USAF Base at Manas and the Pivotal Politics Model

The past 24 hours in Kyrgyzstan have been very volatile. As you certainly know by now, the domestic opposition to President Kurmanbak Bakiyev, lead by Omurbek Tekebaev, has toppled the government and are—apparently—in control. Kyrgyzstan is no stranger to political turmoil, which among many other things, has caused varying degrees of trouble for the U.S. military, as the USAF base at Manas acts as a critical juncture for troops and resources bound for Afghanistan. It has only been six months since a new negotiation was reached between the Bakiyev regime and the United States on the rent for maintaining that base, which resulted in a significant increase in payments to Kyrgyzstan.

During the debate over the new base payment negotiation, Tekebaev was the most outspoken critics of the USAF presence. Now, with Tekebaev in control, there is worry that the Manas base is once again at risk. Also, the scope of this issue goes beyond Kyrgyzstan’s borders, as Russia has vested interest in removing this U.S. presence within its sphere of influence in Central Asia. Finally, the opposition announced this morning that it plans to only stay in power for six months as a transitional government. If we are interested in predicting if a renegotiation over the Manas base will occur, and if so what the outcome might be, we may be able to apply the above information to Keith Krehbiel’s pivotal politics model.

First, consider how the initial Manas base policy change occurred in the Kyrgyzstan parliament. Suppose the base policy can be represented in a one-dimensional policy space; wherein, policies of cheaper rents to the U.S occur on the left end of the spectrum, and rents increase as the policy shifts to the right until a policy of base closure at the extreme right. Using the framework of the pivotal politics model, we represent the status quo policy as q, and the median voters of the Kyrgyzstan parliament as m. The figure below is an abstract representation of this renegotiation with respect to the pivotal politics model.

Recall, in the pivotal politics model the median voter sets the agenda, and thus has the option of proposing a policy change or not. In the Bakiyev regime depicted above, I assume that the median voter favors higher rents than the president. As such, given the position of Bakiyev the best outcome for this median is to propose the president’s indifference point given the current status quo. As increased rents were observed, this may be a reasonable abstraction of the distribution of preference in the Kyrgyzstan parliament at that time.

Now, consider how the distribution of preference has changed given the removal of Bakiyev and the rise of Tekebaev. Further, suppose that under the new regime Russia has influence over the policy outcome. If so, we can add Putin to the model as a veto player, with a preferred policy position at the extreme right where the base is closed. If the worry within the Pentagon is that the sudden shift in power in Kyrgyzstan may result in a closure of the base, does the pivotal politics model support this?

Assuming the median voter’s position does not change; which may be dubious, though the revolt did not directly affect any members of Parliament, we see from the above figure that the pivotal politics model predicts increased rents but not base closure. Furthermore, we see that the change in President and the inclusion of a Putin veto player has very little affect on the outcome of the policy.

Of course, given that the transitional opposition government has claimed that they will only stay in power for six months, this renegotiation may never take place. That said, if new elections take place after this time we may observe an entirely new distribution of preference for the Mansa base, which will likely result in some new policy outcome.

Photo: Foreign Policy

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