what is evidently a new battleground involving a wide array of regional and global actors – the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Organization of Turkish States (all of which count Kazakhstan as a member), NATO (Kazakhstan has an Individual Partnership Action Program, the penultimate step before full membership in the bloc), Russia, China, the U.S, the European Union, Turkey, the other four Central Asia nations, Caspian Sea neighbors Azerbaijan and Iran, Pakistan and India – it’s becoming increasingly evident that there is…