Zeng Xianghong

The U.S. government announced a new Central Asia strategy which has four big changes, treating the region as an independent geopolitical area, seeing Afghanistan as part of Central Asia, clearly strengthening its containment of Russia and China in Central Asia, and redefining America’s comparative advantage in the region. The implementation of the strategy will exert a certain impact on the stability of Central Asia and the interaction among major powers in the region. However, the implementation of the strategy will not go smoothly with several factors at play: America has limited investment and no obvious comparative advantage in implementing the strategy; Central Asian countries will not easily change their pluralistic and balanced foreign policies; Central Asian countries’ cognition of Afghanistan and its situation is significantly different from that of the United States; America’s aggressive strategy in Central Asia may provoke a backlash from other major powers.