Policy brief N o 26 - September 2012 At a time when transatlantic commitments are widely focused on the Syrian crisis and the need for coordinated policies to counter the economic and debt crises, a reading of the European Strategy for Central Asia and equivalent US texts 1 reveal the limited coordination of Western policies in the region. This often is more a matter of a mutual ignorance than of disagreements on the motives of the US and European involvement. Meetings on Central Asia between senior European and US oficials are rare, except for those between the EU Special Representative for Central Asia and the US Under Secretary for the region. Meanwhile, mutual knowledge of the actions of US and European governments and public administration in Central Asia is minimal. US policy toward Central Asia is handled by a diversity of actors – the Defense Department, the State Department, USAID, and Congress – which do not share necessarily the same priorities. To these institutions one can add a range of American private actors, corporate as well as civil society, which each have their own objectives in the region. Tensions between main civil society organisations (the Open Society Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, Human Rights Watch, etc.) and the State and Defense Departments are regular and the assessment of the security-democracy nexus is often at the core of their debate. In addition to this, the United States’ inluence is also expressed via transatlantic institutions, particularly NATO and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). US Central Asia policy: Still American Mars versus European Venus? Marlène Laruelle Marlène Laruelle is a researcher at EUCAM and the director of the Central Asia Program at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES), Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. 1 European Council General Secretariat, The EU and Central Asia: Strategy for a New Partnership; The Joint EU Council and Commission Implementation Report of the EU Strategy for Central Asia, June 2009,http://www. eeas.europa.eu/central_asia/docs/2010_strategy_eu_ centralasia_en.pdf, accessed August 2012. There is no equivalent oficial text from the U.S. side available as declassiied, but the reader can refer to Robert O. Blake, Jr. speech at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute Forum, SAIS Washington, DC, January 25, 2012, and to S.F. Starr, and A.C. Kuchins, “The Key to Success in Afghanistan A Modern Silk Road Strategy,” Silk Road Papers (Washington, D.C.: The Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program, 2010).. 2 US Department of Defense, Sustaining US global leadership: Priorities for 21st century defense, January 2012. The United States does not consider Eurasia as its main foreign policy focus and will continue to embed Central Asia within a more global agenda. Europe however, will remain more intimately linked to the Eurasian region through its own relations to Russia, Turkey, Eastern neighbours and the Mediterranean basin. In contrast to the European approach, the United States’ new emphasis on its strategic interests in the Asia-Paciic region and the maintenance of the focus on a ‘greater Middle-East’, as deined in the new US Defense Strategic Review, conirms that the relationship to China and South Asia will be a key element in the American reading of Central Asia’s future. 2 Beyond differences in the ields of trade orientation, power projection, and focus on hard or soft security; Europe and the United States share many values and seek a relatively similar future for the Central Asian region.