Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla.
How Astana went from a handshake at the United Nations to the front of the line in Trump’s Washington — and why the rest of Central Asia stands to gain from it
On July 10, Donald Trump and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev spoke by phone. The Kazakh president congratulated his American counterpart on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence, reviewed the implementation of agreements struck during his November visit to Washington, restated Kazakhstan’s long-held position on the inadmissibility of nuclear proliferation, and extended an invitation for Trump to visit Kazakhstan.
The call was not an isolated courtesy. It capped eight months of engagement between Astana and Washington that is without precedent in the thirty-five-year history of the relationship: a White House summit, accession to the Abraham Accords, twenty-nine commercial agreements worth some $17 billion, invitations — extended to both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan last year — to the G20 summit Trump will host in Miami, and a stream of senior American visitors to Astana, from Senator Steve Daines to Special Envoy Sergio Gor to executives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. American investment in Kazakhstan has passed $100 billion, with a stated ambition to reach $137 billion. Jeff Erlich, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Kazakhstan and whose experience in the region dates to the late 1990s, told The New York Times that the business relationship “has never been better.”
That this is happening under an American president famously indifferent to regions that cannot offer him deals is not a paradox. Kazakhstan has things Trump’s Washington wants — critical minerals, uranium, a trade corridor that bypasses Russia, Iran, and China — and a leadership that has proven unusually adept at reading this administration’s transactional grammar. But the story is larger than one president’s dealmaking. It marks the moment when Central Asia’s largest economy moved from the periphery of American strategy toward something closer to its center, and when Kazakhstan consolidated its claim to being the region’s political anchor.
From Handshake to Front of the Line
It did not start out this way. For much of 2025, Uzbekistan looked like the Central Asian state best positioned in Trump’s Washington. At the UN General Assembly in September, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev was granted a formal meeting with Trump and left New York with an $8.5 billion order for twenty-two Boeing 787 Dreamliners. Tokayev, by contrast, had to settle for a handshake. Kazakhstan’s own headline agreement at the time — a $4.2 billion contract with the American rail manufacturer Wabtec to renew its locomotive park — was substantial, but it lacked the Oval Office theater. Some in Astana suspected that Sergio Gor, the Tashkent-born Trump confidant confirmed in October as ambassador to India and special envoy for South and Central Asian affairs, harbored a natural sympathy for the country of his birth.
The balance shifted in November, around a piece of Trump’s legacy that money cannot buy. When the five Central Asian presidents gathered at the White House on November 6 for the C5+1 summit — the first time all five had met an American president inside the building, on the tenth anniversary of the format — Trump announced that Kazakhstan would join the Abraham Accords, the first country to do so in his second term. “The first of many,” he posted. The Accords are central to how Trump wants his foreign policy remembered, and Tokayev had handed him a fresh signatory at a moment when the initiative had stalled. Kazakhstan also joined Trump’s Board of Peace, the body created to oversee the Gaza settlement.
The rewards were immediate. When the leaders sat down to dinner, Tokayev was the first of the five presidents Trump called on to speak — a distinction of protocol not lost on anyone in the room — and he used it to declare “the beginning of a new era of interaction” between the region and the United States. His flattery was, even by the standards of the evening, conspicuous — he told his host that Trump had been “sent by heaven” — but it was flattery in the service of a concrete agenda. Kazakh and American companies signed twenty-nine agreements worth roughly $17 billion, spanning locomotives, an AI data hub with Nvidia and the cloud firm Firebird, satellite internet with Amazon’s Leo constellation, and joint ventures in critical minerals.
The centerpiece was tungsten. Kazakhstan’s national mining company agreed with New York-based Cove Capital to jointly develop the Severny Katpar and Verkhnee Kairakty deposits in the Karaganda region — by some assessments the largest known undeveloped tungsten resource in the world — with American development-finance institutions signaling interest in more than a billion dollars of support. The deal has since acquired a political afterlife in Washington: subsequent reporting revealed that an investment vehicle backed by the president’s sons had taken a stake in the venture’s American parent shortly before the contract was awarded, and Democrats have promised congressional scrutiny. For Astana, the controversy is an American domestic affair — but a reminder that partnerships built close to this White House carry exposure to its politics.
Since November, the relationship has settled into an unusually productive rhythm: Gor in Astana in June for talks on investment, artificial intelligence, transport, and critical minerals; a senior U.S. Chamber of Commerce delegation received by Tokayev in early July; the C5+1 Critical Minerals Dialogue convening with high-level American participation; and now the July 10 call, in which both sides, notably, dwelt on results rather than rhetoric.
The Periodic Table Under Their Feet
What does Washington want? The short answer is minerals, and the shorter answer is China.
Beijing’s dominance of critical raw materials — including more than 80 percent of global tungsten supply, a near-monopoly on rare-earth processing — has become one of its sharpest instruments of leverage over the United States. China has repeatedly tightened export controls on rare earths and critical minerals. In early 2025, Beijing instituted strict export controls on tungsten, a commodity NATO lists among just twelve defense-critical raw materials. Finding alternative suppliers is no longer an industrial-policy preference in Washington; it is treated as a national-security requirement.
Kazakhstan is the most credible answer in Central Asia, and arguably one of the most credible anywhere. The country possesses deposits of 21 of the 50 minerals the United States classifies as critical. It is the world’s largest producer of uranium — an increasingly strategic commodity as the United States works to displace Russian nuclear fuel — and holds major deposits of chromium, copper, titanium, and tantalum. The Kuyrektykol discovery in the Karaganda region, announced in 2025, may hold rare-earth resources that would rank Kazakhstan behind only China and Brazil if confirmed. Kazakhs are fond of saying that the entire periodic table lies under their feet; the claim is only a mild exaggeration, and Washington has begun taking it literally.
The caveats are real. Reserves are not supply chains: Kazakhstan’s capacity to process tungsten and separate rare earths remains limited. Astana knows this, which is why its negotiating position has consistently emphasized processing, technology transfer, and higher value-added production over raw exports. For a country that has spent three decades exporting crude oil and importing refined goods, the American minerals push is an opportunity to industrialize, not merely to dig.
The minerals agenda also sits atop a much older economic foundation. More than 600 U.S. companies operate in Kazakhstan, and roughly 70 percent of all foreign direct investment in Central Asia flows to the country, by Tokayev’s own account. Chevron’s 1993 entry into the Tengiz field remains one of the most durable American investments anywhere in the former Soviet Union; the field’s $48.9 billion expansion reached full capacity last year, and Kazakhstan still accounts for roughly a quarter of Chevron’s global output. Whatever the oscillations of American policy over three decades, the companies stayed. That record is Kazakhstan’s silent advantage: it can show Washington not a pitch but a track record.
Astana's Calculus
For Kazakhstan, the logic of the American turn is written into the founding doctrine of its statehood: the multivector foreign policy, which holds that a vast, landlocked country wedged between Russia and China survives by ensuring it is never dependent on either.
The war in Ukraine has strained that doctrine from one direction. Russia remains an inescapable fact of geography — Kazakhstan shares with it the world’s longest continuous land border, a customs union, and a security treaty — but its capacity to underwrite the region’s economy has visibly diminished, and its willingness to respect the sovereignty of former Soviet neighbors is, after February 2022, an open question in Astana. China has filled much of the resulting vacuum, becoming the region’s dominant trading partner and infrastructure financier. Beijing is a valued partner, and relations are good. But substituting one overwhelming dependency for another is precisely the outcome multivectorism exists to prevent. An American vector — alongside European, Gulf, Korean, and Turkish ones — restores the equilibrium. As Nurlan Zhakupov, head of the sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna, put it: Kazakhstan assesses American, Chinese, Russian, or Emirati partners “on a relative performance basis,” and chooses what serves it best.
The Middle Corridor is where these interests converge rather than collide. The trans-Caspian route from China through Kazakhstan to the Caucasus and Europe offers Beijing a path to European markets, offers Washington access to Central Asian minerals without transiting Russia, Iran, or China, and offers Kazakhstan transit revenue and geoeconomic relevance. Traffic is growing fast — container trains through Kazakhstan were up over a third year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, and freight volumes have quintupled since 2019. It is a rare piece of infrastructure that Washington and Beijing can both endorse, which is exactly why Astana promotes it so energetically.
Thirty-Five Years of Cycles
The current moment is best measured against the history that preceded it — a history in which American attention surged, served some external purpose, and receded, and in which Central Asia was almost always a means to some other end.
Washington recognized Kazakhstan’s independence within days of the Soviet collapse in December 1991 — among the first capitals to do so — and the relationship’s founding chapter remains its most consequential. Kazakhstan emerged from the Soviet collapse holding the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal — more than 1,400 strategic warheads — along with the Semipalatinsk test site, where the Soviet Union had conducted 456 nuclear tests over four decades. President Nursultan Nazarbayev closed Semipalatinsk by decree on August 29, 1991, before the USSR had even formally dissolved, and then gave up the arsenal entirely, acceding to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and receiving security assurances under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.
American partnership was woven through that choice. Under the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, Washington financed the dismantlement of weapons infrastructure. In November 1994, in a then-covert operation known as Project Sapphire, the two governments airlifted roughly 600 kilograms of poorly secured highly enriched uranium — enough for some twenty bombs — from the Ulba Metallurgical Plant to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Denuclearization also unlocked the Western capital Kazakhstan’s oil sector needed: Chevron’s Tengiz deal was signed in 1993, with ExxonMobil and others following into Kashagan and Karachaganak. That Tokayev used a call with Trump thirty years later to reaffirm nonproliferation principles was not boilerplate; it was an invocation of the relationship’s founding text.
The rest of the Nazarbayev-era relationship was warier. Through the 1990s, American engagement ran heavily through democracy promotion — NGOs, election monitoring, U.S.-funded media — and Washington’s assessments of Kazakhstan’s managed politics were a chronic irritant, even as energy cooperation deepened. After September 11, 2001, the region was recast in security terms: Kazakhstan’s neighbors hosted American bases, while Kazakhstan granted overflight and emergency landing rights and later became a link in the Northern Distribution Network supplying coalition forces in Afghanistan. The intervention next door served the region well: toppling the Taliban and crushing the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan eliminated the most pressing dangers, and the Western presence coincided with an unusual stretch of stability and growth.
But the pattern held: the region mattered to Washington as a staging ground, not a destination. The C5+1 format, created in 2015 at the foreign-minister level, was an attempt to institutionalize engagement as the security rationale faded. The chaotic withdrawal from Kabul in August 2021 delivered the sharper lesson — that Washington could walk away from a twenty-year commitment essentially overnight, leaving neighbors to manage the consequences.
The Biden years brought a genuine milestone — the first-ever presidential C5+1 summit, on the margins of the UN General Assembly in September 2023, where the Critical Minerals Dialogue was launched — but the underlying posture was cautious. Washington’s regional diplomacy after February 2022 was dominated by Ukraine, and Central Asia was approached substantially as a sanctions-compliance problem: a corridor through which dual-use goods might reach Russia, to be monitored and warned. The engagement laid groundwork, but it treated the region primarily as a risk to be managed.
What has changed under Trump is the frame. Human rights and governance have receded from the agenda — the administration dismantled USAID programming in Kazakhstan, and recent summits have been conspicuously free of the language of political reform. The loss of this dimension has led to the relationship now running on the terrain where Kazakhstan is strongest: resources, logistics, investment, and deals.
The shift runs deeper than tone. Under Trump, Washington has grown willing to look past traditional partners simply because they are traditional. The European Union — an ally by every treaty definition — is increasingly treated in Washington as a bloc that acts against American interests as often as with them. The partners gaining ground instead are those that bring something concrete to the table — capital, resources, military capability — and that read the world less through the lens of ideology than through prosperity and stability. Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, and Poland have all drawn markedly closer to Washington on precisely these terms. It amounts to a redefinition of what makes a country valuable to the United States, and it is a redefinition that plays directly to Central Asia’s strengths. The region’s states cannot offer democratic kinship; they can offer minerals, corridors, capital, and steadiness. For the first time, that is the currency Washington is counting.
The Tashkent Question
No account of Kazakhstan’s American ascent is complete without Uzbekistan, and no honest account renders the two as adversaries. The relationship is fraternal, dense, and increasingly institutionalized. But the two largest states of Central Asia do compete — for investment, for Washington’s attention, and, implicitly, for regional primacy — and the past year has clarified the terms of that competition.
Uzbekistan’s early lead was real. Mirziyoyev, not Tokayev, got the Oval Office meeting in September 2025; in November he arrived in Washington with a pledge that Uzbekistan would invest and purchase $35 billion in the American economy over three years and more than $100 billion over a decade. Tashkent’s pitch rests on genuine assets: the region’s largest population, approaching 38 million; a genuine post-2016 reform story; and an energetic courtship of Trump personally, including Mirziyoyev’s bid to host the next C5+1 summit in Samarkand, which would make Trump the first sitting American president ever to set foot in Central Asia. Tokayev has extended his own invitation, and the question of where Air Force One first lands in the region has become the unofficial scoreboard of the rivalry.
Yet as the relationship has moved from announcements to implementation, Kazakhstan’s structural advantages have told. Its mineral endowment is deeper and more aligned with specific American strategic needs — tungsten, uranium, rare earths — than Uzbekistan’s. It has Caspian ports and the Middle Corridor’s main line; Uzbekistan is doubly landlocked. Its accumulated American investment rests on three decades of contract performance, whereas independent economists have questioned whether Uzbekistan’s headline pledges are achievable on its current trajectory. Uzbek commitments lean heavily on purchases — aircraft, agricultural machinery, auto parts — while the Kazakh portfolio runs toward joint ventures, processing, and infrastructure that bind American capital into the country for decades. One relationship is being measured in orders; the other, increasingly, in assets.
It would nonetheless be a mistake — one Astana itself is careful not to make — to score this as a zero-sum contest. Every deepening of American engagement with any Central Asian state raises the strategic value of all of them: the Middle Corridor needs Uzbek cargo as well as Kazakh rail; the minerals story is regional, from Kazakh tungsten to Uzbek copper to Tajik antimony; and the five states have spent the years since 2018 building habits of consultation that make them more attractive to outside partners precisely because they increasingly act as a coherent region. Both presidents were invited to the Miami G20. The competition is real, but it is a competition to lead a rising bloc, not to escape a sinking one — and a Washington engaged with Tashkent is better for Astana than a Washington engaged with neither.
The Middle-Power Wager
Kazakhstan’s American opening is one panel of a larger design. Tokayev — a career diplomat, former director-general of the UN office in Geneva, and a Mandarin speaker — has articulated a vision of Kazakhstan as a middle power: a state that converts geography, resources, and diplomatic reliability into agency, rather than treating its position between giants as a condition to be endured. At the Antalya Diplomacy Forum this spring, he described middle powers as “bridges” capable of sustaining cooperation when great powers cannot or will not.
The record increasingly supports the ambition. Kazakhstan has hosted negotiation platforms from the Iran nuclear file to the Syria talks; it champions regional formats that give Central Asia a collective voice; and it has managed the near-impossible balancing act of the Ukraine war, maintaining its treaty relationship with Moscow while refusing to recognize the annexations and becoming a reliable alternative supplier to Western markets. Its nonproliferation biography gives it standing on nuclear questions that few states of any size possess — standing Tokayev deploys deliberately, as he did on the July call.
Regional leadership in Central Asia will never be a solo act; Uzbekistan’s demographic weight and Mirziyoyev’s diplomacy guarantee that. But political leadership — the capacity to convene, to mediate, to be the state outside powers call first — has been consolidating in Astana. The first word at the White House dinner on November 6 was one acknowledgment of that. The pattern of American engagement since has been another.
The Test Ahead
A measure of sobriety is warranted, and Kazakh officials privately supply it themselves. The history sketched above is a history of American attention arriving and departing on Washington’s schedule, and there is no guarantee this time is different. Headline deal figures often dwindle once engineers replace press officers. The tungsten controversy shows how a partnership tuned to this particular White House can become entangled in American domestic politics. Russia and China retain instruments of pressure that the United States cannot and will not neutralize; Washington is not about to become Central Asia’s security guarantor, and nobody in Astana pretends otherwise.
But the structural forces underneath the current warmth are more durable than the personalities atop it. American demand for non-Chinese critical minerals will outlast this administration. The Middle Corridor grows more valuable with every year the Russian route remains toxic. And Kazakhstan’s own strategy does not depend on American constancy — that is the entire point of multivectorism. The lesson of thirty-five years is that American companies proved more reliable partners than American administrations; Chevron outlasted six presidents. Kazakhstan’s achievement in the past year has been to convert a moment of geopolitical alignment into contracts, joint ventures, and institutions that can survive the moment’s passing.
Whether Trump lands first in Samarkand or on the steppe, the deeper shift has already occurred. A region long treated as a corridor to somewhere else is being engaged as a destination — and Kazakhstan, more than any of its neighbors, is the reason why.
Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an Expert at the N7 Foundation, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.