There’s an interesting post over at Intel Dump about the dilemma the U.S. faces with their bases in places like Uzbekistan. I found this most interesting:

The tensions between Washington and Tashkent have offered Russia and China an opportunity to squeeze the United States out of Central Asia. Russia, China and four Central Asian nations — Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan — demanded this month that the United States declare a date for withdrawing troops and aircraft from bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

The analysis in the rest of the post is worth reading. In particular:

Cold War bases were located in large countries destined to be economic and geopolitical powerhouses, where the US had vital interests in stability, prosperity and alignment with the United States. Service members and their families moved to the equivalent of medium-sized American towns (replete with schools and bowling alleys) for years at a time. They represented a nice convergence of realpolitik, democratization and economic development in one strategy.

The newer host countries present a stark contrast. Many are practically city-states with little economic potential, non-democratic or unstable governments, but in strategic locations. The bases are extremely spare, where six month tours with no family are the rule and therefore requiring very few “hotel services” to help drive a sizable local economy (the hosts are so poor that bases still represent a windfall; Kyrgyzstan’s accounted for 5 percent of its entire gross domestic product last year). The bases are likely to be removed from host populations and heavily fortified, and are unlikely to do much to increase stability, democracy or familiarity with Americans in their hosts.

Most of you know I’m not a fan of realist foreign policy. More precisely, I don’t like the things that realpolitik can’t measure effectively. Like economics, I understand and believe in the underlying theories, but think that the equations often miss important variables.

This is one of those examples where I think that those that justify, for example, ignoring Uzbekistan’s horrible record on human rights get things wrong. In the short term it’s all good. Down the road, though, we end up paying some sort of price and too often that price isn’t factored into the math. The biggest thing that often bothers me is that military presence and short term domestic economic gain are the only things that usually get factored in. Like a lot of things in our society (or the Soviets or whatever), not much attention is payed to the long term results.

This goes both ways, of course. This is the best reason for keeping a long term base in Iraq is the one described here.