It's unclear what role public opinion plays in Kyrgyzstan's foreign policy -- I think very little -- but to the extent that it does, and if there does turn out to be a showdown over Manas between the U.S. and Russia, it's clear which side the people of Kyrgyzstan would choose. According to a Gallup poll (nearly two years old, but I'm not sure why much would have changed), Kyrgyzstanis who believe it is "more important to have a close relationship with the USA even if it might hurt relationships with Russia" totaled a mere three percent. And those who said that it was "more important to have a close relationship with Russia even if it might hurt relationships with USA": 63 percent. (About 22 percent said it was important to have close relations with both.)

Several other countries of the region were polled on the same question, and the results should be pretty sobering to U.S. policymakers: In every single country, more people believed it was important to have good relations with Russia than with the U.S. That includes Georgia, though there the proportions are closest (28 percent with Russia, 24 percent with the US, and this was before the war so presumably there has been some movement there). And the proportions of people who say their country should favor relations with the U.S. are vanishingly small in a lot of the countries: four percent in Armenia, two percent in Uzbekistan, one percent in Tajikistan, three percent in Kazakhstan.