Mongolia’s increasing dependency on the West

The collapse in Mongolia’s exports of cashmere legwarmers to Russia serves as a bellwether of East-West superpower rivalry. For decades, Mongolia enjoyed a lucrative trade selling cashmere clothes to Russian customers, knitted underwear and leggings being the fastest-selling items. At the outset of the Ukraine invasion, cashmere sales went through the roof as mothers across Russia bought their sons underwear to keep them cosy in their tanks and trenches. Even as the war’s first winter set in, however, sales plummeted, as sanctions started to bite and fewer mamushkas could afford natural-fibre undies.

Mongolia’s cashmere exporters are now in a rush to redesign their products for a primarily western market, where legwarmers have not been in fashion since Jane Fonda’s 1980s workout videos. Even warmer than cashmere, I discovered while in this brutally cold country, is wool harvested from yaks, and apparently yak-wool clothes are about to storm the world’s knitwear industry. Yak is the new merino, say those in the fashion know, and Mongolia desperately hopes that other trade will follow in the yaks’ footsteps.

Mongolia is in a delicate situation. It’s dependent on both Russia and China but it also increasingly looks longingly towards the West. This year it has humbly extended invitations to visit to both Xi Jinping and to Vladimir Putin, while also trying to persuade Elon Musk to set up a factory on its home soil. This is what Mongolia calls its Third Neighbour Policy – a phrase coined by the former US secretary of state James Baker during an Ulaanbaatar visit.

It is a strategy to strengthen relations with democracies in Asia and the West, which the Mongolians ultimately hope will stave off the threat of invasion from Beijing or Moscow, though nobody wishes to antagonise these authoritarian neighbours.