Global Research

Image: Richard Miles a.k.a father of Color Revolution

One of the most prominent Color Revolution experts in America’s coup d’état toolkit has been hurriedly recalled from retirement for immediate deployment to Kyrgyzstan. Richard Miles, the engineer of the first Color Revolution in Serbia and the Rose Revolution in Georgia, has been appointed as charge d’affaires in Kyrgyzstan until a new ambassador is confirmed by the Senate, because the former one, Pamela Spratlen, has been reassigned as the US Ambassador to Uzbekistan. While it is not known how long Miles will remain in Kyrgyzstan, which will be the Eurasian Union’s weakest economy when it joins in May of this year, ordinary citizens there already suspect that foul play is being planned against their country and have protested his arrival. Given that Miles’ track record of regime change makes him worthy of the ‘Male Nuland’ moniker, it’s appropriate to investigate what tricks the US may be up to in Central Asia, and how it may be trying to force the Ukrainian scenario onto Russia’s southern doorstep.

“The Male Nuland”

Richard Miles has kept a relatively low profile throughout the years and hasn’t garnered the notoriety that his ideological protégé Nuland has, but this doesn’t mean that he’s any less dangerous for the countries he visits. In fact, since he’s the individual who spearheaded the Color Revolution tactic in the first place, he can even be referred to as a ‘proto Nuland’, owing to his ‘successes’ in Serbia and Georgia that helped make EuroMaidan possible in the first place. While he was no longer the American Ambassador to Yugoslavia when the 2000 Bulldozer Revolution overthrow Slobodan Milosevic, he certainly paved the way for its implementation during his work over the three years prior, including overseeing the NATO War on Serbia. As regards Georgia, he served as US Ambassador from 2002-2005 and repeated the Belgrade template in Tbilisi.

Afterwards, he became the Executive Director for the Open World Leadership Center for most of 2006, during which he fostered the creation of thousands of pro-American ‘leaders’ in the former Soviet Union. To Center’s own mission statement concisely describes the type of work that it does:

“Begun as a pilot program in 1999 and established as a permanent agency in late 2000, the Center conducts the first and only international exchange agency in the U.S. Legislative Branch and, as such, has enabled more than 17,000 current and future leaders from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan to meaningfully engage and interact with Members of Congress, Congressional staff, and thousands of other Americans, many of whom are the delegates’ direct professional counterparts.”

The above statement can be read as an admission that the Center’s purpose is to create pro-American proxies that can seamlessly interact with and do the bidding of their Washington patrons, thereby essentially making it an NGO front for the US intelligence community’s cultivation of Color Revolution assets. The organization doesn’t hide the fact that its purpose is to promote American interests and profit, brazenly bragging that:

“Open World offers an extraordinary “bang for the buck” in terms of efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and value. The Center boasts an overhead rate of about 7 percent, every grant contains cost-shared elements, and more than 75 percent of our appropriation is plowed back into the American economy every year. The Center might best be described as both a mini-stimulus plan as well as a true international exchange program.”

Bearing in mind Miles’ experience in running this Color Revolution recruitment front, as well as his contribution to managing two ‘successful’ regime change operations in Serbia and Georgia, he can easily be identified as one of the most dangerous people in the US deep state establishment, and the fact that he was recalled from retirement to urgently take the ‘temporary’ post in Kyrgyzstan during these tense geopolitical times must absolutely be seen as a warning about Washington’s nefarious intentions.

Uzbekistan’s Role In The US’ Central Asian Strategy

While Washington is poised to destabilize Kyrgyzstan, it’s showing strong signals that it’s ready to do the opposite in neighboring Uzbekistan, and has been reingratiating itself with Tashkent over the past couple of years in a bid to shore up what it intends to become its Lead From Behind proxy in the region.

Safeguarding The Strategist:

Before going into the specifics and forecast for this strategic partnership, it’s necessary to look at how the US’ latest ambassadorial arrangement is meant to facilitate all of this. Ambassador Pamela Spratlen’s reassignment from Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan must be seen as something other than a simple diplomatic shuffle. Spratlen’s biography shows that she’s one of the US’ premier strategists for Central Asia, having previously held the posts of Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Astana, Director of Central Asian Affairs, and Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Central Asia, et al. Thus, given her importance in crafting the US’ regional strategy for Central Asia, it’s not likely that her handlers would allow such a valuable asset to sit smack dab in the middle of their next targeted state, considering that their hefty investment in her may go to waste if she’s killed or kidnapped in the proceeding violence that’s being planned. Such a mistake was made with Ambassador Christopher Stevens, one of the architects of the US-supported Libya-Syria terrorist nexus, and the US is keen to avoid having Spratlen meet an untimely end in such a shameful and embarrassing manner. Rather, seeing as how she’s a strategic specialist and not a tactical one like Miles, it’s more useful to place her in a safe location where she can supervise, assess, and direct events as they develop, hence why she’s been ordered to Tashkent.

MRAPs are largely ineffective in combating drug smuggling and terrorism, but acquire their real importance in crowd control.

The Lead From Behind Blueprint:

Spratlen’s diplomatic experience in handling Central Asian affairs makes her possibly the best candidate that the US can send to Uzbekistan to seal the deal on a strategic partnership. First things first, it’s worth noting that relations between Washington and Tashkent have been on the mend since the 2005 Andijan Incident led to the practical destruction of bilateral ties. In the years since, the US lifted its military embargo on the country and even bequeathed it with 308 Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles and 20 additional support vehicles from Afghanistan earlier this year, with Uzbekistan only paying the cost of transporting them. On the surface this may only seem to be a symbolic gift of friendship, but in reality, there’s a lot more to it. For instance, Uzbekistan will now be dependent on US-supplied parts and expertise for upkeep, thereby implicitly deepening the military-technical cooperation between the two countries. On top of that, it’s been noted that the MRAPs are largely ineffective in combating drug smuggling and terrorism, but acquire their real importance in crowd control. This factor becomes exceptionally important when one recognizes how close the country stands to the precipice of chaos, but for the time being, it doesn’t look like the US has the intention of stirring the bubbling pot of destabilization (which could still overflow regardless of American meddling), and instead is opting to reinforce the state for its own gain.

The US vision for Central Asia thus deserves further examination in order to figure out its true nature then, since it’s known that the US could easily instigate the creation of a Black Hole of Chaos in Uzbekistan by manipulating the many levers of destabilization there at any time that it sees fit. This would certainly carry with it immense strategic value for the US in its quest to cripple Russia, but it also has one major vulnerability, and it’s that Uzbekistan could receive Russian and Chinese assistance in combating the US-directed chaos and emerge from the crisis as a stronger and more closely integrated member of Eurasian integrational structures, beginning with the SCO and possibly even ending with integration into the Eurasian Union and reintegration into the CSTO. If Russia and China are successful in assisting Uzbekistan (and they’ve been already been expecting some vague form of regional destabilization after the 2014 NATO drawdown), then the end result would be the near-complete removal of American influence in Central Asia after the carnage has ended, meaning that non-West would be secured (despite at what may be devastating costs) in the face of the Reverse Brzezinski’s ultimate failure.

Overcoming The Competition With Russia:

Understanding that such a black hole gambit can be deployed at any time, the US seems to instead have chosen to fortify Uzbekistan as their Lead From Behind partner in the interim, with the hopes that the region’s largest military and population could project increased anti-Russian influence on all four of the other former Soviet republics that it abuts. As it stands, Uzbekistan is still formally opposed to any form of Russian-led integration, as President Islam Karimov said in January that his country will never join any “alliance similar to the U.S.S.R.”, and it even withdrew from the CSTO in 2012. Be that as it may,

Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Uzbek President Islam Karimov attend a meeting at Kuksaroy residence in Tashkent on December 10, 2014.

Russia has been making strong strides in renewing its formerly close relations with the country. Putin visited Karimov in December and spoke about the mutual benefits of Eurasian integration, and announced that both sides had begun consultations on a possible deal between Uzbekistan and the Eurasian Union. To top it off, the Russian President even declared that Moscow would write off $890 million of Uzbekistan’s Soviet-era debt (with only $25 million of it still having to be paid), in what The Diplomat analyzed as demonstrating Russia’s commitment to strengthening ties with Tashkent.

In such a situation, it’s doubtful that Uzbekistan would turn against Russia on its own prerogative and agitate against Moscow’s interests in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. But still, Uzbekistan knows that it’s a battlefield in the ‘New Cold War’, and that it can play this role to its advantage to enact even greater concessions from both Washington and Moscow. One needs to keep in mind that the US wants to transform Uzbekistan into its Lead From Behind proxy for Central Asia (seeing as how it has the potential to become the regional powerhouse and counteract Russia’s Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Tajik partners), but it can’t do this if Uzbekistan retains positive relations with Russia. Thus, it needs to make sure that Uzbekistan does not have a rapprochement with Russia that would endanger American interests (be it naturally occurring or as the result of Russian assistance in defending against an American-inspired chaotic subversion), hence why it aims to drive a militant wedge between Tashkent and Moscow in the same way as it has done between the latter and Kiev. This is precisely the reason why it wants to create a Black Hole of Chaos in Kyrgyzstan via yet another Color Revolution there, since the expected aftershocks (to be described in the follow-up article) run the high chance of being manipulated to the point where they can turn Uzbekistan and Russia into enemies, which would ‘naturally’ make Tashkent the US’ Lead From Behind proxy. Should this plan fail, then the US can always follow up with ‘Plan B’ and unleash uncontrollable chaos inside the country (as was described earlier).

The Central Asian Front

Strategic Theory:

The US’ primary goal in creating chaos in Central Asia is to split Russia’s focus in dealing with the Ukrainian Crisis and create a situation where its decision makers are unable to adequately protect the country’s entire periphery. This is envisioned as leading to the penetration of chaotic dynamics directly into the Russian Federation itself (be it from the west or the south), which could contribute to the realization of the ‘Eurasian Balkans’ end game of dividing the country into ethnic and regional fiefdoms and indefinitely prolonging the US’ unipolar moment. In order to get to such a grand finale, a series of steps must be taken in the countries around Russia to provoke such a scenario.

The unravelling of the Ukrainian state represents the theory’s application in Eastern Europe, the threat of a continuation war in Nagorno-Karabakh fulfills the Caucasus component of this idea, and the looming Kyrgyz catastrophe wraps up the Central Asian front for the US’ pan-Eurasian campaign against Russia. Each of these simmering conflicts has the potential to (re)explode at any time, and if they occur in near-simultaneity, then Russia will be hard-pressed to deal with them all, and may predictably fumble in its approach and create even larger openings for more chaos to rip through its borders.

Even if these aforementioned conflicts don’t break out concurrently, the fact that three massive vacuums of destabilization are sitting on the Russia’s doorsteps means that the threat always remains that one, two, or all of them can heat up sometime in the future. This accordingly leaves Russian decision makers continually on edge and siphons off strategic resources into crafting contingency measures against these probable scenarios that could be of more productive use elsewhere, such as in preparing foreign policy initiatives that could for once place the West on the strategic defensive (for example, protecting Macedonia and promoting the ‘New South Stream’).

The 21^st-Century Reagan Doctrine:

All of the abovementioned strategic imperatives aren’t the realm of speculation, however, since then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton firmly declared in December 2012 that it will do whatever it can to sabotage Russian-led integration processes in the former Soviet sphere. Referring to the Eurasian Union, she said:

“There is a move to re-Sovietise the region, It’s not going to be called that. It’s going to be called a customs union, it will be called Eurasian Union and all of that, but let’s make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.”

This is none other than a 21^st-century application of the Reagan Doctrine, whereby the US will now seek to aggressively roll back Russian influence in the Near Abroad instead of Soviet influence across the world. Seen through this context, the US’ integrated strategy in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia makes more sense. Ukraine would have been the second-largest economy in the Eurasian Union and could have provided a valuable contribution to its overall strength, should the EuroMaidan Color Revolution not have derailed any realistic hopes for it joining in the near future. In the Caucasus, Eurasian Union-member Armenia is geographically cut off from the rest of its partners, being separated by EU-aspiring Georgia and hostile Azerbaijan. This lays the pretext for a coming EU-Eurasian Union crisis in the Caucasus, which could massively destabilize Russia regardless if a continuation war occurs in Nagorno-Karabakh or not.

Completing the encirclement, an outbreak of violence in Kyrgyzstan as a result of yet another Color Revolution there could lead to the formation of a terrorist hotspot inside the Eurasian Union’s newest member, as well as creating an almost irresistible temptation for Russia and the CSTO to fall for a disastrous Reverse Brzezinski intervention. In all three theaters, American foreign policy and regional meddling are the engines for destabilization, while Russia and the Eurasian Union are the ultimate targets, just as Hillary threatened they would be nearly three years ago. In the time since, Ukraine has fallen to Western domination and is rapidly being integrated into Shadow NATO, Nuland is conspiring to reignite the Nagorno-Karabakh war, and now the ‘Male Nuland’ is ready to wreak havoc in Kyrgyzstan, showing that the 21^st-century Reagan Doctrine is in full swing.

To be continued…

Andrew Korybko is the political analyst and journalist for Sputnik who currently lives and studies in Moscow, exclusively for ORIENTAL REVIEW.