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The C5+1 meeting between Central Asian leaders and U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington in early November signals the ascent of Central Asia to the status of a pivot in the bipolar geopolitical order.
The summit culminated in the announcement of hundreds of billions of dollars in investment and trade deals between the U.S. and Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, coupled with a pledge of future cooperation in trade and energy with Turkmenistan.
These agreements include U.S. co-investments in tungsten extraction and agricultural equipment in Kazakhstan, alongside its procurement of U.S. locomotive, air control, airplane, and satellite equipment; U.S. co-investment in the development and maintenance of railway infrastructure linking Kyrgyzstan to the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (Middle Corridor); procurement by Uzbekistan of U.S. airplane and agricultural equipment; and Tajikistan’s procurement of U.S. airline, digital, and AI infrastructure.
Immediately before the leaders of the five Central Asian countries arrived in Washington, a bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives introduced a bill to repeal Cold War-era trade restrictions between the U.S. and Central Asia, which had remained as a legacy of U.S. national security preoccupations with Russia’s regional influence. This bipartisan policy action was driven by a clear shift in national security concerns, as explained by New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen: “America’s partnerships with the strategically vital economies of Central Asia are strong and growing, but we also must incentivize long-term U.S. investments as China and Russia continue to pursue malign tactics and predatory programs ….” Jim Risch, Senator from Idaho, further articulated this strategic offer, stating that “as a volatile Russia and an increasingly aggressive China pursue their own interests across the globe, the U.S. offers Central Asian nations the opportunity to work with an equal partner.”
Central Asia’s evolving role
This legislative narrative reveals Central Asia’s new role as a pivotal axis of geostrategic competition for critical resources between the U.S. and China, which aligns with the U.S. security goal to bypass Russia and Iran via the development of the Middle Corridor. Historically, the landlocked Central Asian region has been viewed strategically as a vital transport route—the Silk Roads—connecting East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, albeit in competition with maritime trade routes. However, in the current context of global market sensitivity and vulnerability to China’s dominium over strategic commodities, the region’s fertile reserves of rare earth minerals amplify its connectivity value, propelling its pivotal role in geostrategic competition.
China’s massive investments over the past decade and a half in the extraction and processing of critical raw materials and rare earths—the backbone of industries relying on information technology, including defense, green energy, communication, and AI systems—have paid off. China currently controls more than 90% of the global rare earths market. The restrictions China imposed on rare earth exports to the U.S. in April and October 2025, in retaliation to President Trump’s elevated tariffs on Chinese imports, revealed the extent of U.S. vulnerability to high-risk supply resources. Central Asia, therefore, offers a crucial opportunity for the U.S. to diversify sourcing away from China and deter Beijing’s capacity to strangle vital elements of defense and tech industries.
The region’s immense reserves of critical raw materials, coupled with its strategic position at the confluence of global trade routes, make it an indispensable geostrategic partner. This opens a critical window for securing massive U.S. investments that can facilitate structural reform and reduce dependency on Russia, Iran, and China. For instance, Kazakhstan’s recent discovery of significant rare earth material deposits (essential for computer hard-disks and smartphones), which adds to its leverage in producing more than 40% of the world’s uranium, clearly illustrates the region’s strategic value for the U.S.
The strategic importance of Central Asia was highlighted by the historical landmark of the C5+1 Washington format earlier this month. For the first time since the C5+1 forum was founded in 2015, the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan were hosted collectively at the White House. This meeting represented a significant elevation from the annual high-level summits involving only the foreign ministers. Two years prior, President Biden had merely signaled the region’s rising importance by meeting the C5 leaders on the side of the UN General Assembly. President Trump’s elevation of the meeting to a presidential-level summit in Washington D.C. is a full statement that the region has reached strategic centrality and has the potential to become a regional powerhouse in the intensifying bipolar competition for control of high-risk supply chains. Furthermore, the formal admission of Azerbaijan to the C5 cooperation model two weeks after the Washington summit expands the region’s logistical potential for advanced connectivity and export capacity, providing direct transit of exports to Türkiye, and subsequently Europe, via the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, thereby bypassing dependency on northern corridor routes.
What do Central Asian states need to reach their potential?
The potential of Central Asia to fully emerge as a regional powerhouse hinges on its capacity to forge a new collective identity based on strong and sustained regional cooperation. The ability of Central Asian nations to coordinate on investment in ports, pipelines, and rail-links, homogenize regulation on border controls and transport interoperability, and cooperate on the joint development of critical processing facilities will be critical to enhance the region’s weight in international negotiations, reinforce collective resilience against external power pressures, and expand regional capacity to extract competitive foreign investment.
Quoting Jean Monnet’s thoughts on the concept of a European community based on critical resource sharing and sustained political coordination, the goal is “to accomplish a common work, not to negotiate advantages, but to seek our advantage in the common advantage.” Central Asia has a golden window of opportunity to shift geopolitically from being a regional supplier of critical raw materials and transit routes to becoming a regional power bloc thriving in a bipolar international order.
