In Samarkand, the Silk Road city in central Uzbekistan, another negotiation over the region’s place between larger powers is due to begin. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expected on Saturday, October 17, for talks with regional ministers. The C5+1 meeting, bringing together Central Asia’s five countries and the United States, is scheduled to run through Tuesday.
The offer Washington brings has changed. As Mansur Mirovalev reports for Al Jazeera, the Trump administration is approaching the former Soviet region through business and strategic interests, leaving aside the democratisation demands that once accompanied Western investment. For governments seeking alternatives to Russia and China, this is an opening. For imprisoned opponents and independent journalists, it offers little assurance.
The conditions attached
After the Soviet collapse in 1991, American and European representatives entered a region struggling with economic decline, unemployment and poverty. Investment, technology and international recognition came with expectations: economic reform, political reform, a departure from Soviet methods of government. Western institutions organised human-rights workshops and sent thousands of students and officials to Western schools.
The relationship soured as leaders rewrote constitutions to prolong their presidencies and installed relatives and friends in powerful posts. Family business empires sometimes competed with Western investors. Western governments threatened sanctions. “When the West began moralising, teaching them about democracy, human rights, they immediately turned towards China or Russia,” Galiya Ibragimova, an Uzbekistan-born regional expert based in Moldova, told Al Jazeera.
Uzbekistan, with 37 million people, contains much of this history. President Islam Karimov allowed a US military base in 2001, becoming the first former Soviet leader to do so. In 2005, he expelled it after Washington condemned the suppression of a popular revolt in Andijan, in the country’s east, that killed hundreds of unarmed civilians. Al Jazeera also cites a leaked US diplomatic cable from 2005 that called his daughter Gulnara a “robber baron”; she forcibly acquired lucrative businesses and was regarded as a possible successor.
The neighbour’s demands
Russia retained a different kind of reach: films, pop music, theatre festivals and television propaganda. Its economic influence accompanies the Kremlin’s “Russian World” concept, which treats Central Asia as part of Moscow’s “near abroad” and diminishes its pre-Russian heritage. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the costs of that proximity have become harder to overlook.
In 2014, Vladimir Putin claimed Kazakhstan had “never had statehood”. His ideological allies have repeatedly threatened annexation of its Russian-speaking north. In January this year, propagandist Vladimir Solovyov advocated a “special military operation” in Central Asia and Armenia, borrowing Moscow’s term for its war in Ukraine. Criticism came from minor political figures; no rebuke came from the centres of power.
Kazakhstan has nevertheless begun extraditing Kremlin critics this year and supplying Russia with gas amid Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil refineries. Central Asian labour migrants have been deceived or coerced into fighting in Ukraine, while Moscow uses companies in the region to obtain microchips, communications equipment and machine tools for drones and missiles. Ibragimova’s assessment is that Washington and Moscow have exchanged roles: Russia now instructs its neighbours about the order they should inhabit.
Business, minerals, silence
Trump largely neglected Central Asia during his first term. Now his administration seeks a renewed presence. Earlier this month, he received Saida Mirziyoyeva, daughter of Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. A year earlier, her father pledged investment of up to $100bn in the American economy, purchases of Boeing aircraft and even American-grown cotton, although Uzbekistan itself is one of the world’s largest cotton producers.
Washington offered no public criticism of Mirziyoyev’s crackdown on critics or his daughter’s increasing domestic influence. Ibragimova describes the new American approach as “just business and nothing more”, without interference over rights or reform. A government seeking investment can welcome this bargain; a citizen seeking protection from that government has different interests.
Alisher Ilkhamov, director of the London-based Central Asia Due Diligence think tank, sees the American interest as primarily geopolitical and military-strategic, given the region’s position within Russia’s and China’s spheres of interest. He believes Washington may eventually want a military base as a deterrent against China. That is his assessment, rather than an announced American plan.
The economic attraction is more immediate: rare-earth minerals and other critical elements used in technology manufacturing. Central Asia has abundant deposits, but developing them requires investment and technology. China’s use of its mineral leverage in dealings with Washington gives those deposits additional strategic value.
Ilkhamov says human rights have disappeared from American foreign-policy priorities since Trump returned to office, leaving the imprisonment of opponents and independent journalists outside Rubio’s apparent agenda. Ivar Dale, senior policy adviser at the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, sees “uncomfortable similarities between Trump’s worldview and established authoritarian regimes like Tajikistan and Turkmenistan”.
Dale nevertheless credits Rubio with probably understanding the region’s challenges better than Vice President JD Vance or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. His demand is directed at Rubio’s department: it “should bring back the focus [on human rights] if the C5+1 format is to be taken seriously going forward”.