NATO's mixed signals in the Caucasus and Central Asia

NATO is expanding its presence in Central Asia and the Caucasus without any clear strategy concerning the Alliance's political goals and methods. Instead, individual members have pursued separate, and sometimes competing, interests and aims. In the absence of collective political guidance, NATO military planners have substituted bureaucratic temporisation for making hard decisions defining NATO's interests in the region and the limit of its reach. As a result, vague commitments and understandings have developed between NATO and its partner states in Central Asia and the Caucasus, most of which are little comprehended even among the parties themselves, and less so by external observers such as Russia, China and Iran.